Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “Dropping out of Trans-Warp,” James, his navigator said, “right on target.”

  West trusted James with just about anything, even though he looked like he had barely left college with a baby face, blue eyes, and blonde hair. Actually James was almost four hundred years old and maybe the top navigator to come out of the war.

  “Void Space bubble should be right ahead of us,” Tammy said.

  “It is,” James said.

  “Take us to within scanning distance slow and carefully,” West said.

  Since the war, all Seeder ships could see clearly on their scans all areas of Void Space. But they were all still very careful around them, since one wrong move could cost them thousands of years lost until they either went through or got rescued.

  This large bubble ahead of them had been on the assumed flight path of one of the ancient Seeder Mother ships named Dawn’s Light.

  The Voice Space was as big around as about ten solar systems, one of the bigger ones West had dealt with.

  It would have been on the edge of a galaxy at the time where the Dawn’s Light would have been heading to possibly seed. It now had shifted a great deal in space, but Tammy had tracked it through the five million years.

  Actually, she had taken it’s position now and backtracked it to where it would have been at the time of the flight of the mother ship.

  They all believed this one bubble was their best hope so far.

  “Scanning distance,” James said. “All stop.”

  Extreme silence.

  Heavier than West could imagine being on this command center, which usually felt light and full of laughter and fun.

  After a moment, Tammy looked up at him from her screen, a smile on her face. “Scans show a Seeder Mother ship.”

  West broke into a large smile as around the command center applause and cheers filled the air.

  “Any idea with this size bubble how much time has passed for them?”

  “Six days and a few hours,” Tammy said.

  West just shook his head. This massive ship with over a million souls on board had been missing for over five million years.

  “Let’s set up to get them out of there,” West said, sending a thousand small probes launching to surround the huge bubble.

  Then sat down in his command chair and asked to be put in contact with Chairman Ray.

  Chairman Ray’s stern face appeared almost instantly. He had long, gray hair that hung down his back and always wore expensive silk shirts and slacks.

  “We have a Seeder Mother ship in a bubble,” West said. “We think it is the Dawn’s Light. I thought you might want to be here to greet them and help start them through the transition.

  “How long until you have the bubble destroyed?”

  “Thirty minutes,” West said.

  Ray nodded. “I will be right there in ten minutes.”

  West nodded and clicked off. Then he turned to his command center crew. “Stay sharp people. Chairman Ray will be here shortly.”

  Then he smiled at Tammy, who smiled back before going back to work.

  A good day. At least so far.

  Two

  Chairman Ray appeared beside West’s command chair and a slight gasp went out through the command center. Chairman West understood that feeling. Ray was the unofficial leader of all the Seeders and was well over five million years old. Seeders lived a very long time, but only some of the ancients were older.

  And Ray had a presence about him with the dark slacks, silk white shirt, long gray hair combed perfectly down his back, and ramrod-straight posture.

  “Are you going to be all right?” West asked Ray, moving over closer to him so that his words would not be heard by any of his crew.

  West nodded. “My brother is one of the chairman on this ship. For millions of years I have feared him lost forever, dealt with his death a long time ago. It was only with your discovery of Empty Space and the rescue of Dreaming Large that I had let myself hope again.”

  West just nodded. Not a thing he could say to that. Not a thing. He was only about twenty thousand years old. He couldn’t imagine thinking that a loved relative had been lost for five million years and now had a chance to see them again.

  Impossible to imagine.

  “Chairman,” James said, “we are ready.”

  West glanced over at Tammy who nodded her agreement. She was his technical expert in empty space bubbles.

  “Are you ready, sir?” West asked, turning to Ray.

  Ray nodded and said nothing.

  “Get them out of there,” West said.

  A moment later a few thousand small explosions showed the massive globe of the Void Space Bubble, then the next moment an ancient Seeder Mother Ship appeared.

  In comparison to the modern, sleek Seeder ships, this one looked ancient in design, even though completely undamaged in any way.

  “It is the Dawn’s Light,” Tammy said, smiling.

  “Please hail their chairmen,” Ray said.

  “Coming on screen,” James said.

  On the big screen in front of them, a man who looked a great deal like Ray, only without the wear and the long gray hair, appeared standing next to a dark-skinned woman with a beaming smile.

  “Hello, Cannon,” Ray said. “Hello, Anna. This is Chairman Evan West of the Rescue Two.”

  “Wow, what are you doing here?” Cannon asked. “And Rescue Two? I don’t understand.”

  Someone on the Dawn’s Light command center said something in the background. West had a hunch it was someone reporting that they were no longer anywhere where they were supposed to be. And that a lot of time had passed.

  Cannon and Anna both turned to listen for a moment.

  Cannon then turned back to Ray and his face suddenly had a look of panic on it. Anna looked the same. “What happened, brother?”

  “You were trapped for over six of your days in what is called an Empty Space Bubble. “We found you and broke you out of that bubble.”

  “But how?” Anna asked.

  “We need to talk in private first,” Ray said. “Chairman West and his wife and I can meet you in your main meeting room?”

  Cannon cut the connection and a moment later West found himself with Tammy standing beside Ray in a standard old-fashioned mother ship meeting room. A large wooden table ran down the middle, with ten comfortable cloth chairs around it.

  Pictures of galaxies and plants covered the walls.

  West and Tammy stood back as Cannon and Anna came into the room. All three embraced. For Cannon and Anna, it had been eighty-plus years since seeing Ray.

  West had no idea how Ray was even holding it together for this meeting.

  “How is Tacita?” Anna asked about Chairman Ray’s wife.

  “She is fine,” Ray said, smiling. “She can join us later when you are ready.”

  Then all five of them sat down after introductions had been made.

  West found himself holding Tammy’s hand under the table and she held his back just as tightly.

  “So tell us exactly what has happened,” Cannon said. “And how did you and your modern-looking ship get here, let alone know we needed to be rescued.”

  Ray turned to West. “Chairman, would you like to tell my brother and his wife how you rescued your wife?”

  He then turned back to his brother. “You will have questions, but hear him out completely first.”

  West nodded and went over the story of the Dreaming Large vanishing. And all the years it took to understand Empty Space Bubbles and learn how to get ships out of them safely.

  “So time does not work the same inside of these Empty Space bubbles as outside,” Anna asked after West was done. “Is that correct?”

  All three of them nodded.

  “So how much time passes inside versus in real space?” Cannon asked.

  “That depends on a lot of factors,” Tammy said, “but mostly on the size of the empty space bubble.”

  “Was the bubble we were in larg
e or small?”

  “Large,” Tammy said. “So the time difference was extreme.”

  “How long have we been missing?” Cannon asked, looking directly at Ray.

  Ray just frowned. “Just over five million years.”

  Cannon sat back hard in his chair and Anna’s eyes looked distant.

  “You thought we were dead for over five million years?” Cannon asked softly.

  “I did,” Ray said.

  Three

  Silence, thick and very heavy filled the room.

  West squeezed Tammy’s hand, very glad she was beside him for this.

  Finally Ray asked if he may connect Cannon’s ship with West’s ship. “I have a presentation for you that I think will make you proud.”

  “Go ahead,” Cannon said, looking at Anna who just was sitting shaking her head. West could not begin to understand what they were feeling right now.

  “When you left on this mission eighty of your years ago,” Ray said as a map of galaxies came up on the screen on the wall at the end of the table. “This was the number of galaxies we had seeded.”

  “Ten if memory serves,” Cannon said, looking at the green dots in a tiny area of the wall screen.

  Ray nodded. “Yes, ten. This is how many human galaxies now exist.”

  Ray changed the image of the map.

  West was stunned at how massive the amount of green was, spreading like a plant over massive amounts of space. Every green dot an entire galaxy with billions of stars.

  “Wow,” Tammy said softly beside him. This kind of perspective was not something they always saw or paid attention to.

  “We have so many Mother Ships,” Ray said, “we are now seeding a new galaxy on the average of ever ten days. And a new Mother Ship is coming on line now almost every month.”

  West shook his head in amazement. He didn’t even know that.

  “What is the gray area?” Anna asked after a moment of everyone staring at the incredible image.

  “Those are the home galaxies of the Gray. They also live on every human seeded world as well and help us in the seeding process in a behind-the-scenes way. We have had a treaty with them since right after you vanished.”

  “And the black area,” Cannon asked.

  West looked down. Not something he wanted to talk about much.

  “We had a war with a Seeder-made culture. Those are all dead galaxies.”

  “And the bright blue dot and line?” Anna asked.

  “The Ancient’s home world and the area we think they disappeared into,” Ray said.

  “Ancients?” Cannon asked.

  West had no doubt this was going to take a lot of time to explain over many, many days.

  “Yes, we were seeded as well,” Ray said. “We call our seeders the “Ancients.”

  “Oh, shit,” Anna said.

  “We can ask Daniels to join us later,” Ray said. “He can explain that part.”

  “Daniels?” Cannon asked, looking puzzled as to why Ray would want their second in command to join them.

  “He’s an ancient,” Ray said, “along with about eighty other crew members on this ship, riding along to help. I’m actually very interested in talking with them as well. Ancients are not enemies. They are Seeders as well. But all of them have just left their home worlds and no one knows exactly where they went.”

  “I am so confused,” Anna said.

  Tammy leaned forward. “Let me try to get you some grounding, since I was also trapped inside an Empty Space Bubble and suddenly had six hundred ships surround us.”

  Anna nodded, as did Cannon.

  “What happened is that without your knowing it, six days ago your time, you ran into an Empty Space Bubble. You engines shut down and nothing seemed to work as normal.”

  They both nodded.

  “You could also no longer see real space, but you could see the edge and were trying to get to it with just your forward real-space motion, correct?”

  Again they both nodded.

  “For every second you existed in that bubble,” Tammy said, “out here in standard time, years went past. And there was nothing at all you could do about it or change it. And there was nothing you did wrong at all. It has happened to many, many Seeder ships until my husband here and his team invented a way to scan for Empty Space bubbles and avoid them.”

  “We will be looking for the Mother Ship Shadow Stars next,” West said. “It vanished about three hundred years after you did.”

  “It was Chairman Ray’s desire to find you that got this mission going,” Tammy said. “Although he did not tell us why exactly.”

  Cannon glanced at Anna, then back at Ray. “We need to tell our crew what happened. Can you give us some time?”

  “Contact us when you need more answers,” Ray said. “I have a fleet of ships headed this way that should start arriving at any moment, with the majority of them arriving tomorrow to help you retrofit your ship and get you into a Seeder port for a complete overhaul to get you and your crew five million years into the future.”

  “Any moment now?” Anna asked. “How fast are your ships?”

  “We can make the journey it took you eighty years to make in a few hours at normal speeds. Faster if we had to.”

  Anna just sort of shook her head.

  Cannon nodded and stood. “Thank you, brother,” he said.

  They hugged and then Ray nodded to Anna.

  Then West, Tammy, and Ray were back in the Command Center of the Rescue Two.

  West turned to his command crew and said simply, “Any question any of the crew of that ship have, no matter how stupid sounding, answer it carefully, fully, and with compassion.”

  Around the command center his crew was nodding.

  West then turned back to Ray. Tammy has his arm around him and seemed to almost be holding him up. Finally Ray seemed to gather himself and stand, his posture back completely.

  “Thank you both for your amazing work on this,” Ray said. “I need to tell Tacita that her brother-in-law and sister-in-law are very much alive and well. She was refusing to believe this possible. She and Anna were very close.”

  “We are here when you need us,” West said.

  Ray nodded. “I know that. But now I need you and your wonderful crew to see if you can find Shadow Stars. We will have this situation covered completely tomorrow with enough counselors to help a lot of those having issues with the time loss deal with it.”

  “We will start our search for Shadow Stars,” West said.

  Ray nodded, but didn’t jump away. It seemed he had something left to say. Finally he looked at both of them. “My sister is on Shadow Stars. And Tacita’s father.”

  West only said, “Understood.”

  Tammy hugged the most powerful Chairman of all Seeders like he was a close friend, then she said simply, “We’ll find them.”

  And with that Chairman Ray nodded his thanks, smiled, and without a word vanished.

  “Open a ship-wide com link,” West said.

  “Well done, everyone, on finding and rescuing the million souls on Dawn’s Light. We will be here for support duty for a very short time, more than likely not longer than a day, then we move on. So we celebrate tonight, then we start our search for Shadow Stars. There are millions on that ship that need our help. Well done, everyone.”

  He clicked off the com link and smiled at Tammy.

  “I suggest we have a nice dinner in our apartment, just the two of us,” Tammy said.

  He smiled and hugged her. “You know we have no hope of making more than an hour or so without getting called back here?”

  “Then we better get going,” she said, laughing. “You make the steaks, I’ll do the salad.”

  “Deal,” he said, and with that they vanished from the Command Center.

  They actually got one hour and fifteen minutes before they were again needed. A wonderful one hour and fifteen minutes as far as West was concerned, because to him, he was really starting to understand the im
portance of time.

  Both on a large scale and on a minute-by-minute level.

  THE END

  — — —

  Want to read more by Dean Wesley Smith?

  The Seeders Universe

  The series offers galaxy-spanning science fiction at its very best, including nine novels of adventure and suspense on a massive scale that explore the vast possibilities of space.

  First in Series Free!

  In the first novel in the series, Against Time, paleontologist Callie Sheridan spent a few days deep in the Oregon Caves on a dig with three students from the University of Oregon. When they emerged, they found almost everyone in the world dead. Survival became her only thought.

  Mathematician and galactic explorer Vardis Fisher dropped into orbit over a planet where almost all of the human life had been recently killed for no obvious reason. Suddenly, hundreds of other ships, all human, appear in orbit and start working to save the planet’s remaining population.

  Together, Callie and Fisher work to discover the secrets of a galaxy that has been hidden in plain sight, even from the powerful humans who rescued millions. And in the process, they just might change everything.

  Get the first novel in the series free!

  Against Time

  Try the Star Trilogy Bundle

  The Star Bundle

  About the Author

  Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith published far more than a hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds of short stories across many genres.

  At the moment he produces novels in several major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the Old West, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, a superhero series starring Poker Boy, and a mystery series featuring the retired detectives of the Cold Poker Gang.

  His monthly magazine, Smith’s Monthly, which consists of only his own fiction, premiered in October 2013 and offers readers more than 70,000 words per issue, including a new and original novel every month.