Morning Song: A Seeders Universe Novel by Dean Wesley Smith Page B

and close to her.
    “How about a group of one person from each team be in charge of a meal,” she said, “and we rotate around.”
    She hadn’t given a thought to eating, but knew they had to in order to keep everyone fresh. She also knew that Fisher’s ship had been set up for enough sleeping quarters for all of them before the mission in case something like this might happen.
    “I think we need to keep at least three people on the scans at all times,” Roscoe said, “sort of as a guard. We can set up a rotation on that as well.”
    “Agree with both,” Fisher said. “Even though all of us have been scanning for hours now, we still really don’t know what’s out there.”
    “I’m not really wrapping my mind around the size of this ship,” Roscoe said. “I figured that if we set off walking from here to the Command Center, it would take us two weeks time if we covered about twenty kilometers per day.”
    Maria had done similar calculations. “I agree. I’m having trouble with the size as well. I did a calculation on a ten kilometer per day pace that it would take over a month simply to get from here to the other side of that huge hanger deck with all the large ships on it.”
    “So we can’t be doing much walking,” Fisher said. “The ship must have some sort of transport system like our big ships do.”
    “I think we’re better off just transporting ourselves for the moment,” Roscoe said. “Not sure how much we want to trigger into this ship’s systems until we can get to that Command Center and see the path and the mission the ship is intended to accomplish.”
    Maria smiled at him. “I agree. In fact, I suggest we just stay here for the next forty-four hours until the ship drops back into trans-tunnel flight and we get information from Chairman Ray and his people. They will have had fourteen days to analyze what we sent them in those first two hours.”
    “I was going to suggest the same,” Roscoe said, smiling at her. “Better we know where we are headed before we go wondering around and get lost in this huge ship.”
    “Any early theories as to what this ship is?” Fisher asked Maria.
    She took a deep breath and for the first time since Chairman Ray had sent her the first data, she decided to mention her theory.
    “I think this is a Seeder Mother Ship,” she said.
    “A what?” both Fisher and Roscoe asked at exactly the same time.
    “There is one theory in history that Seeders have been seeding for more millions and millions of years than we can imagine,” Maria said.
    Roscoe and Fisher nodded.
    Maria went on. “One theory is that a wave, a direction of seeding from galaxy to galaxy starts with a Mother Ship. Maybe this very ship has started many waves, then been restocked and sent ahead again. We don’t know, or maybe this is a new ship, if one-point-four-millions years is new.”
    Roscoe sat back and looked at her, his dark eyes intense. Fisher was just looking puzzled.
    “Remember,” Maria said, “that I showed you the big spiral galaxy that I think this ship came from. And that our branch of Seeders left that galaxy and started off in this direction.”
    She could tell that Roscoe was starting to understand. In the short time they had been working together, she had come to realize he was really smart, maybe one of the smartest people she had ever met.
    “They sent a wave of Seeder ships off toward here,” Maria said, “then launched this ship so that it would meet the front wave, allow us to staff it and start off in a completely new direction as well as going to Andromeda.”
    “What made you think this?” Fisher asked.
    “I’ve thought it right from the start,” Maria said. “But it was only speculation. Now that I’ve seen early scans of the inside of this ship, I’m fairly sure.”
    “Why?” Roscoe asked, his dark eyes focused on her like she hoped they would be for a long time to come.
    “That hanger deck full of ships, to start with,” she said.