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

floating off the deck as she headed for her cabin to get what she might need in the Command Center of the Morning Sun . This was all a dream come true.
    But in the back of her mind, something was nagging at her. She felt completely home inside the Morning Song. Completely, and that felt both good and worried her. She had no idea where the feeling was coming from.
    But in her excitement, she decided to just think about that later. Right now she got to explore a Seeder ship that was so ancient, she couldn’t believe it actually existed.
    And she was going to get to explore it with a man of her dreams.
    It didn’t get better than that.

 
     
     
     
    EIGHTEEN
     
     
    ROSCOE HAD LEARNED very early on that when something was going smoothly, something ugly was about to happen. It didn’t always work that way, but his voice was telling him that was the case this time.
    This ship had made him feel like an ant crawling somewhere on a planet’s continent. The builders of this ship were far, far beyond the knowledge and years of the Seeders now or ones working Andromeda.
    Sure, the ship had been built by humans. Seeders. But not humans like them at all. Humans far, far advanced. So why did ants like him think they could get control of something this big?
    That thought just kept nagging him and he had no idea what to do about that at all.
    And he felt completely at home on the big ship at the same time and that feeling worried him even more and kept him even more on guard.
    He had insisted that each group only jump with line-of-sight as much as possible. That way the ship would be able to know they were coming and they wouldn’t trigger alarms without warning.
    He hoped.
    “Ready?” he asked the three standing around him in the big former exercise room with the scanning stations. This room would be their jump base. Jonas’s group had the main scanning room, and the third group was using a back open area in the dining room.
    Fisher, Maria, and Hudson all nodded as one that they were ready. Maria’s excitement for the moment had turned to serious worry. He wanted to hug her and tell it would be all right, but damned if he knew it would be.
    “I’m going to do the jumping. I’ll take us about a kilometer away across the deck along the path toward the Command Center.”
    Again they all nodded.
    So he jumped them.
    The incredible open space of the huge deck surrounded them.
    The air did smell slightly stale this second time out, and the temperature was slightly under what Fisher kept his ship, but not too cold to be a worry.
    Fisher’s ship looked like a tiny toy sitting in the middle of a huge room from this distance.
    “Stunning,” Hudson said softly as if whispering wouldn’t draw attention to them.
    Roscoe turned to Maria who was slowly turning, trying to take it all in, her large golden eyes even wider than normal.
    “How do we look out ahead?” Roscoe asked her after giving her a moment to be shocked and look around.
    He then moved over next to her as she fumbled to get her scanner out. Her scanner gave him a clear image of where they were jumping to, and a clear path to the Command Center.
    It was going to take him about thirty minutes of quick jumps to get them there, mostly down huge hallways that appeared to be the width of a two-lane highway and up through decks into more hallways.
    She checked the scan and then showed it to him, her shoulder brushing his arm. “We’re clear.”
    He jumped them again.
    “Scans are clear,” Maria said.
    “Triggering nothing,” Callie’s voice came across clear in their ears. The three back on the ship were there to scan ahead and make sure no team triggered anything. “Second team leaving the ship.”
    “Understood,” Roscoe said as they looked around.
    He had jumped them right into the middle of one of the huge hallways. Fifty people could walk side-by-side in this hallway and not even touch shoulders. And the ceiling was high and the lights were hidden, but clearly