Smith's Monthly #4

by Smith, Dean Wesley

“When I pull up at the terminal,” Bud said, “open both doors, then close them and duck down so you can’t be seen. And stay down until I say otherwise, even if we’re moving.”

  “Got it,” Danny said. He was trusting Bud completely with his life at this point.

  Danny tossed his suitcase over the seat and onto the front seat floor as Craig crammed his suitcase down onto the floor.

  “Okay, get ready,” Bud said.

  He swung across two lanes and into a spot against the curb just in front of a small van. The sidewalk was crowded with passengers and their luggage going into the international terminal.

  Craig opened the side door and Danny opened the door on the road side.

  Then they both slammed them closed and ducked down onto the floor, trying to get as low as they could. The backseat of the taxi was cramped, but unless someone looked in, Danny was sure no one passing by in another cab would be able to see them.

  “They’re going past us,” Bud whispered, sitting up on his legs so that he looked taller than he really was.

  The seconds seemed to tick past as Danny held himself in the cramped position tucked down low.

  “I’m going to ache in the morning from this,” Craig whispered.

  “Better than being dead in the morning,” Bud whispered back.

  “They have seen me,” Bud whispered, pretending to count cash. “The cab is pulling in three cars ahead of us and the two men are getting out. Stay down.”

  Bud suddenly pulled the cab back out into traffic and moved over two lanes.

  “The two men are going into the terminal,” Bud whispered. “And the other cab is waiting for them. Stay down a little longer, until we get out of sight completely.”

  The cab bumped and jerked, and in the position Danny was, crammed on the floor of the back seat, his head down against his knees, he had no doubt that Craig was right, they were going to be very sore from this in the morning. And bruised from every bump that Bud hit.

  The cab jerked right, then picked up speed.

  “Clear,” Bud said.

  Danny tried to stretch his cramped muscles as he climbed back onto the seat.

  “Great work,” Danny said to Bud, reaching forward and patting him on the shoulder. “I’m really glad you’re with us.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Craig said.

  Bud laughed. “Makes the days interesting.”

  “What, trying to stay alive?” Craig asked, laughing.

  “I’ve been doing that for five years,” Bud said. “But I will admit, this is new.”

  “Next stop, while we have them busy searching the airport, is my father’s apartment,” Danny said. “We need to know if the twins are right in there being something in the apartment that we need to see.”

  “Address?” Bud asked, like a regular driver would do.

  Danny gave it to him, then sat back and tried to once again get his heart to calm down and stop racing. He really wished he had spent more time in training with his grandfather. Staying calm would come in really handy right about now.

  Continued in the next issue…

  About a year ago I had an assignment from editor John Helfers to write a story for his Fiction River: How to Save the World anthology. Now understand, I am one of the executive editors on the Fiction River line of anthologies. But the editors of each volume have the final call on the stories in each volume (within reason).

  John had been pretty clear on what he wanted, but I had written “The Lady and the Seeders” a month before, starting it from the title and hadn’t done anything with it. And it was about saving the world, after all. So I sent it to John just to see if he was going to expand out his directions enough to include it.

  He wasn’t. He liked the story, though, and Kris liked the story, and I was kind of fond of it as well. But in his rejection letter to me, he said it felt like a novel.

  Now, as an editor, I say that to writers at times myself. Often frustrating to the poor writer, but in this case, John was right. It did feel like a plot of a novel. Sort of. So I put the story away and as I started into this Smith’s Monthly, I decided to write the novel from the short story.

  It’s called Against Time and it was in Smith’s Monthly #3.

  There are tiny parts of the story in the novel, and characters have shifted around, but the core of the book is similar to the short story. So here in this fourth issue, I thought it would be fun and interesting to readers to show the short story that started the novel you read last month.

  Enjoy.

  THE LADY AND THE SEEDERS

  ONE

  I SAT IN MY BIG BLACK INERTIA CHAIR, holding on for dear life as we came from deep space way too hot and directly into orbit insertion around a big, green-and-blue Earth-like planet we had named N-21-7. I had no doubt my fingers were going to have to be pried from the soft foam of the armrests and it tasted like my stomach might revolt from the sharp garlic on artichoke pizza I had baked us for lunch.

  Doc, sitting to my right in his inertia chair, had us braking like crazy to hold the orbit as the features of the planet flashed by far, far too fast for me to even catch a glimpse. You would have thought we had someone with damn big guns on our ass.

  Doc’s fingers were flying over his control panel. My job was to watch for anything in front of us in orbit, but as fast as Doc had us braking, our orbital trajectory just kept changing, so I had no clue what was coming up, let alone be able to watch for anything.

  We might hit something before we even had time to blink, and if the object we plowed into was too large, our screens might not block it.

  This stunt was all my skinny partner’s idea. Doc wanted to test out a new theory. He wanted to see how close to a planet we could drop out of a trans-tunnel and still control slowing into an orbit. He convinced me to give it a try by saying, “Just never know when it might come in handy in the future.”

  I was big on being prepared for just damn near anything, and we had been chased more than once in the last few years of roaming around through space. And more than likely it would happen again. Besides, I figured that if we didn’t plow into something large, the worst that would happen was that we would just sling off the orbit like a flea off a dog’s back and then have to backtrack.

  Doc was convinced that wasn’t going to happen, and he tried to show me the math. I nodded like I always do when he gets into the math on anything concerning orbits and trans-tunnel speeds and finally he stopped and said, “You’ll see. It will work.”

  “Just don’t hit the damn planet square on.”

  “No worries, Skip,” he had said.

  And that always made me worry. Especially when he called me “Skip” which was short for “Skipper.” He never did that unless he was worried as well. My actual name was Fisher, Vardis Fisher, but everyone called me Fisher. I owned The Lady, as I called this deep space exploration ship.

  Most of the time Doc just called her “The Ship.”

  We had built her in two years in a huge warehouse on my parent’s estate just north of our hometown, right after we both finally finished with far too many advanced degrees in college.

  I had the family money in my trust, more than enough, actually, to build a couple ships. And I had patents on a dozen devices I had invented that drew energy from dark matter.

  Doc had the idea for the gravity drive that allowed us to not only just float out of a gravity well, but jump long distances very quickly in what Doc called “Trans-Tunnel Flight.”

  Basically it was a form of time-bending warp drive, but when we were in it, space looked like it had become a tunnel, so Doc named it the “Trans-Tunnel Drive.”

  “Better than “Warp Drive” he had said.

  In the planning stage, we decided to make the ship really huge and really cool, right out of a 1950’s science fiction movie. We even had painted it silver and put fins like a nifty plane and a pointed nose on it so it looked like a cross between a very fast plane and an old rocket ship. The fins were worthless unless i
n the atmosphere if the drive went out, and the pointed nose housed nothing but sensors.

  We each had huge five-room suites on board, since the ship was the size of a hotel that flew. It was so big, there were parts of this ship I hadn’t been in for over a year.

  It actually didn’t need to be this big, but both Doc and I had figured we never knew what we might run into out in space, or how much room we might need, or who might be riding along. The actual engine itself took up the room of a small closet and a large warehouse area was filled with many, many spare parts. The rest was a game room, an exercise room, a small gym, a massive kitchen with a dozen freezers, and numbers of spare bedrooms for a future crew or guests. So far, those guest rooms had not been used.

  Before we took off, we had stocked more food than we would be able to eat in five years, even though, from darned-near-anywhere in this area of the galaxy, we could jump back to earth in a matter of a day or two.

  Food is my passion. Somewhere back in college, after getting my first doctorate, I got close to three hundred pounds on my five-foot-ten inch frame. Back then people said Doc and I looked like the old comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, but I was larger back then than Hardy ever got.

  And I loved cooking. Especially really rich foods. But a couple doctors told me that if I didn’t lose some weight, I was going to have to cut down on many of the dishes I loved to cook.

  So I went exercise crazy. Right before we left, I had run in my tenth marathon and I had been training for an Iron Man competition. I now weighed just under one-seventy and that was all muscle. And I could eat anything I damn well wanted.

  Somehow, Doc ate everything I served him with relish and never gained a pound and spent only a minor amount of time in the gym, usually when he wanted to talk to me about something and knew I was a captive audience while in an exercise routine.

  I didn’t feel right if I didn’t exercise, just as I didn’t feel right when I didn’t eat decent food.

  One of the most enjoyable aspects of this exploring around space was discovering new types of food and ways of cooking it. I was stockpiling the recipes with hopes of doing a number of cookbooks when we got back to Earth.

  I could spend two or three hours a day in the kitchen just testing new foods and writing it all down.

  I doubted anyone would give my books any credit, just as they didn’t give my energy inventions even a second look. The power for everything on this ship and Doc’s drive came from the energy floating around between matter and dark matter.

  For some reason I had the ability to understand when something hidden was between two obvious things. I had perfected the idea of using the energy between the two states of matter while in school and applied for patents, but no professor would let me write it as a thesis. No one really gave my ideas any credit at all, actually, just as they didn’t give Doc’s trans-tunnel drive and anti-gravity work anything but laughter.

  If they could only see us now.

  Finally, Doc had us slowed enough that the orbit we had settled into seemed stable, even though we were still braking.

  “Told you it would work,” Doc said, smiling at me, his thin face twisted into mostly bright white teeth and wide blue eyes.

  I just shook my head and worked my fingers off the armrests of my chair. “Only emergencies,” I said as my stomach started to settle.

  “Exactly,” he said, nodding and going back to continuing to brake us into a stable orbit. “At some point I hope to figure out how we can come out of a trans-tunnel without forward speed. It should be possible.”

  “Make that a priority,” I said.

  Suddenly the warning lights on my heads-up panel flashed into a display that would do a Christmas tree proud.

  The orbit we had dropped into had us hitting a large orbiting object in about five seconds.

  I kicked off Doc’s controls and cut the braking, which allowed us to move out higher away from the planet. On my screen our orbit around the planet changed from a nice circular pattern into a big egg-shaped elliptical orbit.

  We flashed past what looked like an orbiting station far too fast to get a good look at it.

  And far too close for my stomach to be happy. I had long ago lost the desire for near-misses on anything. And if we had hit it, we would have put a very, very large hole in it. Our screens would have kept us safe, but the station and everyone on it would have been in trouble.

  “Wow, good catch, Fisher,” Doc said. “Looks like we have a space-faring culture on this planet.”

  “Great, just great,” I said. “Someone to chase us again after we almost destroyed their space station.”

  Doc laughed. “Yeah, we have a way of making an entrance, don’t we?”

  TWO

  AS DOC BROUGHT US AROUND the planet again and worked to match the orbit of the space station, I scanned the planet. It felt a little like scanning Earth from a low orbit. Evidence of human activity everywhere, large, sprawling cities on all of its major continents, and thousands of roads and smaller cities and towns.

  It looked the same as many of the Earth-type planets we had visited. Humans had clearly been seeded on every Goldilocks zone planet that we had come to at some point in the distant past. We had run across no aliens, but humans were everywhere. At least in the small area of the Milky Way Galaxy we had explored.

  At last count, we had found over two hundred Earth-like planets and every darned one of them had either had human life on them at one point or still did have thriving civilizations.

  And not many of them seemed very far beyond or behind Earth’s level, as if they had all started at the same time in history.

  Very, very strange and it had bothered us both for the first fifty or so planets, but now we were growing used to the idea.

  The human civilization on the planet below also seemed to be around Earth’s level of growth and expansion.

  But as we went around the dark side in our orbit, I noticed one major problem: Nothing was moving.

  And the planet was slowly dropping silent and dark. Only basic recorded sounds were coming from the surface.

  In very short order it would be ghostly silent. And very, very dark.

  “Doc, we have a problem,” I said.

  “They can’t be coming after us already,” he said, not looking up from his board as he brought The Lady up slowly on the orbiting space station. “We missed them, didn’t we?”

  “No one is coming after us,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said, still not looking up. “So what’s the problem?”

  My fingers were moving as fast as I could get them to move over my controls to confirm what I feared.

  All the readings came up the same.

  “Everyone down there is dead.”

  At that, he looked up.

  THREE

  WE DID TEN ORBITS over the next few hours, recording and studying everything we could. There was no doubt the planet below us was just flat dead. Actually, the planet was fine, but all the humans and a bunch of animal life had died very, very suddenly.

  And very recently.

  There were numbers of smaller animals and some larger ones still alive, but human bodies lay everywhere, in every building, in every street.

  Something had killed everyone on the planet and it had done it quickly, where they stood, as they walked, as they drove cars that looked frighteningly like cars from Earth.

  “You see anyone alive?” I finally asked Doc.

  “Not a one,” he said, his voice unnaturally soft.

  He looked over at me, his eyes looking as haunted as I had ever seen them. We 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.

  But it was a different thing when you could see human bodies littering the streets and filling the buildings.

  Recently dead human bodies.

  Millions and millions of them.

  A vas
tly different thing.

  And what worried me more than anything else was that this could happen to Earth. We somehow needed to find out what happened here.

  “The station,” I said.

  He nodded. After this many years together, we often didn’t have to finish sentences or thoughts.

  We both knew that the instruments there might give us some sort of understanding of what had killed the population of this planet.

  His fingers again flew over the control board, bringing us even closer in to match the orbit of the large space station.

  I was feeling stunned and not really looking forward to going into that station when suddenly space around the planet was filled with a hundred huge ships.

  They just appeared out of nowhere and at a dead stop. They made The Lady look like a kids ship in a bathtub compared to an aircraft carrier.

  “What the…” I said, pushing back in my chair as if I needed to get farther away from those clearly alien monster ships.

  Doc glanced up and jerked, also pushing back.

  Then suddenly, on my sensors, I started reading humans again on the planet below.

  Some alone, some scattered in groups.

  I pointed to the readings and tapped Doc who glanced at it and nodded.

  “They are transporting humans to the planet below,” 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 my voice or Doc’s.

  Then everything around us 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,” I said, trying to keep the last bit of control I had. Somehow I managed to not scream and run to the back of the ship.

  “Now what are we going to do?” I asked.

  Doc shook his head slowly, clearly as shaken as I had ever seen him before.