“Coming in,” Roscoe said.
Roscoe jumped him and Jonas back to a special decontamination room on Fisher’s ship and the two of them were scanned at levels Roscoe didn’t want to think about.
“Clear on the decontamination,” Fisher said.
“We agree from here,” Chairman Ray said.
“A clean ship that has warmed up the place and turned on the lights,” Fisher said.
“Seems we have some exploring to do,” Roscoe said.
And after being out there in that huge space, that idea actually excited him for the first time.
SEVENTEEN
ONE HOUR AFTER the big ship dropped back out of trans-tunnel flight and they lost communications with Chairman Ray because of the ship’s shields, Maria found herself sitting beside Roscoe in the kitchen of Fisher’s ship.
He had on a tight black shirt and black slacks with the same wide belt buckle he always wore. His long brown hair was pulled tight behind his head. For the first time since they had been inside the big ship, he had no rifle with him.
She wanted to just touch the muscles that were clear under the tight black shirt, but she didn’t. Instead she let her leg sort of rest casually against his under the table. Being this close to him made her feel so much better in so many ways she wasn’t sure she understood just yet.
Fisher and Callie were both there as well. All of them were sipping on containers of water and she had one in front of her as well, but hadn’t touched it. Besides sitting so close to Roscoe, she was so excited about going out and exploring Morning Song, she almost couldn’t sit still.
Fisher looked at her. “Do you have opinions of the most important areas to explore first?”
“Command Center, of course,” Maria said. “We need to get control of this ship in some fashion or another and that has to be priority.”
Beside her, she could see Roscoe nodding in agreement.
Fisher looked around at his wife, then back at Maria. “You won’t get any disagreement on that at all. Second most important?”
Maria just shook her head. She wanted to see the entire ship, but she knew they had to prioritize right now. “Engines, then secondary control rooms, then living areas, then those big ships on that docking bay. We really need to see how they are outfitted and if they can function after all this time. On second thought, those should be right after the engine room.”
Fisher looked at Roscoe. “Your list?”
Roscoe looked at Maria. “I can’t disagree with that list at all.”
Callie agreed and so did Fisher.
“So there are fifteen of us,” Fisher said. “How would you suggest we split up or should we?”
Maria looked at Roscoe who nodded for her to go ahead.
“My suggestion,” Maria said. “One from each team remain here on the ship running scans ahead of the three groups that are out. Three groups out at a time, four members in each exploring group. We need at least one member from each of our teams in each group.”
“That feels right,” Roscoe said.
Fisher turned to his wife. “Would you mind remaining on board this first time? I need someone in command here who knows how to fly The Lady.”
“I was going to suggest that,” she said.
Fisher turned to Maria again. “Who on your team knows the most about the Command Centers of older Seeder ships?”
“Hudson,” she said, without hesitation.
Hudson was one of her youngest at three hundred years, but looked far older than he should because of his long black beard and shaggy hair. He had made it his passion to study and fly in reality and in simulations all old Seeder ships she could get him near. He could take apart old Command Centers with his eyes closed.
“So the three of us and Hudson head to the Command Center,” Fisher said.
“Jonas could take a team to engineering,” Roscoe said. “His passion is engines of all types.”
Fisher nodded. “Two of my team are engineers as well. Perfect.”
They spent the next half hour detailing out who would go first and so on. They decided that Maria had been right and the third most important place to explore was the big ships on the hanger deck.
Then there was nothing else to talk about.
Maria was almost floating off the deck as she headed for her cabin to get what she might need in the Command Center of the Morning Sun. This was all a dream come true.
But in the back of her mind, something was nagging at her. She felt completely home inside the Morning Song. Completely, and that felt both good and worried her. She had no idea where the feeling was coming from.
But in her excitement, she decided to just think about that later. Right now she got to explore a Seeder ship that was so ancient, she couldn’t believe it actually existed.
And she was going to get to explore it with a man of her dreams.
It didn’t get better than that.
EIGHTEEN
ROSCOE HAD LEARNED very early on that when something was going smoothly, something ugly was about to happen. It didn’t always work that way, but his voice was telling him that was the case this time.
This ship had made him feel like an ant crawling somewhere on a planet’s continent. The builders of this ship were far, far beyond the knowledge and years of the Seeders now or ones working Andromeda.
Sure, the ship had been built by humans. Seeders. But not humans like them at all. Humans far, far advanced. So why did ants like him think they could get control of something this big?
That thought just kept nagging him and he had no idea what to do about that at all.
And he felt completely at home on the big ship at the same time and that feeling worried him even more and kept him even more on guard.
He had insisted that each group only jump with line-of-sight as much as possible. That way the ship would be able to know they were coming and they wouldn’t trigger alarms without warning.
He hoped.
“Ready?” he asked the three standing around him in the big former exercise room with the scanning stations. This room would be their jump base. Jonas’s group had the main scanning room, and the third group was using a back open area in the dining room.
Fisher, Maria, and Hudson all nodded as one that they were ready. Maria’s excitement for the moment had turned to serious worry. He wanted to hug her and tell it would be all right, but damned if he knew it would be.
“I’m going to do the jumping. I’ll take us about a kilometer away across the deck along the path toward the Command Center.”
Again they all nodded.
So he jumped them.
The incredible open space of the huge deck surrounded them.
The air did smell slightly stale this second time out, and the temperature was slightly under what Fisher kept his ship, but not too cold to be a worry.
Fisher’s ship looked like a tiny toy sitting in the middle of a huge room from this distance.
“Stunning,” Hudson said softly as if whispering wouldn’t draw attention to them.
Roscoe turned to Maria who was slowly turning, trying to take it all in, her large golden eyes even wider than normal.
“How do we look out ahead?” Roscoe asked her after giving her a moment to be shocked and look around.
He then moved over next to her as she fumbled to get her scanner out. Her scanner gave him a clear image of where they were jumping to, and a clear path to the Command Center.
It was going to take him about thirty minutes of quick jumps to get them there, mostly down huge hallways that appeared to be the width of a two-lane highway and up through decks into more hallways.
She checked the scan and then showed it to him, her shoulder brushing his arm. “We’re clear.”
He jumped them again.
“Scans are clear,” Maria said.
“Triggering nothing,” Callie’s voice came across clear in their ears. The three back on the ship were there to scan ahead and make sure no team triggered anyt
hing. “Second team leaving the ship.”
“Understood,” Roscoe said as they looked around.
He had jumped them right into the middle of one of the huge hallways. Fifty people could walk side-by-side in this hallway and not even touch shoulders. And the ceiling was high and the lights were hidden, but clearly there.
Hudson kneeled and touched the carpet under their feet. “I don’t think this is fabric,” he said. “I think it’s the decking surface itself formed to be soft and slightly flexible.”
Fisher pointed to regularly spaced panels about every twenty paces. The panels were dark. “Seems like they might have a ship-wide transport system like our own.”
“Ours is like this one,” Maria said, smiling. “This ship has been in flight since before Seeders came into the Local Group.”
“Yeah, that,” Fisher said, smiling back at her.
“Amazing,” Roscoe said. “But glad we’re not hiking. What are these rooms around us?” He pointed at the closed doors that lined the hall every fifty feet or so and seemed to blend perfectly into the wall.
“Offices of some sort,” Maria said, looking at her scanner.
“So how are we on the path ahead?” Roscoe asked Maria, moving over again to stand beside her and look at her scanner.
“Clear,” she said.
He nodded. “I’m going to pick up speed now until we get near the Command Center. We jump, check scan, and jump again. So stay close to me.”
Twelve jumps through identical hallways later, they were sixty-five decks higher in the big ship and in the hallway outside the Morning Song’s big Command Center.
So far, so good.
And that worried Roscoe far more than he wanted to admit.
NINETEEN
MARIA STOOD ONE hundred paces from the big door that led into the Morning Song’s Command Center. She couldn’t decide if she was more afraid or excited. Both emotions seemed to be warring with each other.
Roscoe seemed very worried, but he didn’t say anything. Fisher also looked worried and Hudson just looked excited.
“This is where we discover just how friendly this ship really is,” Roscoe said.
“Callie?” Fisher asked into the air, “any signs of anything coming to life around us or in the Command Center?”
“Nothing,” Callie said.
Maria studied her scans. It just showed the big room, nothing more. “Clear here as well,” she said.
Roscoe nodded and handed Fisher his rifle. Fisher nodded and put it over his shoulder.
“Back in a moment,” Roscoe said, striding down the hallway toward the big door. “Stay there.”
Maria held her breath, watching him walk. More than likely he was scared to death, but he didn’t show it in the slightest. He was more amazing than she had even known.
She didn’t know what she expected when he approached the door, but nothing didn’t seem possible. Yet that was exactly what happened.
Nothing.
He walked right up to the door and stopped.
The door didn’t slide open. She watched as he looked around for a way to have the door slide open, but clearly he didn’t find anything. So he looked back at them and shrugged.
And then vanished.
Clearly he had transported somewhere. Inside the control room, she hoped.
A few seconds later he was back beside her and she actually was so glad to see him, she reached out and grabbed his arm.
“Did I trigger anything?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Callie said.
Maria checked her scanner as well, as did Hudson.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Callie, watch us closely,” Roscoe said.
“Understood,” Callie’s voice came back strong.
Roscoe jumped them inside the Command Center, just inside the door.
And the sight took Maria’s breath away.
Just as with everything on this ship, the Command Center was huge. It had the classic three levels, with a good thirty stations and chairs around the top half-circle level, most facing the wall back, some facing the monster screen on the front wall that was massive.
The air smelled faintly of fresh roses and the floor was a light tan color and soft.
The second level had ten chairs on it, all facing the big front screen. All clearly had heads-up displays that were powered down at the moment.
And in the very center, slightly ahead of all the other stations, two huge chairs towered over any person that might be sitting in them. They were a soft white and dominated the center of the room. They seemed to be linked, form-molded out of one piece of material.
Everything in the room was a brown tone except those two huge molded chairs. The white made them stand out and gave them even more importance.
As Maria moved around the room, she could see that one-half of the two huge chairs was clearly labeled for a man, one for a woman. And between the two chairs was a natural place for the two people to hold hands molded into the chairs.
“You have triggered nothing,” Callie said. “But having you in that room clearly gives some perspective to the size of the room on the scans.”
“It’s huge and amazing,” Fisher said.
Maria was just too stunned to say anything. With Roscoe at her side, she slowly moved down and stood in front of the two big command chairs.
Finally Roscoe glanced at her. “Anything like this in the history of the Seeders?”
She slowly shook her head. “Nothing that I have found.”
Nothing in anything she knew had prepared her for the sight of those two locked command chairs.
They simply took her breath away.
TWENTY
THEY SPENT A good half hour exploring the large room without touching anything before Roscoe recovered enough to ask the question that bothered him a lot.
“Why aren’t these stations powering up?” Without the control stations powered up and the big screen working in front of them and all the other wall screens working as well, a Command Center was just sort of a plain room.
And those two molded-together command chairs made no sense at all.
Both Hudson and Maria shrugged that they had no answer, which bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
“We’re going to need to touch a panel,” Fisher said. “Just see what happens.”
Roscoe agreed and hated that idea, but the only hope they had of this ship getting under their control was to do just that.
He moved over to a panel closest to him on an upper deck station and touched it.
It did nothing for a moment, then a screen came up with ancient Seeder writing on it.
“Maria. Hudson,” he said softly, but clear enough for them to hear.
Both of them scrambled to his side. Fisher was right with them.
“Does that say what I think it says?”
“Oh, shit,” Maria said, staring at the screen.
“We need a damned password,” Hudson said. “Are you kidding me?”
On the screen the clear letters that Roscoe could read thanks to Fisher and Maria’s people cracking the language problem.
Welcome to the Morning Song.
Please enter command permission code.
After a moment the screen went dark.
“What happened?” Callie asked from the ship. “Scans show a tiny energy signature and then nothing.”
“We touched a panel,” Fisher said as Roscoe turned away. “We need a command permission code to take control of the ship.”
“Oh,” was all Callie said.
Roscoe looked at Maria who was standing staring at the big blank screen on the front wall.
He moved over beside her. “How can the Seeders expect us to know a command code after a million plus years? They clearly do.”
“I honestly don’t know,” she said, her voice soft.
He looked around at the stunned look on Fisher’s face. Hudson had dropped to the floor, sitting cross-legged with his head in his h
ands.
“I’m jumping us back to the ship to get some food,” Roscoe said. “We can work there on this.”
Maria nodded and a moment later he had them back in the slightly warmer and far more comfortable interior of Fisher’s ship in the scanning room.
“Come on,” Roscoe said, taking off his gear and stashing it near a wall and then helping Maria out of her pack and taking the scanner from her hands and putting her stuff next to his. “It’s our turn to cook.”
Fisher nodded. “I’ll talk with Callie for a few minutes and join you both.”
“I’m just going to sit here for a while,” Hudson said, dropping into a chair at a screen.
With that, Roscoe took Maria’s hand in his and led her slowly out of the big scanning room and down the small hallway toward the kitchen.
He loved the feel of her hand in his. It felt right and very natural.
She gripped his hand tightly, like he was saving her.
When they finally reached the kitchen, she let go of his hand and then faced him. “Thank you.”
Before he could ask for what, she kissed him for the second time, and for the second time caught him by surprise.
But this time he kissed her back.
It was wonderful and they fit together. Her lips were firm and her body felt wonderful pressed against his.
The kiss lasted far, far too short a time before they broke apart and smiled at each other.
“That was great,” he said. “Another promise for the future, I hope.”
“A very near future,” she said, smiling at him.
Then side-by-side, they went to work preparing dinner for fifteen people.
That felt wonderful.
And wonderfully natural to Roscoe.
Pretty soon they were both laughing.
He had a hunch that if they kept working together, they could solve even losing a million-year-old-password to control a machine that was about to kill millions.
TWENTY-ONE
FOR THE REST of the day and all the next day, teams jumped all over the Morning Song exploring everything they could in that short amount of time. Maria spent almost as much time out exploring than back in Fisher’s ship.
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