Morning Song: A Seeders Universe Novel Read Online Free Page B

you’re kidding me, right?” Roscoe said as he moved toward them.
    Jonas turned from the others, staring and clearly stunned, his mouth open showing a half-chewed hamburger. Then Jonas blinked twice and closed his mouth.
    So Jonas hadn’t known Roscoe was a Seeder either. Amazing.
    The other three turned and Roscoe recognized them all, even though he didn’t know their names. All were from different branches of the Sector Justice force.
    It seemed the Seeders were in just about everything when it came to keeping the peace and making sure human populations they had planted progressed in a peaceful way.
    Jonas finally gathered himself enough to finish chewing, stand and face Roscoe. “Damn, I’m glad to see you,” he said, smiling.
    “Not half as much as I am to see you,” Roscoe said, smiling. “I didn’t know you were a Seeder.”
    Jonas laughed. “I didn’t know the same about you. Go figure.”
    They both laughed.
    The others stood to greet him and with that, Jonas turned to introduce him to the other three. And he started with “Folks, this is Chairman Mundy.”
    And that once again just shocked Roscoe more than he wanted to admit.

 
     
     
     
    FIVE
     
     
    BY THE TIME she finished a quick dinner in her office, alone, Maria managed to somehow get her mind away from Roscoe Mundy and back on the task at hand.
    The guy was amazing and she couldn’t believe a military type had caught her attention like that.
    Yet she so wanted to just get to know him, and maybe a few other things with that incredible body of his as well. It had been far too long since she had a man in her life. She didn’t want to think about exactly how long.
    Using three-dimensional images projected into the air in her office, she had the big ship’s course in a dotted line as it headed for the Milky Way.
    In the research on the ship on the way back to the Milky Way, what she noticed about that dotted line was that on short distances, it seemed straight, but over much, much larger distances, it had a very, very slight continuous curve that could be projected backwards.
    Every day the course shifted in a slight amount that over hundreds and hundreds of years mounted up to about one percent.
    So shrinking down the known area of space to galaxies being nothing more than points in the air in her office, she extended the past course of the big ship.
    It would take, at the ship’s speed, about three million years for the ship to make a complete circle return to where it started.
    Her only problem was that she wasn’t sure how long the ship had been going. Any point on the circle could have been its launch point.
    So starting with a hundred years ago, she had her computer show her the path of the ship through space.
    It didn’t come close to any galaxy or even small star cluster at that point, allowing for the speed and direction of the galaxies movements.
    She repeated the same over and over and over, taking her time to make sure she didn’t miss any detail.
    It seemed to always go between star clusters and galaxies as if the course had been carefully planned to have nothing run into the big ship.
    It became clear as she went that the big ship’s encounter with the two galaxies so far in the Local Group was almost a fluke.
    Or planned, one or the other.
    She was starting to bet on planned.
    In sixty thousand years, the big ship hadn’t come close to any group of stars or galaxies at all.
    Nothing.
    It had traveled in the big expanse between galaxies, missing everything as it went.
    That just seemed wrong and almost impossible, so maybe at some point the big ship had changed course. She couldn’t imagine the scale she was looking at, yet she knew that the Seeders had been in the Local Group galaxies for about five hundred thousand years that it took to do the twelve small galaxies and the Milky Way.
    It had taken the Seeders an amazingly short period of only fifty thousand years to do most of the seeding in the Milky Way. But at around