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

fifty thousand years per large galaxy, and over thirty galaxies in the Local Group, it was going to take over a million years to work through them all and head on outside the Local Group.
    No way her brain could grasp living that long, but she assumed it was possible. She just couldn’t imagine it.
    She had heard that some of the Seeders working the frontlines of the Seeding were older than Chairman Ray if that was possible.
    Seeding entire galaxies was such an immense project, she just couldn’t grasp it all, even though she was a Seeder and understood every step in the process. Her perspective was still on hundreds of years, which felt stunningly long. A thousand years seemed impossible, and three hundred thousand just wasn’t possible to understand, just like the distances of space she was staring at.
    So she kept going, trying to change her perspective on time. She tried to make herself believe she understood the scale of space just fine. Time, on the other hand, was difficult for her to grasp.
    At eight hundred thousand years back, the big ship was finally in a position to brush past the side of a small satellite galaxy of a larger cloud of galaxies.
    But it was only a brush and the ship would have had no reason to leave that galaxy in the direction it had started. So she was pretty sure that wasn’t its starting point.
    At one million, four hundred thousand years, she finally found what she thought might make sense. The ship went through the edge of a smaller satellite galaxy coming from solidly inside an even larger spiral galaxy.
    The ship had completed just under one half of its circle managing to miss everything along the way.
    She had the Local Group including the Milky Way galaxy floating on one side of her office in very tiny scale, then she put up this large spiral galaxy in another corner in small scale as well.
    Then she had her computer put up all the galaxy formations between the two. Then she asked the computer to show the closest path from the one spiral galaxy to the Local Group and the Milky Way.
    She sat back, stunned. There were six major galaxy clusters that consisted of about thirty-five galaxies that formed almost a clear pathway like rocks crossing a pond between the two. Of course there were a lot of other galaxies along the way, but that was the closest route jumping like the leading edge of Seeders expansion did.
    The line of the big ship went out and circled back to cross that path here in the Milky Way.
    Could that have been the trail the Seeders used? If so, there were billions and billions and billions of Earth-like planets seeded with humans in those galaxies.
    Was this big ship sent fourteen hundred thousand years ago as a message through time to the leading edge of the expansion?
    And if so, why?
    And why wasn’t it stopping?
    Clearly, if it was meant to come here, something had gone wrong in its braking plans after all those years.
    But nothing about any of this made any sense at all.
    She recorded everything and then glanced at the time. She only had seven hours before she needed to be on the planet below for a meeting.
    She needed to show all of them the data. It might not be right, but if it was, they needed to approach this ship very, very differently than they would approach a ghost ship.
    But one thing she was sure of. This Seeder ship was at least one-point-four million years old.
    At least.
    But from a very, very advanced Seeder culture.

 
     
     
     
    SIX
     
     
    ROSCOE COULDN’T BELIEVE how good a cook Fisher was, and how stunningly beautiful Maria looked in the morning.
    He was sitting across from her and eating breakfast in the wonderful café that seemed to fill the basement of the old lodge.
    The café had been perfectly preserved over the years and had two u-shaped counters that stuck out into the room with thirty or so bar stools with cloth seats along the counters. The person waiting on them, in this case, Fisher, walked down the center of the counters.
    The room