Smith's Monthly #9 Page 20

  “Very well done,” Roscoe said.

  The words Thank you again appeared on the big screen.

  “Hudson, you have Command Center,” Roscoe said. “Everyone stay to rotations for now. Help has arrived.

  Hudson’s head snapped up and his eyes were wide.

  Maria squeezed Roscoe’s hand for being so mean, and barely stopped a laugh at Hudson’s look. He would be fine, just as Roscoe knew he would. Plus, Morning Song would warn them if something was going wrong.

  Roscoe turned to Fisher and Callie. “Want to meet our first guests?”

  “Love to,” Callie said.

  And a moment later Roscoe had the four of them in the Command Center of The Huntington.

  And after the first twenty minutes of explaining the size and scope of Morning Song, Maria realized that they had one more important task that needed to be done very quickly. There needed to be an introduction video to Morning Song that everyone was required to watch.

  Before coming on board.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  IT TOOK ANOTHER twenty days for the crew of The Huntington to take over some of Command Center duties and start repairs.

  The fifteen original members on Fisher’s ship remained there, sleeping and eating together, since they had all become friends. Roscoe liked those dinners since Fisher was such a great cook.

  He and Maria had borrowed an extra bed and transported it to their suite on Morning Song because they just didn’t want to keep everyone awake with their lovemaking. Besides, even without furniture, they loved their suite.

  The crew of The Huntington bunked and ate on board ship, since repairs to the water systems on Morning Song were far from started, let alone completed.

  Roscoe and Maria had been talking and wanted to offer the second-in-command to Fisher and Callie. But they weren’t sure how to go about it. So one afternoon as things were calm, they jumped to Chairman Ray and Tacita’s ship after asking the day before if they could.

  They ended up back in the sterile meeting room and both Ray and Tacita were happy to see them.

  “How is the learning settling in?” Ray asked as they all took seats, Ray and Tacita on one side, Roscoe and Maria on the other. As they always did, Roscoe and Maria moved so their legs would be in contact.

  Roscoe shrugged. “I know the knowledge is there and I find myself knowing something suddenly when I need to know it, but I have no memory of knowing the information before. I’m no longer surprised at that happening.”

  Maria laughed. “Describes my experience exactly.”

  “It will get smoother with time,” Tacita said.

  Roscoe glanced at Maria and she nodded that he should go ahead. “We are wondering if we can offer the job of second-in-command of the upcoming mission to Fisher and Callie.”

  Ray sat back, smiling.

  Tacita shook her head. “You can offer any job on the Morning Song to anyone you want, as long as Morning Song approves.

  “We are not your bosses anymore,” Ray said. “It is your ship, you have your mission, you do as you see fit on that mission. But you do need to ask your ship.”

  Roscoe nodded. That made sense. Morning Song needed to be able to work with them.

  “Without sitting in the chairs,” Maria asked, “is there any way Morning Song can give them the knowledge about herself she gave us at first?”

  “Any panel will tell them,” Tacita said.

  “But I would do that in private,” Ray said, “since they will have a lot of questions.”

  “Do you think Fisher and Callie will agree?” Tacita asked Roscoe.

  Roscoe smiled at Ray and Tacita. “You put the four of us together for a reason, didn’t you?”

  “We did,” Ray said, smiling. “If Fisher and Callie agree, can we ask one thing?”

  “Certainly,” Maria said.

  Roscoe knew exactly what Ray was going to ask, so he said it first. “You want them in forty years to chair the next Mother Ship coming in.”

  Again, Ray laughed. “Yes. But I would suggest you not tell them that, not at first at least.”

  Tacita nodded. “Wait five or ten thousand years.”

  Again Roscoe just couldn’t imagine living that long. But he agreed anyway.

  Two days later Morning Song had agreed to their choice of Fisher and Callie, and Fisher and Callie had agreed and said they were honored beyond words.

  Then they had gone through the scanner brain widening in the Command Center and been stunned.

  “I can actually see and understand the ship now,” Fisher said, looking off into the distance in his mind.

  Roscoe laughed at that, since that was exactly how he had felt.

  “Morning Song,” Callie said, “You are a masterpiece in construction and engineering.”

  The words Thank You, Callie, appeared on the big screen in the Command Center.

  Maria hugged Callie at that.

  That evening, in the kitchen of The Lady, while Fisher cooked a wonderful dinner in celebration, the four of them laughed and joked and then started to plan what was needed to be done over the next few years to get ready for the mission.

  Ten days later, Morning Song had slowed enough to start bringing in more help.

  The Huntington, with about half her crew staying, left to go start recruiting and setting up construction areas for the building of the warships needed.

  Roscoe and Maria had put Red and Mattie in charge of the military wing of the mission and all the recruitment, since Morning Song had liked both of them and they both had agreed to go along when asked.

  The plan that Roscoe and Maria and Fisher and Callie had worked out was pretty set. It would take almost five years to hire crew, do needed repairs, stock everything, and build enough ships to have a fighter fleet on board.

  For Seeders, five years was a blink of an eye.

  Chairman Ray thought that far too fast, but said he would wait and see.

  For Roscoe, it seemed like a very long time.

  But as long as he and Maria were together, time really didn’t seem to matter.

  Section Four:

  THE MISSION CHANGE

  THIRTY-SIX

  A MONTH LATER, more and more crew were coming on board and fanning out into different areas of Morning Song, doing repairs and bringing up stations. A promise of flowing water was still a ways away, something both Roscoe and Maria could hardly wait to have happen. Then they would be able to furnish and actually move into their Chairmen’s suite.

  They spent a lot of days, evenings, and often late into the nights in the command chairs, linked in with everything going on over the ship, working to prioritize what needed to be done first and helping the repair crews where they could.

  Everything was going well, but over the last few days, there was something that had been bothering Roscoe as it became clear that their plan was soon going to be in full forward motion very soon.

  Another couple of months, Morning Song will have slowed enough to actually trans-tunnel jump to a large Seeder base in a satellite galaxy on the way to Andromeda where all major repairs and crew recruitment would really start.

  And those preparations included building a large military fleet.

  So one night, after he and Maria had spent a wonderful hour in their suite making love, he brought what was worrying him to Maria.

  She was naked, her wonderful red hair spread over the bed, her shoulder cradled into his side, her arm over him and her leg over his leg. They often slept just like that, feeling more comfortable touching as much as they could.

  He couldn’t even remember or imagine being alone as he had before meeting her. That just seemed like an alien time and memory.

  “I’m bothered by something,” he said.

  “Nothing I did, I hope,” she said, snuggling even closer against him.

  “Oh, heavens, no,” he said, laughing and hugging her. “I’m worried that we are planning for a mission with million-year-old scouting data.”

  She
pushed herself up on her elbow and looked into his eyes with those wonderful, round, golden eyes of hers.

  “You suggesting we send a scouting mission?”

  “No, I think you and I need to do it,” he said. “We need to see what we are taking over a million people on the Morning Song into.”

  Now she frowned. “How? The target galaxy is over thirty galaxies away from here. We can’t be gone that long from the preparations here. That would take a decade to get there and back at top trans-tunnel speeds.”

  “I know,” he said, smiling at her.

  She shook her head and laughed. “You have a plan, don’t you?”

  “I do,” he said, smiling at her, “but it will take being in the Command Center and the help of Morning Song to lay it all out.”

  She pushed away from him and stood, her wonderful naked body shining in the dim light of the bedroom in their suite.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, enjoying the view of her toned body and smooth skin and the patterns of freckles.

  “We’re not sleeping until we work this through,” she said, grabbing her slacks she had shoved off to one side of the bed. “You want to present this idea to Fisher and Callie as well at the same time? They are still in Command Center.”

  He stood, laughing. This was not what he expected, but he should have. “Might as well.”

  She pulled on the thin, silk blouse she had been wearing earlier without the exercise bra, then said simply, “Morning Song, please warn Chairman Fisher that we will be arriving.”

  Five minutes later, after one long kiss that Maria said was to hold her, they jumped to Command Center.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE MOMENT ROSCOE said that he was bothered by planning a mission on ancient scouting data, she knew he was right. And he seemed to have a way to scout the distant target galaxy without spending the years to get there.

  Somehow. He was smart that way and could see patterns and solutions no one around him could see. One of the thousands of things she loved about him.

  The overall mission was that Morning Song would seed galaxies along the way, getting close to the target galaxy in about one and a half million years. Maria was still having a very difficult time grasping those sorts of time spans, but yet it seemed very ambitious that they could completely seed an entire galaxy with human life in only fifty thousand years. But that was a normal time for Seeders.

  In the Command Center, both Callie and Fisher stood as Maria and Roscoe appeared. They had both been working at their stations on either side of the big chairs. Both wore jeans and Fisher had on a dress shirt with his sleeves rolled up while Callie wore a white blouse with a necklace of freshwater pearls.

  The Command Center felt like her home every time she came here. Even though it was a huge space, it felt intimate to Maria.

  There were four other crew members in the room, so Roscoe turned to them and said, “Please take a break, everyone. Chairman Fisher will contact you when you can return.”

  All of them nodded and vanished.

  “So what’s happening?” Fisher asked, looking puzzled.

  Maria smiled and sat on the empty chair for one of the environmental stations. “Roscoe has a plan he wants to run past the four of us and Morning Song.

  “To do what?” Callie asked.

  “We need to scout where we are headed,” Roscoe said. “Before we make preparations we either don’t need, or that are not enough.”

  Callie and Fisher both nodded.

  Maria turned to face the big screen. “Morning Song, please bring up a two dimensional representation of the galaxies between the Milky Way and our target galaxy that are on the plan to seed.”

  On the screen the Milky Way was labeled. Then like stones crossing a river, the other galaxies and satellite galaxies along the way were marked, with a line from one to the other. The line stopped short of a galaxy marked with an X.

  Maria had seen that image a number of times and studied it. If she really was as long-lived as it seemed she would be, barring accidents, that simple map represented the next million and a half years of her life.

  Impossible for her to grasp, so she had made herself stop thinking about it.

  “Morning Song, at a Seeder ship’s fastest trans-tunnel pace,” Roscoe said, “how long would it take to get to the target galaxy?”

  The answer appeared on the screen below the map as a direct line appeared from the Milky Way to the target galaxy.

  Seventy-one years.

  “To your knowledge,” Roscoe asked, “are there any Seeder ships between here and the target galaxy. If there are, explain what they are and show their locations.”

  Twelve scout ships.

  Green dots appeared showing the locations of all the scout ships searching ahead for any sign of intelligent alien life.

  Maria knew those ships were slightly smaller than Chairman Ray’s ship and held a crew of a thousand or more. A couple of the scout ships were even larger and very fast. They were staffed with mostly scientists and explorers and their families, people who loved to push off into the unknown to see what they could find.

  Those scout ships were very fast and only lightly armed, but had the best screens known to Seeder technology, so they could move around without ever being seen if there was alien life. She knew from the knowledge poured into her head that the scout ships often spent a couple hundred years or more in a galaxy.

  The closest ship to the target galaxy was only two galaxies away from the target.

  Suddenly Maria understood what Roscoe was thinking.

  “Morning Song,” Maria asked. “At full speed, how long would it take the closest scout ship to reach the target galaxy?”

  Approximately twenty-three days.

  Roscoe was smiling.

  Maria went over and kissed him, then hugged him. “That’s just brilliant.”

  Fisher cleared his throat and then said, “We might need a little more explanation here.”

  Maria turned to the big screen again and pointed. “Morning Song, please connect each ship with each other ship, starting from the Milky Way.”

  Green lines connected the green dots.

  “Is any distance between ships too far for Chairman Ray to transport?” Roscoe asked.

  No.

  You and Chairman Boone could also make the jumps.

  Now that shocked Maria. She had no idea she had that ability. She wouldn’t even begin to know how to do it. Just the idea of transporting herself over an entire galaxy gave her the shudders.

  Beside her, Roscoe was staring at the big screen, shaking his head. Clearly he had not known he could do that either.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  ROSCOE LOOKED AT Maria and smiled after he got over the shock of being told he could personally transport over distances between galaxies. He honestly didn’t want to think about that at the moment.

  Besides, he wanted Chairman Ray and Tacita to be part of this scouting mission as well.

  But looking at the big screen, he suddenly realized something else that needed to be added to the upcoming mission, part of Maria’s plan to help Seeders have more of a historical memory, even over millions of years.

  “Morning Song,” Roscoe asked. “Approximately how far can a person who has been given training as a Seeder transport under normal conditions?”

  Over one hundred thousand light years is standard

  “Why that question?” Maria asked, looking puzzled.

  “A new addition to our mission,” Roscoe said. “We add in jump stations along our path so any of us can easily return to the Milky Way at any time.”

  She instantly understood what he was suggesting and again gave him a hug.

  “That will help with the Seeder historical records,” she said.

  “And help us return to our lodge at times for rest periods,” Fisher said, smiling. “Thank you.”

  Roscoe could tell that Fisher and Callie really, really liked that idea. Leaving their lodge was one of the only he
sitations they had about joining the mission.

  “It will also make recruiting for this mission much easier,” Callie said.

  “We’ll call it Project Breadcrumbs,” Maria said. “Each jump station can have shops, sleeping areas, restaurants, and so on.”

  He loved that and they all laughed, but he knew the name would stick. And he had to admit, it would help a lot with recruiting. Someone knowing they could return home at any moment was much better than trying to convince someone to never return.

  “So when do we talk with Chairman Ray and Tacita,” Maria asked, “about this scouting mission and jump station idea.”

  “How about now?” Roscoe asked. “If there are objections, I sure would like to hear them before we go any farther.”

  “So would I,” Maria said.

  She took Roscoe by the hand and pulled him down toward their chairs. He knew what she was doing. In the chairs, they could talk directly to Chairman Ray and ask him to come here if he was close. As far as Roscoe knew, Ray was close.

  They sat down in the chair and a moment later were melded even more than they were outside the chair.

  Roscoe loved that feeling.

  He loved everything about being close to Maria.

  “Chairman Ray?” Maria said aloud, knowing her voice was being sent to Ray. “Would you and Tacita have a few moments to talk with us in Morning Song’s Command Center?”

  “Certainly,” Ray said, his image clear in the reply. “Five minutes.”

  He cut off and Roscoe stood, pulling Maria to her feet.

  “Well?” Fisher asked.

  “Chairman Ray is on the way,” Roscoe said, turning to look up at the images still on the big screen. He had no doubt this coming conversation was going to be interesting. He just wasn’t sure how or in which direction it would go.