Star Fall: A Seeders Universe Novel Read online

  And the crews of the other ships that wouldn’t go out for a week were all working support functions, from taking in data to helping with final preparations. Not even in all the years fighting the aliens had Star Fall seen such a unified activity of its entire crew.

  And everyone seemed excited.

  All she felt was scared. They were launching just from Star Fall over eight-hundred-thousand people into an unknown ancient artifact. So many things could go wrong, she didn’t even want to think about it. But her nightmares over the last few days had certainly made sleeping hard.

  And every time she had woken up, Matt would be sitting at the kitchen table working over data. She doubted he had slept much at all in the last three days either.

  She was sure that many of the scientists and chairmen of ships had had the same problem.

  “All ships ready to launch,” Star Fall said.

  Carey squeezed Matt’s hand and nodded.

  “Send them to see what they can find,” Matt said.

  “Launching,” Star Fall said. “Star Rain and Star Mist are also launching.”

  For the next hour Carey was convinced that she mostly just held her breath. Military ships led the way on the insistence of the military commanders. A scout ship followed each military ship along with a scientific ship.

  Some of the ships stayed higher over the massive landscape of the outside ring. Others dove in closer, moving quickly but recording all the while.

  It was those images that stunned Carey in their beauty. Lush green forests, lakes, oceans, deserts, mountains, all there. It seemed that the entire massive ring was covered in an Earth-like atmosphere and settings.

  But no signs at all of any humans or Gray or Cirrata.

  “There are no ruins,” Matt said after a short while. “At least in this area of the ring’s inner surface.”

  Carey snapped her head to look at Matt. Then she said, “Star Fall, could you connect us to the other four chairmen?”

  The other four appeared on their screen.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Gina said.

  “Stunning and massive,” Gage said.

  “Seen any ruins or sign that any of the ancients even lived on the surface?”

  The other four looked puzzled, then clearly turned away to watch their own command chair feeds.

  “No,” Benny said. “Unlike all the planets in all the galaxies, there are no ruins.”

  “No signs of underground Gray cities or under ocean Cirrata cities either,” Angie said.

  “Well, that’s great,” Matt said, laughing. “We wanted answers and all we got were more questions.”

  “Peachy,” Benny said.

  The other four chairmen vanished and Matt and Carey went back to studying the information flowing in.

  The ring itself was not only an impossible distance wide, but it was actually hundreds of thousands of kilometers thick. In fact it was so thick that Star Fall could fit inside easily, standing on its tail.

  “It’s hollow,” she said softly to herself, realizing what she had just thought. She looked quickly for at what little data she had about that. Then she said, “Star Fall, have numbers of our scout and scientific ships scan inside the ring. What is in there?”

  “Understood,” Star Fall said.

  Beside her Matt nodded, then said, “Good idea.”

  Less than five minutes later the preliminary scans from inside the massive ring were coming in. It took Carey a moment to understand what she was seeing. Then it became clear.

  They had found the cities.

  The inside of the ring also was terra-formed to look like the surface of an earth planet, with mountains, lakes, oceans, deserts, and lots and lots of formally human cities.

  And unlike the ruins on the planets, these cities still looked maintained.

  They were empty of life, but it looked at first glance as if the occupants had left just a few days before.

  “So the surface of the ring is a giant wildlife park,” Matt said. “They lived inside the ring in another natural environment.”

  “Looks like there is a sun in the sky down there,” Carey said, studying images of one city that seemed to cover a vast area. It had beautiful, sweeping lines in the buildings that seemed to reach into the sky. Stunning, just stunning at first glance.

  “They also found Gray cities and Cirrata cities,” Matt said, pointing at more data coming in.

  Carey looked at the data and agreed. “But where did they all go? And why?”

  Matt just shook his head. He had no better answer than she had, which was none at all.

  TWENTY-NINE

  MATT AND CAREY barely slept for the first two days of the exploration. They did manage to both get regular food and both had taken a nap and a quick shower at one point.

  But otherwise, they never left the command center.

  Matt just couldn’t let himself take a chance of missing something. And with that many ships out, he wanted to be on top of anything that might go wrong.

  But the lack of sleep was slowly catching up to him. He could feel it.

  The scout ships were starting a giant mapping program to map not only the contours of the surface of the large sphere, but also the cities in the lower section.

  The scientists were working on how the entire structure held together and the environmental aspects of holding an atmosphere on the surface of the big ring and also holding an atmosphere and refreshing it in the massive interior.

  Impossible tasks everyone agreed. Except for the fact that it was being done right in front of them.

  And Matt really wanted to know how the inside imitated day and night, which it clearly did on a regular schedule. Numbers of scientific ships had already started to focus on that.

  Because the ring was so wide, the scout ships often reported thousands of human cities as well as Gray cities and Cirrata cities in just one width of the ring. The scouts figured that even with thousands of ships working on the project round the clock, it would take them upwards of two hundred years just to map the insides of the large ring.

  And the idea of that excited them all, which Matt found funny.

  No one had any ideas yet what was on or inside the other four rings. That exploration was to happen with the second wave of ships going out in five days.

  Matt and Carey had had one of the scout ships go in very low over what looked to be a residential area of one city and take photographic images. They had wanted to see what the insides of an ancient’s place looked like.

  The images were stunning. All the rooms were completely empty and clean. There didn’t even look like there was dust on anything. There were numbers of bedrooms with large closets and there was what looked to be a modern form of kitchen. The home had numbers of bathrooms with showers and strange-looking toilets.

  “You could just move in there now,” Matt said, staring at the images. “Add furniture and a bed and food and dishes and you would be home.”

  Carey only nodded to that, clearly as bothered by how the place looked as he was.

  Matt had no doubt at all after two days that this entire thing was being maintained. They had no idea yet how that was happening. Or even how all the power being beamed at the Center from all the galaxies was being caught and used.

  But there was no doubt that massive amounts of energy were being used in just what they had seen so far.

  Finally, as things seemed to be dropping into regular scanning for all the ships, Matt decided to ask Star Fall one question.

  “Star Fall, would it be possible to make a rough guess as to how many humans might have lived on this ring before they left?”

  “No,” Star Fall said, surprising Matt.

  Carey glanced at him, also puzzled.

  “Can you explain?” Matt asked.

  “The interior surface area of this ring would be millions of factors larger than the total surface area of every human planet in the hundreds of millions of galaxies already seeded in human space.”

>   Matt just shook his head at that.

  “In other words, far too large for us to grasp?” Carey asked.

  “No,” Star Fall said. “Just far too large to try to calculate with any sort of accuracy at this point. An estimate would have no value because it could not be accurate even to the nearest trillion square kilometers.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “Thank you.”

  With that he took Carey’s hand and pulled her to her feet.

  “My brain hurts,” he said. “Let’s get something to eat and a full night’s sleep.”

  She only nodded.

  With that he jumped them to their apartment.

  After some quick soup and crackers, they both fell into bed and Matt doubted that either one of them managed to stay awake longer than a few seconds.

  He knew he didn’t.

  THIRTY

  CAREY AND MATT made themselves get back to a moderately regular schedule after the first two days of exploring.

  Every night Carey decided that she wanted to cook to get her mind down into details she could handle instead of the massiveness of the Center. That helped her a lot and when she explained why she wanted to cook to Matt, he decided he wanted to make them lunch every day for the same reason.

  Staying grounded in their own world was going to be a real task with exploring this massive structure ahead of them.

  On the morning of the second week, after all the scout, military, and scientific ships had returned without incident, they launched the second half. This week’s task was to do a preliminary scan of the second ring. Smaller than the first ring, but not by much, and the same width.

  Carey was almost as nervous at the launching of the second wave of ships as she had been the first. She was starting to completely understand, at a deep level, how really tiny and insignificant they were compared to the knowledge of these ancients.

  But thankfully, everything went smoothly and she and Matt could maintain their routine of good sleep and good food, which kept their minds clear on what was happening with the ships.

  The second wave knew a lot more about what to look for after a week of following the data from the first wave and what they had found on the outer ring.

  From the start, it looked as if the massive second ring was just a replica of the outer ring. The interior surface was like a wild Earth-like planet’s surface, with atmosphere and mountains, lakes, oceans, deserts and everything. All completely natural, or as natural as it could be on the inside surface of a vast ring in space.

  Inside the ring was where the cities were once again.

  And again just one width of the ring would contain thousands of human, Gray, and Cirrata cities. And once again Star Fall would give no estimate of how large the insides of the ring were.

  The second wave spent most of the week trying to find and study any sort of inner workings of the ring, what kept them moving, what kept gravity on, what kept the atmosphere from just drifting off into space.

  They found nothing.

  Just structure of some unknown and impossibly strong material and Earth-like environments and millions of pristine, yet abandoned cities.

  The third week was when the first wave of ships went back out, but instead of going back to the large ring, they headed for the third ring.

  Again, no difference.

  And the same the following week with the fourth ring in from the outside. And the cities in the fourth ring seemed to be no different from the cities in the outer ring.

  It was when the ships launched to explore the inner ring that everything changed.

  Carey had been afraid of what they would find on the inner ring for a week and all of the chairmen had talked about it.

  The inner ring had no forests or land on the surface of the ring at all. It was simply the metal they had found that held all the rings together. This ring had no signs that anyone was meant to live on it.

  And the scout, military, and scientific ships couldn’t get between that metal surface and the large glowing star in the center.

  They could come up under the ring or beside the ring, but not over the ring in any fashion. Strong force fields just stopped the ships cold without any damage.

  The inside of the ring was a vast array of massive machines. Most of the machines seemed to be larger than Star Fall. After a short time it was clear that billions of beams from the inner ring connected to the large glowing object in the center.

  They had no idea what the beams were and they could get no closer to the glowing object in the center.

  And no one had the slightest idea even after a week of scans what the machines did. All they knew was that there were more billions of them than anyone could estimate, they were clearly all working, and they were massive in size and scope.

  Carey figured they kept the Center going, gathered the energy from the billions of galaxies, but how was so far beyond even their best scientists as to be laughable.

  And Carey doubted that the answers of how wouldn’t be figured out for centuries, at least. But no doubt this place was going to keep millions of the top scientists in all of human space very busy for a very long time.

  At one point Matt had said, “I feel like a caveman and a plane just flew by.”

  Carey felt that exact same way.

  But there was one other thing that bothered her more than anything about what they had found in the five weeks. They had found no command center.

  From how the space stations they had discovered in abandoned galaxies worked, the ancient humans used command centers just as on Star Fall.

  And all the ancient ships they had found used command centers.

  So where was the command center of the Center? She would bet anything it was here somewhere.

  But it had not been found, which meant nothing considering the size of everything.

  So she offered to cook dinner for the six chairmen. She spent a number of hours on the game hens and sage dressing and salad. Over dinner they all talked about the Center and all the findings.

  But she waited until they were all finished and sipping their coffee before she asked the one question she had been wondering about for days.

  “Any idea where we would find their command center?”

  That stopped the other five cold and she just smiled at them and sipped her coffee and let the question hang unanswered in the middle of the table.

  Finding that command center needed to be their focus and they suddenly all knew it.

  And now, maybe they might find it.

  SECTION SEVEN

  Command Search

  THIRTY-ONE

  MATT KNEW FROM the instant that Carey asked the question that they all needed to focus their search in some form or another on finding the Center’s command.

  He had no idea how, but as he thought about it while Carey sipped her coffee and smiled slightly, he came up with a few ideas.

  “Any bets,” he said, “that the command is in the inner ring?”

  Benny nodded. “A logical place.”

  “But why does it bother me that logic might not be the right answer here,” Angie said.

  Carey nodded. “I agree. All the rings seem, at least at first study, to be completely symmetrical in nature. A command center would not fit.”

  “So where is it?” Gage asked. “On that bright sun or whatever it is at the middle of this thing?”

  “I doubt that,” Angie said, laughing.

  Matt looked at Carey as they all sat and thought and drank their coffee after her wonderful dinner. She said symmetrical and she was right. Everything about the entire sphere of galaxies, the Center itself, the interior of the rings, was symmetrical in nature.

  “The ancients seemed to take comfort from symmetry,” Matt said.

  The others nodded.

  “Almost anal about it, actually,” Benny said. “Gina and I commented on that a lot as we were approaching the Center.”

  Gina nodded.

  “Privacy shield down,” Matt said. “
Star Fall, please float an image of the Center over the table between all of us.”

  An image of the spinning and twisting rings of the Center appeared. It really was a beautiful thing when looked at like that.

  “Please shrink it down to about half the size you have it now,” Matt said.

  The image got smaller. And if possible more beautiful and stunning.

  The bright yellow-sun-like object in the center was now a clear orb, the rings spinning and twisting around the bright center orb like a kid’s gyroscope he remembered playing with.

  Shrunk down like this it almost seemed possible to handle the size of it. Almost.

  “So what wouldn’t disturb the symmetry of this beautiful object,” Carey asked.

  Suddenly Matt realized he knew the answer to that question, remembering how he had taken a string on the kid’s gyroscope to get it spinning. The string had wrapped around the pole in the center.

  “The poles,” he said.

  “Of course,” Gage said.

  Carey nodded.

  “Star Fall, are there any objects outside the Center above what might be considered the poles of the Center?”

  “Yes,” Star Fall said. A single artificial moon-sized object holds a stationary orbit over a pole of the Center eighteen light years away from the rings.”

  “Damn,” Gage said. “We’ve been so focused on the spinning rings we didn’t look for what was close around it.”

  “Please show that object as a point of light to show the location,” Matt said.

  A point of light appeared right above the spinning Center.

  Symmetrical.

  “Star Fall, any other objects like that close to the Center?” Matt asked.

  “No,” Star Fall said.

  All six of them leaned forward, then Carey said, “I think we may have just found our command center.”

  All Matt could do was nod. Maybe now they might actually get some real answers.

  THIRTY-TWO