Star Rain Read online

  Then, for seemingly the first time in sixteen years, he went and sat down in his chairman’s chair.

  And then on a private channel he said to Rescue One, “Please contact my wife on Dreaming Large and put her through to my personal screen here.”

  “I will be glad to, Chairman,” Rescue One said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  And then, for the first time in sixteen years, he took a deep breath and relaxed.

  ONE

  (Sixty-three years after the rescue of the Dreaming Large)

  CHAIRMAN BENNY SLADE stood beside Gina Helm, his co-chairman of the Seeder mother ship Star Rain, in their massive command center, watching the newest reports come in on the big wall-sized screen from their sector of space.

  Beside them their molded joint command chair dominated the large room, but neither of them felt like sitting in it at the moment.

  There were twenty others at stations in the command center behind them and not a person was saying a word. The room was the size of a banquet room and three levels, with one wall filled with a massive screen.

  Benny had on his normal jeans and dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He worked out and ran every day and kept his dark hair military short. He loved this job more than anything he could have ever imagined. But sometimes, on days like today, he would rather be doing just about anything else.

  Gina was as tall as his six-foot height, had black hair, and was in as good shape physically as he was. She had on a long-sleeve white blouse, jeans, and tennis shoes. She always kept her long black hair pulled back and tied.

  Benny loved Gina more than he could ever imagine loving another human being, and now, after thirty plus years together, couldn’t imagine not having her at his side.

  “So, what do you think,” Gina asked softly, staring at the last reports flowing over the big screen. Everyone in the command center could see the data and no one was saying a word. Tomb-like silence, never a good thing as far as Benny was concerned.

  “We’re losing this goddamned fight,” Benny said.

  Gina only nodded.

  As more and more scout ships were put out to find alien galaxies, and as the scout ships found the galaxies, many of them just teeming with alien planets, the more it became clear the impossibility of the fight they faced.

  Benny glanced around at their command crew as they worked at their stations, quietly, making sure everything on the massive mother ship was running smoothly and clearly not wanting to acknowledge what Benny had just said.

  Their ship, Star Rain, was shaped like a large bird gliding through space, but it was larger than most moons and functioned more like a flying city than anything else. And it was all controlled by Star Rain and the team in this command center.

  And Benny knew that all of the team behind him were basically looking at the same data he and Gina were staring at on the big screen.

  And he had no doubt all of them were coming to the same damn conclusion he and Gina were facing.

  They were losing.

  Every one of the over one million people on the Star Rain knew it.

  No one was talking about giving up or retreating, but unless a miracle occurred, they were not going to be able to contain the aliens.

  But they had no real choice if all human-settled galaxies were going to survive. They had to stop this plague of rat-like aliens somehow.

  But damned if any of them knew how.

  Gina took his hand and squeezed it. They had been together now ever since he had set up the Empire State Building in his hometown of New York City to house survivors from a planet-wide disaster.

  She had been a Seeder and assigned to help him. After they had met, he had become a Seeder as well and together they had stayed on his home planet to help in the recovery and rebuilding.

  Three long years they worked on the surface, including moving to Portland, one of the new centers of the recovering civilization. That task has seemed impossible as well.

  And then one day, seemingly out of the blue, they had been offered this job to be joint chairmen of a massive million-person Seeder mother ship.

  It seemed he and Gina had great Seeder genes or some such thing. Benny had never completely understood that and honestly had never gotten around to asking or looking it up. It didn’t matter, they took the job and now stood here.

  Three mother ships had been sent to investigate an alien culture, only to find out the alien culture was manmade. The aliens, as everyone just called them, looked like rats and were no smarter than rats, actually, and thanks to the stupidity of their creators, the aliens were spreading faster from galaxy to galaxy than could be stopped.

  Benny hated rats. He had right from the start in New York.

  Now they had been fighting this fight against these alien rats for sixteen years.

  And Benny was feeling more frustrated by the day.

  “Chairmen Ray and Tacita are asking for you presence on the Star Mist,” Star Rain reported.

  Star Rain, their wonderful ship, had an intelligence that was more like their friend to Gina and him than a huge ship. But without Star Rain, nothing in this moon-sized ship would work.

  Gina laughed. “Wonder if this is more bad news.”

  Benny smiled at her and then pointed to the big screen. “More bad news? I thought I was the fatalistic one around here.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” she said, smiling at him and talking in her pretend voice. “Let’s go hear the great news they bring that will pull our asses out of this fire and save the day.”

  “That’s better,” he said, laughing.

  It sure had seemed over the years, since this fight had started, that more bad news had come than good. The aliens had expanded from their first world in three major directions and had been expanding for a couple hundred thousand years now.

  The human idiots who designed and genetically built the aliens were an old group who had split away from the Seeders millions of years before. They called themselves The Creators. They believed in being able to create intelligent life from alien structures.

  Now they were also fighting against their own creations. No one on a Seeder ship had even talked with them.

  And a second ancient fleet of humans calling themselves The Exterminators had followed The Creators and were working now as well to clean up this mess.

  So now three fleets of humans were attacking this problem and none of them talking to the other. Benny agreed that at this point, that was for the best.

  The idiot Creators had given the aliens only two major drives. First was to have offspring, litters and litters of them. Second designed-in drive was to build trans-tunnel spaceships from a certain pattern and expand to other planets. What a stupid idea. Benny wanted to just meet the Creators and lift them off the ground and shake them and ask them what the hell they were thinking.

  The Creators also forgot to program in the aliens simple things like survival and an ability to learn as they went.

  In fact, the aliens were almost as dumb as rats in New York. Actually, Benny had seen smarter rats in New York. Thank heavens no one had given the rats in New York the ability to build spaceships.

  The more the aliens had been studied over the sixteen years, the more all of the chairmen had come to the conclusion that this race really wasn’t intelligent in any real sense of the word. The aliens were just a programmed higher-form rat-like animal and nothing more.

  Programmed to breed, expand by building a simple ship, and destroy anything in its way to build more ships.

  Benny had a gut sense the destroying part hadn’t been programmed in, but was just part of the nature of the creatures.

  Rats.

  He flat hated rats.

  What was amazing is that the aliens didn’t even realize they were in a war with their creators. Awareness and communication between the aliens was basically non-existent.

  And they had no weapons. They had never been smart enough to create any.

  Just their she
er mass and ability to breed was their weapon. And that was enough.

  Now, for sixteen years, every resource humanity in hundreds of galaxies could muster quickly was headed here or had gotten here after being retrofitted with the new trans-tunnel drive.

  The ship Star Mist was on the first front they had outlined at the beginning. Benny and Gina had taken Star Rain to a second front and Carrie and Matt had taken Star Fall to a third front.

  The scientists who had studied the alien transports concluded that the best way to destroy an alien ship was a single, low-intensity weapon into the trans-tunnel drive. The alien ship exploded like a kid’s balloon against a cactus.

  The idea was to destroy all the ships leaving a galaxy and trap the aliens in one galaxy where they would eventually just turn on each other and die off.

  But the aliens had to be contained inside the galaxy and galaxies were damn big things and easy for a tiny ship to escape.

  So for sixteen years, Benny didn’t want to think about the millions of alien ships they had already destroyed. But as more information flowed and more scouting had been done, it was clear to them all that they were losing the fight.

  And they were missing alien ships, letting them through to find new galaxies. With the aliens, all it took was one ship to eventually populate an entire galaxy in just six hundred years.

  They bred, as the old saying back in New York was, like rats.

  They were rats.

  Gina reached over and took Benny’s hand as he kept staring at the data pouring across the big screen from the newest scouting missions.

  “Let’s go find out what Chairmen Ray and Tacita want.”

  “Almost afraid to,” Benny said.

  “Yeah, I hear you there,” Gina said.

  A moment later they had transported two hundred galaxies away to another front of this massive war.

  TWO

  CARRIE AND MATT from the Star Fall were already there and a moment later their hosts, Angie and Gage from Star Mist appeared.

  The conference room on Star Mist looked the same as the one on Star Fall. The room was filled in the center by a long oak-colored wooden table that had two large, high-backed black leather chairs on each side and two on each end. The ceiling was high enough for holographic images to form over the table. And the light was all indirect and always just perfect. There were always beverages and snacks along the back wall.

  Gina liked the room, but not what they talked about in the room all the time.

  Carrie and Matt were also from Benny’s home world and had both survived the disaster that killed most of the planet’s population. They had both been from the Portland, Oregon, area. Gina liked them both a lot.

  Carrie was very short, with long brown hair and skin that looked like it had never seen sun. She had an infectious smile that made people around her laugh.

  And yet, at the same time, Carrie was intense and a fighter and Gina decided she would never want to tangle with her.

  Matt was about the same height as Gina and Benny and his short brown hair always seemed to be blowing in all directions at once. He seemed to mostly just sit and listen, but when he said something, it tended to cut right to the problem.

  Carrie and Matt sat across the wide table from Benny and Gina.

  Ray and Tacita looked as they always looked, a black silk shirt for Ray and pantsuit for Tacita. Ray had long, gray hair going down his back and Tacita kept her black hair starkly short.

  They were the oldest Seeders by far and had been the first chairman of a mother ship over four million years ago. That was a number that Gina had a hard time even trying to imagine.

  She had no idea how two people could live four million years and not be bored or senile. It seemed the special Seeder gene allowed them to remember better and just live forever, barring accidents.

  Ray and Tacita sat in their normal seats at the other end of the table opposite Angie and Gage.

  Angie had long black hair she kept pulled back and was tall and thin and clearly in shape. She had also come from Benny’s home world. Gage was about the same height as Gina and Benny and had a short, military haircut. He had been in the Seeders responsible for helping the planet recover and had rescued Angie one day and they had been in love ever since.

  Gina liked them both a lot. Solid, very, very competent people.

  “I think we are ready,” Angie said.

  Gina glanced at Ray and Tacita at the other end of the table as they both nodded. Gina had to admit that Ray and Tacita had moved mountains in this fight so far and never seemed to tire bringing fighter crews from the Milky Way.

  And in these meetings, Angie could never tell if they were bringing good news or bad news.

  “Thank you for the meeting and sorry for the short notice,” Ray said.

  “We assumed you would want to know this,” Tacita said.

  None of them said a word, letting Ray go on.

  “First, as discussed in the last chairmen’s meeting on the original Earth, we have seven more mother ships coming in this direction, all fitted with the new drives. And more are clearing their current tasks, retrofitting their drives and will be starting in this direction as well over the next one hundred years.”

  Gina just shook her head slightly. Seeders not only thought in very large distances, galaxy-spanning distances, often treating galaxies like way-stops or measuring marks along the way, but they also planned in centuries of time. The fact that this fight had been going on now for so long was only a tiny blip to longer-lived Seeders.

  “All mother ships have also retrofitted their bays to build and hold only the military mother ships. By the time they arrive each will have thousands more ships to add to the front lines and they are building more every day.”

  Gina was very glad to hear that again. She and Benny and everyone at the table knew that information already, but it sure felt good to hear once again that a lot more ships were coming to help in this seemingly hopeless fight.

  “And fighters from younger galaxies?” Gage asked.

  “We are recruiting and training from everywhere,” Ray said. “The entire branch of Seeders who helped new recruits has grown into the largest area of all Seeders in just ten years. And we are scanning a thousand seeded planets a week for Seeder genes in the populations.”

  Gina nodded. She didn’t want to ask how many they were finding. It seemed that Seeder genes were very rare things. But there was no doubt the war effort was clearly gearing up on a scale almost impossible to imagine. That was good news, but not news that would be at the level of an emergency meeting.

  “A second update before we give you the reason we asked for this meeting,” Ray said. “The last of the transit jump stations will be coming online in two weeks.”

  “Wonderful,” Benny said.

  Everyone nodded.

  Gina agreed. That was good news because the jump stations were a series of stations spaced just the right distance apart so that any Seeder could jump to this area of the known universe, going from one station to the next. She and Benny could jump vast distances because of their training and special gene. But most Seeders had a range of just about 100,000 light years, about the breadth of the Milky Way Galaxy back home.

  So to build a jump station from the Seeder-settled part of the universe to here, there were thousands and thousands of jump stations along the track. Building that had been a massive undertaking and Gina, in the beginning, never thought it would be built in time to help.

  She had been wrong, clearly.

  And she was damn glad she had been.

  That meant far more ships could be built here, near the lines and crews could come to their ships without Ray and Tacita having to jump them.

  “The big news we have is that we finally have working the extreme long-range scanner,” Tacita said.

  Gina about came out of her chair. Sixteen years they had been waiting for a scanner that would spot any alien ship even a hundred thousand light years away.

&nbs
p; “The scanner will show all alien and human ships in motion within a two-hundred-thousand light-year radius.”

  “With your permissions,” Ray said, “we would like to give the details on building the scanner to your ships.”

  “It is designed to also work with boosters to expand the range,” Tacita said, “so before the system is turned on completely, we will need for ships to spread boosters around to certain locations along all front lines.”

  “And to the second and third lines of defense as well,” Benny said.

  “Exactly,” Ray said, nodding.

  Gina was excited and she could see that Benny was as well. Now, maybe, just maybe, they could see who they were fighting instead of having to just stumble into them in the dark of space.

  “And we hope to set up a wall of monitoring stations between this area of space and human-settled areas,” Ray said. “That will take a few hundred years to accomplish, but worth the price and safety. The work has already started.”

  Gina nodded to that as well, as did everyone else.

  “How long until the scanners are fully operational in this area?” Gage asked a moment before Gina could ask the exact same question.

  “Two years considering all lines of defenses and the time it will take to build and plant the boosters,” Ray said.

  “But we can test it on galaxies near your ships as soon as your ships have integrated it into their scanning systems,” Tacita said.

  Ray nodded. “We suggest we do that first before moving forward.”

  Gina glanced around at the other five chairmen. All of them were nodding.

  She smiled at Benny. This could mean the turning point in this fight since over the last sixteen years, the hardest part was just finding the alien ships between galaxies. They missed so many. It had felt at times as if they were taking cups of water out of a waterfall in hopes of stopping the torrent.

  Benny nodded and smiled as well, then turned to Ray and Tacita. “Please work with Star Fall to get the new scanning system in place.”

  “And with Star Mist,” Angie said and Gage nodded.