Smith's Monthly #9 Page 12

  “So if we extend out the line the ship is traveling on,” Maria said, “we get this. Again, note, in one-point-four million years, the big ship comes near no other galaxy or star cluster until it hit the Local Group here. That had to be planned.”

  Again the scale of all the galaxies came down as the dotted yellow line went out near the edge of the room, slowly turning until it ran smack into the middle of the big spiral galaxy that in theory the Seeders had come from.

  “That’s one-point-four million years of travel for the ship,” Maria said. “One-point-eight million years ago, the Seeders started on this seeding path, which would be sure to lead to the Local Group and the Milky Way if they continued onward.”

  Everyone was silent. Roscoe just stared at what she was showing them.

  Then Ray spoke softly. “So about one-point-four million years ago, from that galaxy, they launched this big ship to intercept the leading edge of their seeding.”

  Roscoe didn’t know what to think. He was having a difficult time grasping time and the scale of distance.

  But he did have one question he needed to ask. “With the time deletion that ship is experiencing, we know from an outside take, it took one-point-four million years if it was launched from there.”

  He pointed to the spiral galaxy that intersected the path of the big ship.

  Maria nodded and Roscoe could see both Fisher and Callie’s eyes get big as they caught his question ahead.

  “If someone, or a group of people are inside that ship,” Roscoe asked, “how old would they be?”

  Ray just stared at him, as did those wonderful golden eyes of Maria.

  Finally Fisher answered his question. “About two hundred thousand years old, give or take.”

  “Younger than we are,” Tacita said bluntly.

  Roscoe just couldn’t imagine that, so he pushed the idea of even trying to imagine it out of his mind.

  “But why would anyone undertake such a journey?” Callie asked, “assuming there is anyone alive in there and it’s not just a robot ship.”

  That question just hung there in the air along with all the small images of vast galaxies and a dotted line of an impossible journey.

  “My question exactly,” Maria said. “At our full trans-tunnel speed, going directly from that galaxy to this one would take about nine hundred years is all. So doing this makes no sense.”

  Roscoe had nothing more to ask or even say. His mind was overwhelmed.

  Across from him, Maria sat down and clicked off her device and the galaxies floating in the air vanished.

  Ray looked around at everyone, then nodded to Maria. “Great job, Chairman Boone.”

  Maria nodded, but didn’t smile. Roscoe had a hunch his question just tossed in another dimension to the reality of her specialty of tracing back the Seeder’s path.

  Ray looked at his wife and then at Fisher. “Thank you for the wonderful breakfast. May we impose on you again tomorrow at the same time?”

  “Of course,” Fisher said nodding.

  “He loves cooking almost more than anything else,” Callie said.

  “Good,” Ray said. “I think we need to adjourn until then to think about what Chairman Boone has presented and continue preparing for our first boarding attempt.”

  Then with a nod to Fisher again, Chairman Ray and Tacita vanished.

  “That was amazing,” Roscoe said to Maria.

  “And that was a great question I hadn’t thought about,” Maria said.

  They stared at each other for a moment and Roscoe couldn’t think of a thing to say. The attraction to Maria was more than he could remember ever feeling before.

  Fisher and Callie both started to clean up, so finally breaking his gaze from those fantastic golden eyes, Roscoe stood and took his plate and empty orange juice glass and headed for the kitchen.

  “I’ll be glad to wash,” he said.

  “And I’ll dry,” Maria said from behind him.

  “And we’ll take you both up on that,” Callie said, laughing.

  Suddenly Roscoe wasn’t sure what he had gotten himself into. But he liked the idea of spending a little more time with Maria.

  If he could manage to not break any dishes.

  SEVEN

  MARIA REALLY ENJOYED the short time she had standing beside Roscoe at the sink in the old lodge. Every so often their hands would touch as he handed her a plate, and each time it felt like a small shock.

  He kept glancing at her the entire time as well.

  He was so damned good-looking, and it had been so long since she had even allowed herself to look at another man. She didn’t dare look at her crew as the Chairman of the ship, and she hadn’t spent much time away from her ship in some time.

  So maybe she was just desperate. But she didn’t think so. Roscoe was handsome and funny and clearly very, very smart.

  Callie had excused herself and transported to their ship and Fisher had stayed in the kitchen to clean up the grill, and bring them the remains of the dishes from the counter.

  Roscoe had quizzed Fisher on the lodge and then got both of them laughing with his incredible sense of humor.

  In a moment when Fisher had gone back into the diner area to make sure they hadn’t missed a dish, Roscoe turned to her. “So how far out were you when Chairman Ray recalled you to help with this?”

  She laughed. “Far out describes it,” she said. “We had gone through three seeded galaxies and were on the other side of the third headed toward a small group of stars at the edge of the Local Group.”

  “Wow,” he said, shaking his head, causing his long brown hair to swirl back and forth on his collar which took her a moment to pull her attention away from and back to the plate in her hand.

  “I can’t even imagine that,” he said, focusing on scrubbing out a pot in the sink like an expert, “yet from what you were talking about, it’s a small distance compared to what that huge ship has crossed.”

  “A very small part,” she said. “And it still took us two full weeks at full drive to get back.”

  “Were the human populations of those galaxies you went through extremely advanced?” Roscoe asked her.

  “They were, and very peaceful,” she said, remembering some of the encounters. “But we really didn’t introduce ourselves as Seeders and none of them had speeds of ships high enough to cross the distances between galaxies. And we didn’t tell them we could.”

  “Wow, sort of trapped in their own galaxy,” Roscoe said. “How strange that sounds.”

  Maria had to admit, it did sound strange. “What was weird was that none of them much cared about the Seeders. They had just come to accept thousands and thousands of years before that Seeders had all moved on and that Seeders couldn’t be followed. In fact, the farther out we went, the more Seeders were just myths relegated to deep archives of past religions.”

  “I don’t feel like a religion, do you?” Roscoe asked.

  “Honestly wouldn’t know what a religion would feel like,” she said, laughing.

  “I don’t either,” he said, taking a towel to dry off his hands as he looked at her with a sly smile. “But I’m betting sort of soft and squishy.”

  She laughed and said, “And slick and hard to hold onto.”

  He managed to keep a straight face on that handsome face for a moment before breaking into laughter that, if she had her way, she would listen to a lot more of over time.

  EIGHT

  ROSCOE SPENT THE next two weeks mostly with Jonas, working with staffing and training the crew for The Huntington.

  They had decided to mostly stay with Seeders and not recruit too many new humans right out of the blue. In fact, of the two hundred they picked, only ten were non-Seeders. Five couples.

  One such couple was the most famous couple in all of Sector Justice, Mattie Silks and Red Kenney. Red owned another organization that worked closely with Sector Justice called Innocence Inc. Mattie was rumored to be the most deadly enforcer in all of Sector Justice and
had taken the job as liaison between the two organizations when she and Red were married.

  He and Jonas both knew them and had approached them on their private ship. It didn’t take long to convince them after showing them the big ship and telling them about the threat they were trying to stop.

  Roscoe’s highlights of each day had been the morning meetings with Chairman Ray, Tacita, Fisher, Callie, and Maria. Each morning Fisher cooked them a wonderful breakfast and then after updating on progress and planning the first boarding, he and Maria did dishes.

  He was starting to feel more and more attracted to her every day, and more comfortable with her.

  And she clearly liked him as well and was flirting back with him. At some point, he hoped to spend a lot more time with her every day besides twenty minutes doing dishes.

  It was finally, on the first day of the third week, that Fisher dropped a bombshell on the meeting.

  “I think we can board the big ship in trans-tunnel flight.”

  The statement sort of hung there in the dining room air like a bad odor that no one wanted to comment on. Roscoe just couldn’t even image anything like that being possible.

  Chairman Ray smiled and motioned for Fisher to go on, then went back to finishing up his eggs.

  “The ship’s screens won’t be active during trans-tunnel flight,” Fisher said. “The ship is in the trans-tunnel for only about two hours, so it will be tight, but possible.”

  Maria shook her head and Roscoe didn’t blame her.

  “I didn’t think it was possible to leave the confines of a ship in trans-tunnel flight,” he said.

  “It’s not,” Fisher said. “But we can attach my ship to the big ship near where we think a port is and then board after we come out of trans-tunnel flight. When it drops out, if our drives are off, it will take us out with it.”

  Again silence.

  Tacita looked at Maria. “Chairman, has your team ascertained where the ports might be?”

  “Yes,” Maria said, nodding. “I believe that Chairman Fisher’s option of attachment might not be necessary. We might be able to get the ship to open a port large enough for his ship to enter while in tunnel flight. The ship should have a very large landing deck if the design of this ship matches what we know of older Seeder designs.”

  “How about we scout this first?” Roscoe suggested, not liking at all what he was hearing. Far too many things could go completely wrong.

  “How do you suggest we do that?” Fisher asked.

  “You said the shields are off when in trans-tunnel flight?” Roscoe said.

  “Scan it then,” Maria said at the same time he did.

  He smiled at her and her smile made it to her wonderful golden eyes just fine.

  “Is that possible for you to do?” Chairman Ray asked Fisher and Callie. “It has been my understanding that scans in trans-tunnel flight are impossible at the moment.”

  Both Fisher and Callie looked at each other in silence for a moment, then Fisher turned to Chairman Ray. “They have been because no one has had a need until now to do that. Let us talk with our team and we’ll have an answer to that in the morning.”

  Ray pushed his finished plate away and stood. Tacita did the same beside him.

  “We are getting close,” he said. “Good work, everyone.”

  With that they vanished.

  Callie looked at Roscoe, smiling. “Great idea.”

  “If we can figure out how to make it work,” Fisher said, staring at his wife clearly in deep thought.

  “Go get to it,” Roscoe said. “We’ll handle the dishes and clean up.”

  “Thank you,” Callie said, and an instant later they were gone.

  Roscoe stood and started to gather up dishes, not really knowing what to say. For the first time he and Maria were really alone.

  And suddenly he felt like he was back about four hundred years in school with a girl he liked and not knowing what to say.

  She was gathering plates and cups and silverware on her side of the counter as well when he looked up at her.

  She felt him staring at her and looked up, smiling at him with a twinkle in her golden eyes. “This time I’ll wash.”

  He had no idea what that meant.

  NINE

  MARIA KNEW THAT both she and Roscoe had a lot to do, but she was in no hurry to leave and clearly he wasn’t either.

  She washed the dishes he gathered up and they talked about the mission. At one point he asked about her home planet and she told him about it, finishing with the fact that it had been a few hundred years since she had been back.

  “That would be fun to see,” he said. ‘Sounds beautiful and cold.”

  “Cold describes it,” she said.

  Then she asked him where he was from and he described a standard seeded planet that had gotten into space a little ahead of others in the area. He had gotten a degree in astronomy and physics before joining his planet’s military to get out into space. He had been recruited into the Seeders about ten years later.

  “Two degrees?” she asked, looking at him, stunned.

  “Only way I could get off the planet,” he said, laughing.

  The more she learned about this guy, the more she was liking.

  After a far too short time period, they were done.

  They both wiped down the counters last, talking about how great it would be to have a home base like this one.

  “Tomorrow morning then,” he said, smiling at her and holding her gaze.

  She stepped up to him and kissed him for just an instant. Then she stepped back.

  She could feel her breath short and she knew she was blushing, but she didn’t care. It had been wonderful, even though she completely surprised him.

  He also had the decency to be blushing as well.

  “What was that, Chairman Boone?” he asked, smiling slightly.

  “A promise for the future,” she said, smiling back. “Until tomorrow.”

  And she transported back to her ship before she couldn’t hold herself back and jumped him.

  Or before he made a move to kiss her.

  She had a hunch that neither of them would get anything done if that happened.

  It took her a good half hour in the gym working off the excitement of being with Roscoe before she went back to a meeting with her team.

  Two hours later they had worked out a computer generated list of a few million standard entrance codes that an old Seeder ship might use for its landing deck, if there was a landing deck.

  They were all convinced there was, and that it would be large enough to hold just about any ship.

  After that she had a small lunch and then went back to the gym to try to get Roscoe from her mind. Even a hard workout didn’t do it.

  It had been just too damned long since she had been with a man. And she had a hunch, the way she was feeling, she had never been with anyone like Roscoe.

  Ever.

  TEN

  THE NEXT MORNING at breakfast, Maria was cheerful and smiling. He had worried about her kiss and how she would react today. All fine in that department. He had worried for nothing. She was as stunning and alluring as ever.

  And even more friendly.

  He had thought about her the entire day yesterday, trying to keep as busy as he could to cut down the time daydreaming of her.

  It had worked a little, but not much. He pretty much had everything in place and ready to go.

  About halfway through breakfast, Chairman Ray asked them about all their progress.

  Maria told him how her crew had come up with a few million codes that might open the docking area if there was one like most Seeder ships. Then she said she and her crew were as ready as they ever would be.

  Roscoe reported that The Huntington was ready and the other four warships were also in position and standing by. He was ready as well.

  Callie and Fisher then reported that their team had figured out a way to get limited scans inside trans-tunnel flight, and had worke
d out exactly how to match the speed inside the trans-tunnel of the big ship.

  The ship would only be in trans-tunnel flight for two hours starting tomorrow, then be in regular flight for fourteen days.

  Fisher looked at Chairman Ray. “We’re ready now if you want us to try to get a scan.”

  Chairman Ray nodded. Then he turned to Roscoe. “I want you and four of your best team on Chairman Fisher’s ship.”

  Roscoe nodded, surprised, but it made sense in case something went wrong.

  Ray turned to Maria. “I need you and four of your best scientists on the ship as well.”

  She nodded and said nothing, clearly understanding what Ray was doing.

  Ray then turned to Fisher. “Only take the crew you need to get the scans. Leave all your data and most of your crew in one of the other science ships.”

  Fisher nodded as well. “We’ll just need five also.”

  Roscoe was impressed. Chairman Ray had decided to move, but had reduced the risk down to painful, but not disastrous levels if something went wrong.

  “We’ll need to depart in one hour,” Fisher said, “to be in position and at speed for the big ship’s jump.”

  Roscoe nodded to Ray and stood. “Thanks once again for the great breakfast,” he said to Fisher. “I’ll be glad to do the dishes when we get back.”

  Ray laughed. “You all go. Tacita and I are not too old to do dishes.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Tacita said, smiling at her husband.

  They all laughed.

  “My people will be ready and on board your ship in forty-five minutes,” Maria said to Fisher.

  Then she vanished.

  “As will my people,” Roscoe said.

  Then he left, jumping back to his ship to get to Jonas and his command crew. He planned on taking the four of his top command crew, leaving The Huntington in the hands of Red and Mattie until they got back.

  They were going to scan a very old and very advanced ship. There was going to be no telling what they would find or trigger.