Morning Song: A Seeders Universe Novel Read Free

plow through many inhabited planets in the Milky Way, killing billions, if it can’t be stopped.”
    Ray’s face appeared again. “I have sent all the data we have gathered about this ship and its path. We are going to try to board the ship to gain control of it, since we fear it is a ghost ship. We need your expertise on this coming mission.”
    Then Chairman Wade Ray nodded. “Please help us. Billions of lives are at stake.”
    At that the message ended.
    She sat and listened to it one more time, then did a quick glance at all the data. Maybe, just maybe, she didn’t have to backtrack any more to find the path of the original Seeders. Maybe the knowledge had come to them.
    She had Dannie send back a short message to Chairman Ray. “Message received. We are on the way.”
    Then she paged her five senior staff and told them to meet her in the Command Center. At top trans-tunnel speed it would take them almost two weeks to reach The Milky Way and the location where Chairman Ray had asked for them to go.
    In that two weeks they had a lot of planning to go.
    And research, since that ship’s path might point back to the solution they have been looking for on this entire mission as to where the Seeders started from.
    But first she wanted to have her senior staff all see the message from Chairman Ray at the same time. She wanted to see their reactions.
    And then eventually everyone on board would see the message and data as well. After all, they were all in this together.
    But with so many lives at stake, she couldn’t imagine a single member of her crew having an issue with returning to the Milky Way and trying to help.
    They were all Seeders, after all. Starting, protecting, and nurturing human life was their job.

 
     
     
     
    TWO
     
     
    ROSCOE MUNDY BRUSHED the long brown hair from off his face and looked around, stunned at what he saw. He was alone and he stood in the center of the huge main room of an old lodge. He had been in some pretty impressive structures over the last few hundred years, especially the last twenty years working implanted as an enforcer with Sector Justice in the third sector of the Milky Way Galaxy, but this building was close to the top in impressiveness of pure comfort of all the places he had seen.
    He dropped his small leather pack on the wooden plank floor and took a deep breath of the clean air. He had on a long-sleeved black shirt with a black leather vest over the top of it and the sleeves rolled up. He had on cowboy boots and jeans and a wide, black-leather belt. The belt buckle was two pistols crossed like swords.
    He stood in one place in the big room, just looking around, trying to take in the details.
    The walls, posts, and beams were peeled and polished logs that had to be ten feet around in places. A giant, smooth-rock fireplace filled one side of the immense room, a natural crackling fire going in it, giving the room a wonderful, wood-smoke smell.
    What looked like a check-in desk, all made out of polished wood, filled the right side of the room near a grand, wood staircase that wound up to a floor above.
    To the right of where he had transported in were brown cloth couches and chairs, all facing the huge fireplace and looking very comfortable and deep, with quilts tossed over the backs of a few of them.
    He could see pine trees outside the huge windows in a neighboring dining room area that had a good twenty tables with four chairs each. None of the tables were set.
    This lodge was very high up in some coastal mountains on a planet that had had a major accident. A stray electromagnetic pulse from a distant nova had wiped out all but about a million of its population. That disaster had happened just over three hundred years before, just after he joined the Seeders and came to the Milky Way to help out.
    The population of the planet was recovering nicely, especially in such a short time. In fact, they were almost back into space. They did not know anything about the huge