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  Gage didn’t know the mission that they were being recruited for, but he had a hunch it was because of their ability to co-chair the huge ships. Until today he had never been on a mother ship, and actually thought them a myth.

  Finally, Ray returned them to Chairman Soma’s office with the plan that he and Tacita and the three couples would meet for the first briefing on the coming mission in five hours.

  Gage was looking forward to that.

  Angie was holding Gage’s hand and when they appeared in Soma’s office, without Ray, Gage said, “Thank you for the use of your office for all of this.”

  Soma bowed deeply to them. “It has been my honor. And please, if there is anything I can do to aid you or your mission, do not hesitate.”

  Gage told control that two were going to the surface and jumped Angie and him back to her apartment.

  She first went and found both of her cats and petted them while he sat on the couch. Then she came back and sat down beside him.

  “I have to be dreaming,” she said.

  “The fact that I am with the most beautiful woman on the planet is a dream,” he said. “Not sure what you are dreaming about.”

  She laughed and took his hand and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  They sat like that for a few wonderful minutes, both lost in their own thoughts. Then she said, “The Seeders are amazing. How have they managed to just keep going and going for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years?”

  “Fresh recruits like us,” he said and she nodded.

  “Ray and Tacita want that freshness for whatever they have in mind,” Angie said. “That much is clear.”

  “Very clear,” he said. But darned if he could really figure out what the mission might be considering what he now knew about Seeders. This had to be something very new. And that excited him.

  “It makes me sad that so many human civilizations just stagnate inside their own galaxy,” Angie said.

  “I’m not sure if having a galaxy spanning civilization could be called stagnating,” Gage said, laughing. “But yes, it does seem that by taking out of most populations the Seeder gene as recruits, eventually the desire to move outward by every culture is replaced by a desire to remain solid and happy and working in other things besides exploring.”

  “You think the Seeder gene is what always made humans look to explore?”

  “As logical as anything,” he said.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  Gage smiled. “We have hours. I am thinking a leisurely walk to one of the fine restaurants in this neighborhood, then back here for some private connection time, then off to the meeting with the others.”

  She pushed off his shoulder and looked at him, smiling, the smile in her eyes as well. “You think an early dinner might get you into my pants?”

  “A guy can hope,” Gage said, smiling back.

  “Okay,” she said. “I suppose I can be bought, but I’m not cheap.”

  He laughed. “All right, I’ll spring for dessert as well.”

  “Deal,” she said, and kissed him.

  And they damn near skipped the dinner. They would have if they both hadn’t been so hungry.

  SECTION TWO

  The Mission and Getting Ready

  SEVENTEEN

  ANGIE FELT EXCITED to see the other four members of this mission. She had known and liked all four of them.

  Ray had said the briefing would be in Chairman Soma’s office and she and Gage had been the first to arrive.

  Soma greeted them with a bow and asked what he could have brought in for them to drink. Both just asked for water.

  A moment later a woman’s voice in the air said, “Chairman Soma, Gina Helm and Benny Slade asking permission to come to your office.”

  “Please,” he said, and a moment later they both appeared.

  Gina was tall and lanky and looked strong, far stronger than Angie. She had dark, short hair and wore a white long-sleeved blouse with the sleeves rolled up and jeans.

  Beside her Benny was as tall as Gina, but far wider and very muscled. He was ex-military and it showed in his posture and short, dark hair, cropped close. He had also been originally from New York and had saved many lives there by setting up huge buildings as refuges after the Event.

  As a couple, Benny and Gina had always intimidated Angie, but she had really come to like them over the last year since they came to Portland from New York.

  Both of them smiled when they saw Angie and they both hugged her, congratulating her on joining the Seeders.

  Then Angie introduced Gage.

  Benny smiled. “So it’s your men who have been keeping an eye on us over the last six months.”

  “They that obvious?” Gage asked, laughing.

  “Not in the slightest,” Benny said. “In fact, they are damn fine.”

  “Good to hear,” Gage said. “I’m hoping they’ll join up to come along on whatever we are going to be doing.”

  “That would be damn great if they would,” Benny said.

  At that moment Chairman Ray appeared with Carrie Noack and Matt Ladel. Both were looking a little shocked and Angie didn’t blame them at all. She was feeling the same way.

  Carrie was a tiny woman and all muscle. She had short brown hair and very light skin. She wore a blue blouse and jeans and tennis shoes. Matt was as tall as Gage or Benny at six foot, and he too was all muscle. He had short brown hair that Angie had never seen combed and large brown eyes.

  Angie went and hugged them both and the others congratulated all three of them for joining the Seeders.

  Angie felt so much better now that Carrie and Matt were here and she wasn’t the only new blood in the room. And having her there also seemed to bring Carrie and Matt back into their eyes a little as well. Clearly Chairman Ray had been giving them extra help over the last few hours.

  Angie felt lucky that she had Gage beside her.

  After the bottles of water for everyone arrived, they all sat in Chairman Soma’s couches and chairs. Only Ray remained standing and Soma went around behind his desk to watch, but be out of the picture.

  At that moment Tacita appeared beside Ray and bowed a greeting to all of them.

  Angie just felt in awe seeing her and her amazing beauty.

  “It’s time we tell you what this is all about,” Ray said. “We have been planning this for about three years now, since we found all of you with your special genes during and around the rescue operation here.”

  Angie was sitting next to Gage in one of the big chairs and she reached over and took his hand. She noticed that Carrie and Matt were also holding hands on the couch and Benny and Gina also held hands across two chairs.

  Clearly Ray and Tacita had recruited three couples.

  “All of you now know from your training,” Ray said, “how very rare true alien advanced life is throughout the known universe.”

  All of them nodded.

  Angie had been surprised at that more than anything else in the vast learning from this afternoon. Most galaxies had no growing or even starting alien sentient population. And Seeder scout ships spent a vast amount of time searching before any Seeder ships entered the galaxy to start seeding.

  And on any galaxy that alien life was found, no matter at what level, the Seeders simply watched in secret and the seeding ships went around, leaving the entire galaxy to the alien race.

  Very, very few alien races ever made it off their original planets and only two alien races had made it to other stars before falling back into ruin and then destruction. Without Seeder help, almost all human worlds seeded would face the same exact fate. Even with Seeder help, many still did.

  It seemed it was very, very difficult to survive as a culture and expand into space.

  And that was not counting the natural disasters that almost wiped out the human population on the planet below.

  Ray went on with Tacita standing beside him saying nothing.

  “Three years ago this was foun
d in deep space heading for an edge of this galaxy,” Ray said.

  A hologram of what looked like a blackish pile of wadded-up junk appeared floating in the middle of the room. The pile of junk was clearly artificially constructed, but Angie could make no sense out of it at all.

  “This is an alien ship,” Ray said. “It is the size of a small moon, larger than even Seeder Mother Ships.”

  Angie was stunned, as she could imagine those that found the alien ship had to have been. Seeder Mother Ships were also the size of small moons, but shaped like a bird in flight, not like a pile of junk.

  “The ship has been on trans-tunnel drive for about two hundred thousand years. The shields of the ship failed about a hundred thousand years ago. Nothing is alive on the ship.”

  Stunned silence filled the room as they all just stared at the hologram of the alien ship floating in the middle of the room.

  Angie had a very hard time imagining two hundred thousand years. That number just seemed impossible.

  “Are the alien drives designed for flight speeds between galaxies?” Gina asked.

  Ray nodded. “They were. Basically just trans-tunnel drives, taking all fuel from the space it traveled through. We have been studying that ship now for the last three years. Every detail of it.”

  “What did the aliens look like?” Benny asked. “Were you able to tell that?”

  Angie wasn’t sure she wanted to know that, but was glad Benny asked.

  “Short mammals with fur on their bodies,” Tacita said. “Two arms with hands with six fingers on each hand. Legs used for climbing as well as grasping. A moderate brain capacity.”

  “They looked something like this,” Ray said, “from what we have gotten out of the records on the ship and from what remains of those on that ship that were protected.”

  An image of a very alien creature appeared in the air. It looked like a cross between a badger and a raccoon, only with a huge head and huge and powerful shoulders and arms.

  “Rats,” Benny said. “They look like damn rats. I hated those things in New York.”

  The alien had close-set dark eyes and a long snout with sharp-looking teeth, so Angie could see where Benny from New York thought that.

  “They stand about two feet tall,” Tacita said. “Very powerful.”

  “Damn large rats,” Benny said.

  Ray went on. “From what we could tell from remaining records on the ship that we have been able to translate, they could have up to thirty offspring, lived between twenty and thirty of our years, and were extremely aggressive.”

  “So why the mess of a ship?” Benny asked.

  “This is what their original ship looked like,” Ray said.

  Angie watched as the hologram shifted to a sleek arrow with six fins.

  “As something went wrong on their mission to a nearby galaxy,” Tacita said, “and they found themselves going into deep space with no hope of finding a nearby galaxy soon, they started to build onto their ship to allow for the extra population growth.”

  “They managed to scoop up materials from the vacuum of space just as trans-tunnel drive takes power from the slight particles in deep space. They created this ship, along with ways of feeding the constantly growing population.”

  The hologram slowly morphed into the image of the ball of trash that had been there before. Only now Angie could see the ship inside the additions.

  “They made it work for almost a hundred thousand years,” Tacita said, “before the ship’s systems collapsed from overload and their shields failed.”

  “At three generations every one hundred years,” Gage said, “that’s impressive. Three thousand generations were born and died on that ship. Wow.”

  Angie just stared at it, feeling a deep sadness for alien creatures that had died a very long time ago just trying to stay alive.

  Even if they did look like rats.

  EIGHTEEN

  GAGE FELT STUNNED by all that he had heard so far. Aliens had actually developed a society that had managed to get out of a galaxy. That was both exciting and scary beyond words.

  And to hear about the tragic tale of this one spaceship was amazing.

  In the advanced information they had gotten earlier, he now knew what all the aliens Seeders had discovered over the years looked like. Spider-like creatures with large brains, other mammal-like creatures like these, and even some strange squid-like creatures that had actually managed to get to their nearest star systems.

  “So what mission are you thinking of us doing that concerns this alien ship?” Gina asked, looking away from the ship to Ray.

  Angie and Gage did the same, Angie squeezing his hand.

  The hologram of the ship vanished showing a mostly two-dimensional illustration of a vast number of galaxies. The galaxies were no more than points of light and the hologram looked more like a white cloud floating there in the air.

  “This is cut along the lines the alien ship traveled in two hundred thousand years of trans-tunnel flight,” Ray said.

  “Wow, that’s a lot of distance,” Benny said.

  “It is,” Ray said. “The small dot here is the Milky Way Galaxy and Andromeda Galaxy and other local group galaxies and all of these other dots are galaxies or clusters of galaxies the ship got near, but clearly not close enough to help them with whatever problem they were having.”

  Gage watched as a line appeared from the Milky Way back through all the other dots to one galaxy that must have been the start of the two hundred thousand year voyage.

  “We believe the ship started here,” Ray said.

  The dot expanded to become an image of a group of galaxies. The line ended in the center one.

  “We think the ship was trying to reach this galaxy,” Tacita said, and one of the close galaxies to the main one lit up. “But something went horribly wrong and they passed the galaxy by and went onward.”

  “We do not know from the records we have translated so far if this was just a standard milk run, or the first exploration run to another galaxy,” Ray said.

  The hologram vanished.

  “What we are hoping you can do with three new ships,” Ray said, “is go find out what these aliens are up to and if they are expanding in this direction and so on.”

  “In essence,” Tacita said, “a scouting mission.”

  Gage sat back and Angie squeezed his hand.

  “I’m just a little confused,” Matt said. “Are you asking us to go on a two hundred thousand year one way mission?”

  Ray shook his head and smiled. “No, thanks to two brilliant inventors who actually met in orbit over this planet during the evacuation ten days after the Event, new breakthroughs have happened in trans-tunnel drive.”

  “The first breakthrough since humans left our original galaxy,” Tacita said, “besides making the drives safer.”

  “So how long should this trip take?” Gina asked.

  “At full speed of the new drives,” Ray said, “about ten years. But we expect you will do a little exploring along the way, so a little longer.”

  Gage again just shook his head. He couldn’t even imagine that speed and not even the training earlier today on the real scale of Seeders helped him with that.

  “Two hundred thousand years down to ten?” Gina said. “How is that even possible?”

  “In short,” Ray said, “trans-tunnel drive opens up a tunnel through space so that a ship can travel far, far faster than the speed of light.”

  All of them nodded. Gage understood that as well. He even knew the math of it from his college days.

  “What the two new brilliant inventors did was figure out a way to open multiple tunnels inside open trans-tunnel flights.”

  “Basically,” Tacita said, “If you are going ten times the speed of light inside one tunnel, and then open another tunnel inside that tunnel going ten times the speed of the other tunnel, it factors to a hundred times higher. These inventors have come up with a way to open ten tunnels inside each other safely if ne
eded.”

  Gage just sat there shaking his head. He and Angie were going to lead one of three ships to visit the first aliens to ever create a culture that could leave its own galaxy.

  It was no wonder Ray and Tacita wanted young people who were used to the unexpected and had lived with that being normal. There was no telling what they would run into on the other side of that ten-year journey.

  And no telling what they would find along the way, either.

  Damn, this was scary.

  And exciting.

  NINETEEN

  ANGIE WAS STARTING to feel overwhelmed again. But with slow breaths, she just let her new learning from earlier kick in.

  The woman who had been helping find new people to tell about Portland yesterday was at a slight war with the woman who was now a Seeder and knew all the history and details of being a Seeder.

  Yesterday she thought that aliens didn’t exist and humans were the only ones in the galaxy. She had been partially right about the humans being the only ones, but now she knew aliens clearly did exist.

  Just an unimaginable distance away.

  Across from her Carrie and Matt were also looking somewhat shocked. And neither had said much at all.

  It was Benny who again broke the silence in the room by asking the next obvious question, but one Angie had not thought of in the slightest.

  “What kind of ships will we be using?” Benny asked.

  Ray nodded and a hologram of a beautiful spaceship appeared floating in front of them. It had the look of a beautiful bird in full flight. The front was a long neck and the nose came down to what looked to almost a point.

  “Three identical ships,” Ray said. “Each are mother ships in size and will carry over a million people each.”

  Angie just opened her mouth, then shut it.

  Over a million people?

  Her stomach twisted into a knot.

  “Each ship will have two hundred scout ships, a couple hundred seeder ships, and two hundred military ships as well,” Tacita said. “All equipped and built with the new drive.”