Smith's Monthly #9 Page 13

  And that had him both scared to death and excited at the same time.

  ELEVEN

  MARIA LIKED WORKING with Roscoe and felt comfortable with him. He and his top command crew were in a secondary control room on Fisher’s small ship called The Lady.

  His crew stood against the back bulkhead, armed and ready to go. The room was a high-ceilinged room that Fisher said had been used as an exercise room. He had converted it for this mission, along with other rooms.

  His ship had a very comfortable feel and she had liked it the moment she stepped on board. The carpet in the hallways and rooms was soft, but not thick. Colors were tan and all chairs were form-fitting.

  Fisher and Callie had decorated the hallway walls with various paintings and images from different planets. Often the images were changing, showing fantastic beauty from varied worlds. Maria bet that if she asked Fisher and Callie, each image and painting would have a story from the last three hundred years they had been together.

  Fisher had said that most of the time the ship was on one of the big landing decks of his large Seeder research science ship. But he and Callie lived on this ship as their own personal apartment and always kept it at the top performance and with top equipment for all tasks.

  Maria’s crew stood near her on her right, watching the big image screen on the wall and the heads-up displays in front of Fisher’s three crew members.

  She and Roscoe stood side-by-side. At one point she had moved so that he almost touched her left arm. She wanted him a lot closer than that at some point.

  They had talked a bit while boarding about how excited they were for the coming mission. Now, as they waited in the last few seconds, she shifted from foot to foot, but he stood rock still. How he could do that was impossible for her to grasp in this situation. This was too exciting to not move.

  The large screen on the wall kept them all informed as to what Callie and Fisher were doing in the small ship’s Command Center.

  The big screen also showed the huge old Seeder ship flashing through space at near light speed.

  The big Seeder ship was so large, no perspective was possible. It was impossible for her to grasp that someone had built something that big.

  “Matching speed now,” Fisher said.

  She also found it hard to believe that this ship could move this fast. Nothing she knew of had near-light speed.

  “Jump to trans-tunnel flight with the big ship in ten seconds,” Callie reported.

  “Here we go,” Roscoe said, glancing at her and smiling.

  She smiled at him. He seemed so cool under pressure situations. She wanted to just clutch something. She liked more and more about him, she had to admit. She forced herself to go back to watching the monitors. She couldn’t let herself get distracted at this moment by his incredible looks and dark eyes. She was tempted to reach out and hold his hand, but she didn’t.

  “Two, one,” Fisher said from the control room and the small ship jumped to trans-tunnel.

  The stars streaked and everything on the screen went from clear to gray as it always did in fast trans-tunnel flight.

  The big ship was right beside them, also in trans-tunnel flight.

  Fisher had matched the jump perfectly. Amazing. She didn’t know this was possible either, for two ships to be inside the same trans-tunnel flight.

  Wow, Fisher and his team were really something.

  “Ready for scans,” Callie said.

  In front of Maria, the three crew members from Fisher’s team worked their boards quickly. On the big screen, and on the heads-up displays, was where they all hoped the scan results would start appearing.

  “Nothing seeming to block the scans,” Fisher reported from the Command Center.

  Maria now wanted to jump up and down she was so excited. She was about to see inside a million-year-old Seeder ship. Beside her Roscoe didn’t even move. He had some amazing control.

  “Ready,” Fisher said.

  “Now,” Callie said.

  Nothing.

  Screens showed the same image of the big ship in trans-tunnel flight.

  Maria was disappointed for a moment, then suddenly everything changed.

  The trans-tunnel streaks and grayness vanished.

  And what appeared on the screen was something Maria couldn’t comprehend in the slightest.

  Fisher’s ship now sat like a tiny dot on a vast plain of decking of some sort. Distant ceiling lights illuminated the vast space that looked like it could easily cover a large city.

  The ceiling was so far overhead, it almost couldn’t be seen.

  “Oh, shit,” Jonas said from behind her. “We triggered something.”

  Beside her, Roscoe snapped around. “Full alert. Jonas, to the control room.”

  Without looking around, Maria knew Roscoe’s military crew snapped instantly into action, weapons at the ready as each took up a position near assigned members of the other two teams.

  Roscoe had his pulse rifle off his shoulder and ready, standing beside her, his attention now on the screens as well as everyone in the room.

  She glanced at him and then took a deep breath to calm herself and get back to thinking, just as Roscoe was doing.

  “Seems we are inside the big ship,” Fisher said from the control room, his voice sounding impossibly calm.

  “It would seem that way,” Maria said, shaking her head. Then she said to Fisher with more authority. “Can we get a signal out to Chairman Ray?”

  A moment later Ray’s face came on the screen.

  She was never so happy to see a face in her life. She released the breath that she had been holding.

  “We are inside the big ship,” Fisher reported to Ray. “Our scans triggered a transport of some sort.”

  Ray just nodded. The man had ice in his veins just as Roscoe. “Everyone safe?”

  “We are, and still scanning,” Fisher said. “Transmitting data to you now as it comes in.”

  Ray glanced to his right for a moment, then nodded. “Continue as long as you can.”

  Maria was even more excited that Ray was getting their scans. That was a very, very good sign.

  “I’m assuming,” Fisher said, “that if we are still here when the ship drops out of trans-tunnel in an hour or so and goes behind its screens, our transmissions will be cut off.”

  “Understood,” Ray said, nodding.

  “Suggestions?” Fisher asked.

  Ray stood silent for a moment, then shrugged slightly, his long gray hair bouncing on his shoulders. “Find a way to turn or stop that ship before it destroys those planets,” Ray said.

  “Understood,” Fisher said.

  Then Ray said simply into the camera. “Roscoe, take care of those people in there.”

  “Understand, Chairman,” Roscoe said from beside her. “We will.”

  “Good luck,” Ray said and cut off.

  “Scanning data still pouring out and being received,” Fisher said. “Chairman Mundy, Chairman Boone, meet me in the kitchen.”

  “Understood,” Maria said.

  Beside her Roscoe nodded and then followed her out of the secondary Command Center and down the short hall toward the small ship’s kitchen.

  She was inside an ancient and more than likely very deadly Seeder ship.

  A dream come true for her life’s work.

  And a nightmare at the same time.

  Section Two:

  THE PAST CONTROLS

  TWELVE

  ROSCOE HAD BEEN worried right from the start about their scans triggering a defense mechanism. They had prepared Fisher’s ship with supplies and other needed items for just this contingency. And everyone on board had brought a week’s worth of clothes that could be washed if needed. From the looks of it, Fisher’s wash machine was going to get a workout before this was all settled.

  But so far, nothing seemed deadly.

  So far.

  But he was going to take no chances that didn’t need to be taken.

  Fishe
r smiled at them as Roscoe and Maria arrived in the kitchen. Roscoe had his pulse rifle over his shoulder for the moment, but he could get to it quickly. His team was going to be close to any of the other team members at all times in case a group were transported out of Fisher’s ship. He wanted one of his armed team with the others.

  Roscoe glanced around at the kitchen. It could hold about six sitting around a nifty wooden dining table secured to the floor and the cooking area seemed state-of-the-art from what Roscoe could tell. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he tried at times.

  Roscoe could see a pantry stocked completely full just beyond one side of the kitchen. He knew that in other places on the ship there were enough supplies on board to feed the fifteen of them for a year, at least.

  He sure hoped this mission didn’t take that long, or a lot of people on those planets ahead of them were going to die.

  Maria seemed calm now, not as excited as she had been before they jumped into trans-tunnel flight. Her excitement had been almost infectious and he loved that feeling of looking at the good things in something instead of always the bad. She balanced him well.

  “This sure feels familiar,” Fisher said, smiling, seemingly not at all concerned about the situation as he opened the fridge and offered them water or something else to drink.

  Both Maria and Roscoe declined, so Fisher took out a bottle of a pink fluid and sat down at the kitchen table, indicating that they should join him.

  “Familiar?” Maria asked as she sat across from Fisher. “How?”

  Roscoe went over and leaned against a bulkhead near Maria, preferring to stand at the moment. It was going to take him some time to relax at this point.

  Fisher took a drink and sighed. “When my friend and I first ran into a large ship coming to rescue the population of the planet where we have the lodge, our ship, this ship, in a much more primitive state, was teleported inside a huge landing deck. It was a smaller deck by a long ways from what we are in now, but still huge by our little ship’s standards.”

  “Is it something about this ship that makes people want to do that?” Roscoe asked.

  Fisher laughed and Maria shook her head and smiled at him, which he appreciated more than he wanted to admit. The tension in the room seemed to ease a lot from his joke question and he loved it when those golden eyes of hers looked fondly at him.

  “Must be,” Fisher said.

  “What happened that first time?” Maria asked.

  “Scared to death, we just went outside to introduce ourselves. Seeders, by their very nature, are a peace-loving group. We didn’t know that at the time, but we do now.”

  Roscoe had to admit, that was true. But as Sector Justice forces knew so well, they still needed to know how to defend themselves. This huge ship clearly had good defenses.

  “So are you suggesting we go introduce ourselves?” Maria said.

  “Can you think of another option,” Fisher asked, “after we study what we are getting from the scans, of course. They sure know we are here. I have nothing on this ship that could even pretend to block a scan, even if we wanted to.”

  Roscoe nodded at that. “How long until preliminary scans will be done?”

  Fisher shrugged. “This ship we are in is bigger than many moons, so it’s going to take some time to really cover it. But honestly, we’ll know if we’re alone and the focus of our mission in two hours.”

  “Can you feed the scans to my people in a place in the ship where we could work?” Maria asked.

  Roscoe knew the answer, since he had checked out and helped Fisher set up the ship before the mission. But he let Fisher answer.

  “We can,” Fisher said. “We retrofitted our second exercise room with ten work and scanning stations before this mission.”

  He looked over at Roscoe. “I assume you are going to want to look at all the scans as well.”

  “I am,” Roscoe said. “And my second-in-command, Jonas, will as well. We’ll study monitors in the room with Chairman Boone’s team. The rest of my team will remain on guard with each group in case a group is transported off the ship without warning.”

  “Very good thinking,” Fisher said, nodding. “So in three hours, after the big ship drops back into real space, the three of us will meet here and decide how to proceed next.”

  Maria nodded and smiled at Roscoe as she stood. She patted him on the arm. “Let’s go to work.”

  Roscoe could tell she was clearly back to being excited, and since the history of Seeders was her passion and life’s work, he could certainly understand that.

  His passion was to keep everyone safe. And he needed to know what was inside this monster old ship to even begin to do that.

  And secondly, he needed to keep them all focused on one task: Stopping this ship before it killed millions of others on defenseless planets.

  THIRTEEN

  THE NEXT THREE hours went by quickly, too fast, as far as Maria was concerned. The former exercise room turned second scanning room was long and fairly narrow. Fisher had set up ten stations down one wall. The other walls were covered in art and some of the exercise equipment had been pushed together in a back corner.

  The floor was covered in a comfortable mat-like substance that felt soft and warm to her feet. It was a comfortable place to work, but she wouldn’t have cared. She could have done this work standing in a closet and she wouldn’t have cared.

  The scans they were getting of the big ship were amazing.

  It had become clear after the first hour that there was no one alive here, even though the ship had been designed for millions of humans to live comfortably for very long periods of time.

  And she had a hunch that was a very, very low guess as to the number this ship could actually hold. She just couldn’t imagine a ship holding more, so her brain stopped her there.

  All of the scans from the three areas of the ship, the main scanning room, the control room, and this room, were being fed into a central image and slowly in that three-dimensional image, pieces of the ship were coming together.

  Part of this ship was nothing more than a huge city, plain and simple, with housing that went from small apartments to five bedroom suites. It had what looked like schools, shopping, large areas that would be parks when planted, and so on.

  The ship also carried a good five hundred other huge ships on one landing deck. All those ships were also empty of human life, but designed to hold thousands of humans per ship comfortably.

  In fact, each ship was bigger than Chairman’s Ray’s ship, one of the biggest the Seeders had working right now in any of the Local Sector galaxies.

  The big ship was also riddled with massive warehouse rooms stacked full of who knew what. Every warehouse looked completely untouched and her scans could not seem to tell what was in any of them. They were just too far away.

  And from what she could tell, there were thousands of science labs and other areas for unknown reasons. Offices and work areas she guessed.

  Roscoe was at the screen beside her, his rifle over his shoulder. She noticed he was amazingly good at running scans and comfortable on the heads-up board. He seemed to be focused on different areas of the ship than she was.

  She liked having him that close and had stopped herself from excitedly showing him something at two different points. It seemed she just wanted to share things with him.

  She had always been a loner by nature. This kind of desire to share and be close to another person was different for her and she honestly liked it more than she ever thought she would. And she had no idea why he was bringing that out in her. No other man she had known ever had.

  Roscoe’s second-in-command, Jonas, had focused his scanning on the Command Center for the big ship.

  After three hours, Fisher came in and motioned for her and Roscoe to come talk with him in the kitchen again.

  “We’re going to need to feed people pretty soon,” Fisher said as he entered the kitchen and took a container of water from the fridge and sat down. “We’ve
set up a room as a dining hall and we have a meal already prepared and ready to just heat and serve when we call dinner. After this first meal, we’re going to need to do more cooking.”

  Maria nodded, sitting down at the table across from Fisher again. Roscoe once again stayed standing and close to her.

  “How about a group of one person from each team be in charge of a meal,” she said, “and we rotate around.”

  She hadn’t given a thought to eating, but knew they had to in order to keep everyone fresh. She also knew that Fisher’s ship had been set up for enough sleeping quarters for all of them before the mission in case something like this might happen.

  “I think we need to keep at least three people on the scans at all times,” Roscoe said, “sort of as a guard. We can set up a rotation on that as well.”

  “Agree with both,” Fisher said. “Even though all of us have been scanning for hours now, we still really don’t know what’s out there.”

  “I’m not really wrapping my mind around the size of this ship,” Roscoe said. “I figured that if we set off walking from here to the Command Center, it would take us two weeks time if we covered about twenty kilometers per day.”

  Maria had done similar calculations. “I agree. I’m having trouble with the size as well. I did a calculation on a ten kilometer per day pace that it would take over a month simply to get from here to the other side of that huge hanger deck with all the large ships on it.”

  “So we can’t be doing much walking,” Fisher said. “The ship must have some sort of transport system like our big ships do.”

  “I think we’re better off just transporting ourselves for the moment,” Roscoe said. “Not sure how much we want to trigger into this ship’s systems until we can get to that Command Center and see the path and the mission the ship is intended to accomplish.”

  Maria smiled at him. “I agree. In fact, I suggest we just stay here for the next forty-four hours until the ship drops back into trans-tunnel flight and we get information from Chairman Ray and his people. They will have had fourteen days to analyze what we sent them in those first two hours.”