Star Mist Read online

  Everyone agreed and for the next fifteen minutes, all six chairmen, sitting in their command chairs, absorbed a detailed history of the Seeders after the first millions of years in the original galaxy.

  Gage was surprised about the fifty million years after the original galaxy was settled and calmed and the first mother ship was launched. Human history had clearly not gone smoothly.

  And there were many small sects of humans who had taken off into space, and one full ship of prisoners that had been exiled in the last days of the final settling of the original galaxy.

  Gage was fairly convinced these humans here were not from the exiled prisoners because that ship had been sent in almost the opposite direction. The distance between where it ended up and this location would be impossible to cover even in four million years at standard trans-tunnel drive speeds.

  New trans-tunnel speeds could cover it in a few hundred years, but so far there were no signs that this human group had the new trans-tunnel drive.

  So which of the many fleeing sects of humanity could this one be?

  After they were all finished with the history lesson, it was Matt who suggested they postpone the meeting with Ray and Tacita until they had the preliminary information from the ship.

  Everyone agree and Ray and Tacita also agreed, saying that would give them even more time to dig into the types of engines and Seeder ship styles each sect originally left with.

  Then, before they signed off, Angie asked the question she and Gage had talked about for only a few minutes.

  “Chairmen Ray and Tacita,” Angie said, “Could any of the settled galaxies along the way, say two million years ago, moved on into drive speeds that would allow them to leave their galaxy?”

  “They almost uniformly do not,” Tacita said.

  “Almost uniformly?” Benny asked.

  Silence.

  Then Ray said, “We will do what we can to find out that information as well.”

  The conference ended.

  A few minutes later, as Angie and Gage were going over what they had just learned, Soma reported to them that the scout ships headed to the next galaxy on their original route had found another completely destroyed galaxy.

  Gage just couldn’t believe the amount of life, alien or human, that had been lost.

  “How much farther to our target galaxy from that galaxy,” Angie asked Star Mist.

  “There are forty more galaxies along the original route,” Star Mist said.

  Gage took a deep breath and squeezed Angie’s hand. Then he asked, “Star Mist, please link us to the other chairmen again and show us an image of the galaxies surrounding our target galaxy. With the outside edge of the sphere being the galaxy we are now.”

  The other four came on as the image appeared in front of all of them.

  It looked like a ball of bright lights.

  “How many galaxies is that?” Benny asked.

  “One hundred and seventy thousand,” Star Mist said.

  All Gage could do was stare at that and wonder if this alien culture had spread over all of them, part of them, or even farther.

  And how they would even learn that information.

  Nobody said a word.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ANGIE HAD AGREED that they should just send the small group of ten scout ships and ten military ships onward toward their target galaxy, reporting in as they got to each galaxy close along the intended path.

  They needed to know how widespread this was.

  More information kept pouring in from the damaged fleet ship. It had no shields that could make it invisible as all Seeders ships had standard. It was an old ship as well and had very little fire-power in weapons.

  There had been a stockpile of large bombs used to ignite an atmosphere, but the bombs had been taken with the survivors.

  When Angie had asked how old the ship was, the answer was not certain, but maybe fifty thousand years, if not more.

  Growing up on a young planet where it seemed inventions and jumps forward in science were every day, Angie found it difficult to imagine how little humanity changed over very, very long stretches of time. At some point, when this was over, she would have to ask historians about that.

  And why.

  Star Mist broke into her thoughts. “The fleet responsible for the destruction has been found.”

  A moment later all six of them were again linked as the information came in. The location of the fleet, not very far from this galaxy, actually, was shown on a holo-image.

  Data scrolled under the hologram. Seven hundred and six ships, with two large mother ships smaller than Star Mist, but yet still large. Large enough to carry a half-million people and even more ships.

  Large enough to have a factory on board to build more ships as they went.

  Angie did not much like that thought at all.

  All were clearly human ships and all the smaller ships were designed in the exact same style as the ship left behind.

  They were all moving at standard trans-tunnel speeds and were within three weeks of a new galaxy.

  All six of the chairmen agreed instantly to have a couple scout ships with military escorts jump ahead to see what was ahead of the fleet.

  Suddenly Angie had a worry. “Star Mist, from the data so far, did the aliens of this galaxy have a way to warn a neighboring galaxy what was happening?”

  “No way of knowing for certain,” Star Mist said.

  “So a ship at full trans-tunnel speed,” Benny said, “would only be a few weeks ahead of the fleet. Not much of a warning to mount a defense against what this fleet does.”

  A few minutes later the scout ships sent ahead reported a full galaxy of teeming alien life, the same aliens that had been in the ship found near the Milky Way.

  “We have three weeks,” Gina said softly.

  No one else said a word.

  All Angie could do was stare at the images of planets teeming with life the scout ships were sending back.

  An entire galaxy of life.

  Seeders prided themselves in building civilizations and saving lives. Could the three-plus million Seeders on this mission just stand off and watch an entire galaxy be wiped out.

  Did they even have a choice?

  What the hell were the six chairmen going to do?

  THIRTY-FOUR

  TWO HOURS LATER, the six chairmen were back in the conference room with Ray and Tacita.

  Gage hated that they were put in this spot, with an impossible decision. They were going to have to stop a fleet of human ships to save a galaxy of aliens.

  But either way, it was now clear they were going to have to jump into the middle of something they did not want to be a part of.

  Over the last two hours, the scout ships moving ahead had found another destroyed galaxy. And the data from the fleet’s ship left behind had given them the last four hundred and ten years of their trip but not much more in who they were overall.

  It seemed that in those four hundred plus years, they had wiped out over nine hundred galaxies full of the aliens.

  And they had mapped out where there were even more galaxies full of these aliens that would take them another two hundred years.

  It seemed that what had been learned from the derelict ship about the aliens was very true. They were low-level intelligence, had somehow managed to get and be able to replicate trans-tunnel ships, and they could spread over an entire galaxy of planets, adapting to local conditions in under six hundred years.

  That was stunningly fast.

  With the help of Star Mist, Ray and Tacita had a short presentation about the history of the aliens.

  “They started here,” Ray said. He had Star Mist pinpoint a galaxy on a hologram that floated above the table in a red dot. “They spread like this in just under a half million years.”

  Gage watched as a red tide swarmed out of the one galaxy, mostly moving in one direction.

  “We have no information as to the chance they also spread in other dir
ections,” Ray said.

  “Star Mist,” Gage said, “please pinpoint the galaxy we are at now.”

  A white light blinked on one of the galaxies near the edge of expansion.

  “The ratio on that is that every one galaxy they settled spawned at least three more,” Ray said.

  “A form of exponential growth,” Matt said, softly.

  “Shit,” Benny said.

  Angie just sucked in her breath and Gage couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “They must move on,” Tacita said, “because they not only are constantly having over thirty offspring in a very short lifetime, but they use up each planet’s resources very, very quickly by constructing buildings and millions of ships.”

  “Most die left behind on planets that are overcrowded and without resources,” Ray said. “Basically, every planet the aliens settle becomes exactly like the ship we found.”

  “Overused and dead,” Tacita said.

  “This galaxy the fleet wiped out was in the final stages of life,” Ray said. “It had been drained of all resources by the aliens, all ships that could be built had been built and were on to other galaxies, and the hundreds of billions of aliens on these planets had already turned on each other for food.”

  Silence.

  “They were eating each other?” Benny asked.

  Ray nodded.

  Intense silence in the conference room.

  Gage couldn’t think of a damn thing to say after that.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ANGIE SAT WITH everyone in silence for a moment. She always said that Seeders worked at a grand scale, but basically putting down an entire galaxy, like putting down a sick dog, was not at all what she was thinking.

  She looked at the hologram floating above the table. The red was like a giant stain of blood covering it.

  Then she had a horrid thought.

  “Star Mist,” Angie said, breaking the silence. “Could you run a simulation of the expansion of this alien race, left unchecked over the next million years? And please mark on the scale humanities home galaxy and the Milky Way Galaxy.”

  The hologram shifted to what looked like a fine cloud of dots in the air over the table with the Milky Way blinking and humanity’s home galaxy blinking.

  “I will run this in one hundred thousand year increments,” Star Mist said.

  The red started as a small stain in one area of the dust field. It stopped and Star Mist said simply, “First Segment.”

  The next image had the red creeping out into a far larger red stain among the white points of light that indicated entire galaxies.

  The third had the stain taking up a large area.

  It was at the sixth expansion that the red stain covered the Milky Way and the seventh expansion covered the historical home for all of humanity.

  “That’s enough, Star Mist,” Angie said. “Thank you.”

  She felt sick and once again there was silence in the room.

  This time it was Benny who broke the silence. “Star Mist, would you bring the scale back down to the current area of the alien infestation and then overlay what we know of which galaxies the fleet has destroyed?”

  The hologram again changed. The alien galaxies were represented in red, the fleet-destroyed galaxies were represented in green.

  Angie saw the pattern at once. The fleet was trying to cut off the leading edge, leaving the galaxies in the center to just collapse on themselves. The fleet was trying to slow down the expansion.

  And they were losing.

  They were losing big time, actually.

  “Shit, just shit,” Benny said.

  Not a person in the room could disagree with that statement.

  Finally, as Angie sat staring at the images where the aliens were expanding, Gage said, “We still need a lot more information here.”

  “Agreed,” Gina said and Angie nodded.

  “Do you know who those humans are in that fleet?”

  “We think we do,” Tacita said, nodding. “And we were slightly wrong about our previous assumption. This fleet is not the humans who broke from the Seeders because they wanted to create alien creatures.”

  “Then who are they?” Benny asked.

  “They call themselves The Exterminators,” Ray said. “Star Mist, please show the timeline I gave you for The Exterminators.”

  The hologram of the galaxies faded and a timeline came up floating in the air.

  “The fight between the Seeders,” Ray said, “which Tacita and I led, and those who wanted to help alien races, and even create them, ended just about a half million years after we left our galaxy with the first mother ship.”

  “Because they had created a nasty race we had to destroy, all laws changed against them. We allowed those who called themselves The Creators to take the ship out a million years as we told you,” Tacita said.

  “But that decision was not a popular one either,” Ray said.

  “To say the least,” Tacita said. “A man by the name of Chairman Wanderson put together a fleet that would follow the first ship and clean up after them and their mistakes. He felt it was the only way to save humanity and over a million people signed up to go with him. They called themselves The Exterminators.”

  “That fleet is The Exterminators,” Ray said. “Or part of them or what is left of them after all this time.”

  Angie tried to grasp what she had just heard. “Are you saying that maybe this alien race that will sweep over our known universe was built by a group called The Creators?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” Tacita said.

  Ray shook his head. “Considering this alien race does not have the mental ability to invent trans-tunnel flight, let alone slow their own reproduction so they don’t eat each other, it seems likely. This race should have destroyed itself on its home planet in the normal evolution of their species.”

  “So this other group is trying to clean up the mess from the first group?” Benny said.

  “Seems very, very likely,” Ray said.

  “I would say it’s about damn time we talk to both groups,” Benny said.

  Angie wasn’t so certain about that.

  And honestly, she had no real desire to talk with a group that could create an alien race as an experiment or one who could wipe out galaxies full of an alien race.

  THIRTY-SIX

  THE MEETING BROKE as all eight chairmen went to get more information. Angie and Gage had spent the next two hours in their command chair and not a one of the two shifts of the command crew had left other than to take a short break or get some food.

  Thirty scout ships and thirty military ships surrounded and shadowed the fleet, carefully trying to tap into any data they could without raising alarms or letting anyone know they were there.

  Every bit of information had been captured from the fleet’s ship and from that it was learned that Ray and Tacita were right. This was one of The Exterminator ships. And The Creators were not far beyond the galaxy the mission had been aiming at originally.

  At one point the two groups had joined forces to stop the expansion, even though for centuries before, they had had running pitched battles. But it seemed that by the time some sanity had taken hold in the two groups, it was too late.

  Now both groups were just fighting a losing battle as the race one group had created swallowed one galaxy after another faster than they could be stopped.

  The Creators had given their creation the ability to build an exact pattern ship with trans-tunnel drive. Basically a transport ship. The desire to build the ship and expand into space had ended up being part of the alien driving needs, just like eating and creating offspring.

  And the aliens built the ships by the millions on any planet they reached, using all resources of the planet, then jamming the ships full and sending the ships off into space to find new planets or galaxies.

  It was why the aliens on the ship they found nearing the Milky Way had been unable to fix their ship. They were smart enough, barely, to
build with a pattern, not smart enough to fix the ship when it broke down.

  Gage couldn’t get the image of this rat-like race overwhelming the Milky Way galaxy like a tidal wave swelling up over a flat beach. Humans would be defenseless at such an onslaught of sheer mass of numbers.

  It seemed very clear to him now that this mission was going to be a humanity rescue mission and a mission of death to swarming masses of rat-like aliens.

  He flat didn’t see a choice.

  They all decided they needed some rest before they made the next decision.

  He and Angie had gone back to their apartment. They had both worked to fix a small, light meal, then they took a shower together and crawled into bed.

  Gage woke about three hours later and Angie was already wide awake beside him.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked, moving to put his arm over her to hold her while she stared at the ceiling.

  Even under this kind of extreme stress and on very little sleep, she was still the most beautiful woman he could ever imagine.

  “We have to show every member of the crew of every ship,” she said, “everything we know, including the outcome of these aliens being left unchecked.”

  He hadn’t thought about that at all, but he agreed.

  “We have been carrying a few hundred Seeding ships and crews,” she said. “If we decide to help with stopping this alien culture from expanding, we need to let everyone who has problems with that decision head back home on a Seeding ship.”

  He understood exactly what she was saying. No one should be forced to help destroy galaxies full of aliens.

  “I agree,” he said. “But we might find another way.”

  “I love you for your optimism,” she said, turning to kiss him.

  After a moment of holding each other, something that gave him strength, he said, “Ready to go back to work?”

  “No,” she said. “But it seems a million or more people and the fate of all humanity says we should.”

  He laughed and watched her as she rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.