“You got any idea how many are alive down there?” Fisher finally asked Doc.
“Not a clue,” Doc said, his voice unnaturally soft. “Not that many compared to how many died.”
He looked over, his eyes looking haunted. They had run into a couple of Earth-like planets with no humans and only signs of a civilization in the distant past. That was one thing, almost a scientific curiosity as to what happened.
Humans did have a way of killing each other and a few planets hadn’t escaped that.
But it was a different thing when they could see human bodies littering the streets and filling the buildings.
Recently dead human bodies.
Millions and millions and millions of them.
A vastly different thing.
And what worried Fisher more than anything else was that this could happen to their home world. They somehow needed to find out what happened here.
They sat in silence until finally Fisher had an idea.
“The station,” Fisher said.
Doc nodded. After this many years together, they often didn’t have to finish sentences or thoughts.
They both knew that the instruments there might give them some sort of understanding of what had killed most of the human population of this planet.
Doc’s fingers again flew over the control board, bringing them even closer in to match the orbit of the large space station.
Fisher just felt stunned. He was not really looking forward to going into that station. More than likely it was full of dead bodies as well.
They would have to be very, very careful.
Suddenly space around the planet filled with numbers of huge spaceships.
It looked like at least fifty, maybe more from what Fisher could tell.
They just appeared out of nowhere and at a dead stop, spaced evenly around the planet.
From what Fisher could tell, they made The Lady look like a kid’s ship in a bathtub compared to an aircraft carrier.
“What the…” Fisher said, pushing back in his chair as if he needed to get farther away from those clearly alien monster ships.
Doc glanced up and jerked, also pushing back.
Then suddenly, on the sensors, Fisher started reading humans disappearing from the planet below.
Some alone, some scattered in groups.
But if the big ships were taking them, they weren’t missing anyone.
One moment a person was on the planet, the next they were gone.
Fisher did a quick calculation. If those ships were as big as they seemed, there were enough ships to handle all the survivors from below.
Fisher pointed to the readings and tapped Doc who glanced at it and nodded.
“They are transporting humans to the ships,” he said. “Looks like we found our seeders.”
“We are not the originals,” a voice said clearly inside the control room of The Lady. Only it wasn’t Fisher’s voice or Doc’s.
And it was in perfect English.
Then everything around them shimmered for a moment and stabilized again.
The Lady was no longer floating in space near an empty space station. It was now seemingly sitting on a huge landing dock inside another ship.
“Oh, man,” Fisher said, trying to keep the last bit of control he had. Somehow he managed to not scream and run to the back of the ship, which would have done no good at all, but he was sure it would have felt better than just sitting there.
“Now what are we going to do?” he finally asked his partner as they stared out the viewport at what appeared to be the inside of a huge hanger deck.
Doc shook his head slowly, clearly as shaken as Fisher had ever seen him before.
Then Doc turned and with a half-smile and shrug said, “Go and say hello?”
Fisher preferred the idea of running and screaming much better, but figured Doc was more than likely right.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BY EARLY EVENING, Callie had cleared the main floor, taking the bodies down the service elevator and out onto the truck.
After the sun went down, she had started closing the door to the truck just to make sure no animals got in. She was far from used to the smell and it clearly wasn’t getting any better.
There were six bodies on the top floor in four rooms. She needed to get them out before she could stop.
Two couples and two single guests. Or at least guests who were alone when the death hit, as she was starting to think of it.
She didn’t know what else to call what had happened besides “the death.”
Over the next hour she got four of them out, the one couple together. Now she only had one more couple, but she wasn’t looking forward to this at all, which was why Callie had left them to last.
The couple had been young, very young, and when the death hit, they had been making love. So both were nude and even though they were dead, Callie felt embarrassed she had to see them and touch them and move them from that position.
When she found them the first time, she had covered them with a blanket.
Now she had no choice. She had to get them out of the hotel.
“Think like a doctor,” she said to herself as she opened their door, the rancid smell hitting her solidly. “You’ve seen naked flesh before. You can do this.”
She pushed the cart over beside the bed, then pushed back the blanket.
The young girl, a natural redhead, was slumped on top of the boy who didn’t look much older than eighteen.
She pulled the girl over toward the cart. For a moment Callie didn’t think the girl was going to let go of her boyfriend.
Then she did and flopped down on the cart, her dead eyes staring up at the ceiling.
Callie then took the boy and rolled him over on top of his girlfriend on the cart.
Again, they looked like they were making love.
Callie quickly threw a blanket over them and somehow managed to get them downstairs and into the truck. She left them together, covered in a blanket and threw a change of clothes and their indentifications in beside them.
Then, as she closed the back of the truck, Callie said simply to all nineteen in there, “Rest in peace.”
She moved the truck up to the parking lot and parked it near the two bodies there. Animals had done horrid work to those two and she didn’t even want to try to load them into the truck. There was only so much she could do and she was beyond tired.
She took off the orange coat and draped it over the woman on the ground, then took off the ski pants and draped them over the man.
That wouldn’t help them, but it was the best she could do.
She could do nothing for those in the cave.
Then suddenly it dawned on her that Dave was still in there with his dead wife.
She had completely and totally forgotten about him.
Suddenly her heart was racing and she was excited again. She had someone to help her survive all this.
How could she have forgotten him?
She took a flashlight she had been carrying and a second one from out of the glove box in the truck, then headed down the path through the dark trees to the mouth of the cave.
The smell in the cave was bad, but she waded in.
“Dave!”
Her words echoed among the rocks.
Dave was still with his wife, her head cradled in his lap.
At first Callie thought he was just sleeping, hunched over her. But as she got closer, she knew that wasn’t the case.
A large knife lay beside Dave and there was a dark pool of dried blood on the asphalt.
Dave had slashed his wrists and died there with his wife, not willing to leave her.
“Damn it all to hell,” she said, resisting the urge to just kick his body. “I needed your help you selfish bastard.”
Then she managed to get herself a little under control.
“Sorry, Dave,” she said, her voice soft. “I’ve just seen so much death already, I didn’t need more.”
She stared at the guide she had come to like over the last few days.
“Rest in peace,” she said. “All of you.”
Then she turned and headed back to the lodge.
She needed the longest, hottest shower she had ever taken with as much soap and shampoo that she could find.
And then she needed some sleep.
And maybe, just maybe, she might wake up from this nightmare.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BOTH FISHER AND DOC did some quick checking and the atmosphere outside the ship in the huge space dock was normal, no bad things in it that could kill them. And the gravity seemed to be Earth-normal as well.
Beyond that, they couldn’t tell much of anything about the ship around them past what they could see in the huge room. The dock had to be as large as a football stadium and could have easily held three or four ships The Lady’s size.
They tested, but every control they had was locked down solid and the engines were offline. Something was blocking them. They were going nowhere under their own power.
“You ready, Skip?” Doc asked, pretending to stretch like he was relaxed about meeting the owners of these huge ships.
Fisher just shook his head and stood. “Seems like we have no choice, doesn’t it?”
A good minute later they were standing on the deck looking around. The sides of the room seem to vanish in the distance and Fisher had been clearly wrong. This room could hold twenty ships the size of theirs, and have room between them all.
And he thought they had built a large ship when they built The Lady. Everything in space was relative it seemed.
Then, just as the first time they were grabbed, everything shimmered and they found themselves in a high-ceilinged meeting room with tables full of meats and vegetables and breads along one wall. It looked like preparations for a huge party, but so far the guests hadn’t arrived.
To Fisher, the place had a warm feel and it seemed that someone was pumping in the smell of baking bread as well. Or maybe they actually were baking bread nearby.
He turned slowly around, surveying the large meeting room. There were stacks of blankets and chairs and cots everywhere. One wall was filled with a huge viewport that looked down on the greens and blues and whites of the planet below.
“Looks like we are just in time for the party,” Doc said.
“If you had come to this planet a day earlier,” a voice said from behind them, “you more than likely would have been as dead as most of those on the planet below.”
Fisher and Doc spun around to see a man about Fisher’s height and weight walking toward them, smiling. He had gray/silver hair, wore jeans and a green short-sleeved shirt tucked into his pants. He looked as normal and as human as anyone from Earth.
And as far as Fisher could tell, he was speaking perfect English.
They had met a few human cultures that had perfected some sort of translation devices that just made it sound like they were speaking English. But this was even more advanced. His lips seemed to match what he was saying.
Considering the size of this ship they were in, Fisher figured he would have been less stunned if an alien had joined them spouting six arms and a beak and squeaking their national anthem.
The guy extended his hand for Fisher to shake. “I’m Benson.”
“Fisher,” he said, carefully shaking Benson’s hand.
It felt as normal as any human handshake, which bothered Fisher even more.
“Doc,” said softly as he shook Benson’s hand next.
“So you are the two explorers we’ve been hearing about,” Benson said, smiling. “I understand you have had some adventures.”
“A few,” Fisher said, even more shocked that anyone had followed them around this area of space. Granted, it was a tiny area in comparison to the entire Milky Way Galaxy, but they had still covered a lot of light years and visited a few hundred Earth-like planets. And tracking them through open trans-tunnel space wasn’t like following footprints in the mud. Or at least Fisher didn’t think it was.
“So where are you two from?” Benson asked.
“Earth.”
Fisher gave him the answer he knew would make the guy smile and at the same time give him no information at all, since most of the human planets they had visited had called their planets Earth. In fact, every one of them had.
He did smile. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to tell me. How about I show you around and tell you what we are doing and then maybe you’ll feel more like talking. And maybe you can help us a little with what’s coming. We’re going to need all the help we can get for a few hours.” He waved at the room that was prepared for visitors.
“I find it fascinating,” he said as he started to lead them toward a door, “that a human culture in this area has advanced as far as you have.”
Fisher almost told him that the rest of their planet hadn’t just yet, but instead just nodded and said, “Hold on a second. Can you tell us what happened down there? And what’s happening now? How come all those people are vanishing off the surface?”
Fisher pointed at the planet that could be seen out of a large viewport on one side of the room.
Benson tapped something on his wrist and in the air near them an image of the Milky Way Galaxy came into being, spinning in the air.
Impressive three-dimensional image.
Then like focusing in, the view shifted down to this spiral arm of the galaxy and then to this small section of space. There had to be five hundred suns represented by nothing more than bright colored lights floating in the air.
One light was suddenly circled in the air by a red ring.
“An explosion in this sun caused rays of extreme electro-magnetic energy to be sent out into space.”
From the circled star a number of white rays seemed to expand outward.
Benson went on. “By the time we noticed the explosion and calculated the frequency of the energy and then traced its path, we were too late to get here to save all the people of this planet. We couldn’t mount a big enough rescue force to even attempt it.”
Fisher was watching and it was clear Benson was very, very upset at that fact.
“EMP blast killed them where they stood,” Doc said, nodding. “That makes sense now. The right frequency would short-circuit human brains like that.”
Benson nodded. “About two million of the population survived by accidentally being in different forms of shelters or underground or inside something that shielded them. They didn’t know it was coming.”
Then Fisher finally understood what we had seen and why they were taking people off the planet. “But there is a second blast of energy following the first.”
Benson nodded. “You guessed it. We got here ahead of that with a large enough fleet to get all the survivors out of the way. What you are witnessing is my people taking them off the planet during the night hours in each area of the planet. This ship should start loading in an hour. We will move out of the way of the wave for a few hours, then come back and return everyone.”
“We arrived between the waves?” Doc asked.
“About one day after the first one,” Benson said. “And about ten hours ahead of the second. Your shielding might have sheltered you from the second one since it’s not as powerful, but it might not have either. Before you leave we will help you strengthen that shielding some for the future.”
Fisher looked at Benson and then nodded. “Thanks.”
“So you go around rescuing planets full of humans?” Doc asked.
Benson shook his head sadly. “First time. But after this we will be more vigilant. Billions died down there before we got here.”
He seemed actually deeply affected by that, so Fisher tried to change the subject.
“So you know who seeded humans on so many planets in this area of the galaxy?” he asked.
“In every area of the galaxy,” Benson said so matter-of-factly that it bothered Fisher. “There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of human ci
vilizations in different stages of development in this galaxy. And no one knows much about the people or race who did it except that it took them over fifty thousand years to complete the task for the entire galaxy.”
“Your planet was seeded as well?” Doc asked. “How come you are more advanced than any culture we have seen?”
“We were all seeded,” Benson said, nodding. Again the floating map of the Milky Way Galaxy came into being in the air beside them. “My home planet is there, also called Earth.”
A circle appeared around a dot a third of the way around the galaxy. Then another appeared around a dot Fisher knew to be the sun they were orbiting.
“We are here at the moment,” Benson said. “My area of the galaxy was seemingly seeded first, so civilizations that survived in that area are the most advanced. This arm of the galaxy was next, and as you move around in a clockwise direction, each human civilization gets more primitive.”
“Wow,” was all Fisher could think to say. Stunned didn’t begin to describe how he felt.
Benson went on. “Our area of the galaxy has formed a large organization of aligned planets and about fifty worlds work together. That’s why we could mount such a large fleet on such short notice.”
“And no alien life at all?” Doc asked.
“Nothing above basic animal level,” Benson said. “The Seeders, as we call them, not only seeded humans, but all the plant and animal life it would take to sustain human civilizations in the growth years.”
“All the same on every planet?” Doc asked.
“All the same,” Benson said. “Exactly.”
Fisher stood there shaking his head and just staring at the image of the galaxy floating in the empty meeting room air. He remembered how stunned he had felt every time they came across another human civilization during their first year exploring. But after a while he had just come to expect it.
Now he was feeling that same feeling again. It was just too much to grasp.
Humans always thought they were alone in the galaxy. It seemed they were. But not in the way people back home might think.
Finally he shook his head and glanced at Benson, who looked almost haunted as he stared out the viewport at the planet below. For some reason he clearly felt responsible for all those deaths.
Against Time Page 3
