A MATTER FOR A FUTURE YEAR, by Dean Wesley Smith

A Seeder’s Universe Story

Originally published in Stories from July (2015).

I

“It’s not going to work,” Davis said, staring at the control panel in front of him.

The silence in the massive control room felt like a weight on Chairman Peter German, pressing down on his chest. Twenty officers still pretended to study their stations, but all of them were waiting for his response. He knew that.

He glanced at Davis, his best friend and third in command. Davis was bald and liked to wear t-shirts. Davis only shrugged an apology at the answer.

German could sense the growing frustration, anger, and even hints of panic in his command bridge crew. He felt the same emotions exactly.

German stood six feet tall, had striking black hair that trailed over his collar, and dark green eyes that people said felt like he could look through them. No one had ever questioned his ability to lead and no one was now, either. In fact, they were depending on his leadership.

He wore tan slacks, an open-neck dress shirt, and tennis shoes. After centuries on this ship, uniforms were a forgotten thing of the past for everyone.

In situations like this, he never sat down, but instead either stood by his own chair so he could see his panels, or roamed around the bridge.

In his seven hundred years of being a Chairman of the Seeder’s scout ship Pale Light, he had never felt so bad, so lost, or so flat confused as he did right now. But he sure couldn’t show that or admit that to his bridge crew. Over eighty thousand people on this ship depended on him and his bridge crew to find a solution.

So they would find one.

Pale Light and everyone on board had made a great living for centuries. Every Seeder ship ran like a corporation, which was why he was called Chairman. On top of that, he had gotten the original funding for this ship and had the most shares in the corporation. Over the centuries, they had taken many lucrative contracts to scout galaxies ahead of the wave of Seeder ships.

At the moment they were twenty galaxies out ahead of the front wave. It would take the front wave of Seeder ships over two hundred thousand years to work their way here, and that was because most of the galaxies between here and the main wave were small.

Pale Light, with him in charge, had explored uncounted galaxies, had even discovered two young alien races and seen remnants of three others. Everyone on board got bonuses when they found aliens and warned the Seeder ships in the main wave away from those galaxies.

Now Pale Light had a problem.

Everyone on board had a problem.

They were dead in space. And not a person on the ship had any idea why or what was wrong.

They had suddenly dropped out of drive at a dead stop. That should not have been possible either, but it had happened.

And unless they solved this problem in short order, he would have to start putting most of the people on board into suspended animation, something that had never been done on Pale Light since it was built.

He had already given the order to start checking the chambers and preparing them.

Pale Light just didn’t have enough supplies on board to feed all eighty thousand people for the five year sub-light trip to the nearest inhabitable planet.

And even when they got there, they would be stuck on a single planet in a galaxy with nothing more than a number designation and no hope of anyone even looking for them for two or three hundred years.

He could smell the sweat of the officers around him, many who had served with him for centuries. They all knew that scouting into other galaxies was a dangerous mission. Many Seeder scout ships like the Pale Light had gone missing over the centuries. That’s why they were paid so well. But after centuries, he had forgotten the danger.

They all had.

He glanced around at his top bridge crew. All of them needed a break from the bridge, him included. They had been working on what had happened—and different solutions to what was wrong with Pale Light—and the future that faced them for over five hours straight.

There had to be a solution, a reason for the sudden stop. But none of them could find it yet.

Pale Light should be working fine. It was not.

It was that simple.

Why was the main problem as far as he was concerned.

And the second problem was what to do about it.

And about the eighty thousand people who worked for him.

They had less than twenty-four hours by everyone’s calculation before he would have to order most of the population of Pale Light into the suspension chambers to give a skeleton crew enough supplies to make it the five years of sub-light travel.

He did not want to do that because he understood, just as everyone on this bridge understood, that just under one percent of the humans going into suspended animation did not wake up.

That meant that the moment he gave that order, he was sentencing a lot of people who worked for him to death.

But if he didn’t order it, they would all starve in a matter of months.

He ran his fingers through his hair, then took a deep breath and said to the bridge crew, “We get some food, some showers, mandatory for all of us, and some rest. We return here in six hours, rested, cleaned up and ready to solve this situation. Get the evening crew to take over until then.”

With that, German teleported to his cabin.

He loved his four-room suite. He had decorated the rooms in earth tones, with soft brown furniture, warm, comfortable tan floors, and wood-grained tables and counter-tops.

His fiancé, Dr. Kathy Spears, had helped him. A couple times he had tried to get her to join him on the Pale Light, but she had wanted to stay in her practice for a few more years.

They talked almost every night and since Pale Light reported back every two years, they reconnected then and spent six months together. One of these times, she would join him. She had promised. But as she said, they had lots of time.

He picked up the holo-image of Kathy on his bedroom nightstand, then put it back down again.

He couldn’t think about her right now and he didn’t dare allow himself to even think about the problem. He needed some rest. He stripped off his clothes and climbed into his shower. Ten minutes later, feeling slightly refreshed, he put on a fresh clothes and went into his kitchen to fix himself a sandwich.

After eating half the turkey sandwich and drinking a glass of fruit juice, he was ready for a nap.

There was a solution. He knew that. They just had to find it.

And find out why this had happened in the first place.

Rest would help.

He cleared his mind, lay down on the bed, and was asleep almost instantly.

Centuries of practice clearing ship’s business from his mind before sleeping allowed him to do that.

Even dire problems.

II

German woke three hours later, feeling much better.

He washed his face, once again changed to a clean shirt, and went back to the kitchen to finish the other half of the turkey sandwich he had made earlier.

As he ate, he pulled up some of the data they had worked out earlier.

If a support crew was going to have enough food to survive a five-year sub-light trip to the nearest planet that would sustain a human population, he had to order all but three hundred of the eighty thousand on board into suspended animation. They would lose around five hundred people if he did that, but the rest would survive.

Sub-light drives worked, but something had blocked the Pale Light’s hyper drives. Everything showed fine on all engine readings, just something stopped the ship from jumping.

It was as if hyper space, real space, and everything else around them had just stopped existing.

They had done every reading of the space around them that they could, and some that no one had tried in centuries. Nothing was there. Nothing.

Empty space surrounded them.

But he and all the scientists on board knew that empty space, really, truly empty space did not exist. Space was always full of so many things. But it seemed empty space actually did exist and they were parked solidly in the middle of a large bubble of it.

With that, he went to his private research computer in his office. That computer gave him access to many confidential reports in the Seeder’s network and command structure. The files had been stored on board and updated every time they returned to the leading edge with their reports. He was the only one on the Pale Light that had access to the confidential files, although if something happened to him, Rose Marie, his second in command, knew where they were and how to get into them.

He looked up the reference to “empty space” to see if other ships had run into this kind of thing before.

What he found scared him more than the idea of putting almost everyone who worked for him into suspended animation.

It seemed that major studies, all highly classified, had been done on Empty Space or Void Space, as it was called. It seemed that nothing existed in the space, including time.

Empty Space was basically a void in time and space. The voids were small, and no one had yet figured out how they formed. But they came with a very real warning: if caught by one, get out quickly.

Another scientist called Empty Space the only reliable time travel machine into the future in the universe.

“Oh, shit,” German said, his stomach twisting down on the turkey sandwich he had just finished.

He touched a button on his wall. “All command crew return at once to the bridge.”

He instantly teleported there.

A young man by the name of Moore was at the helm. He had a head of bright red hair and freckles. He usually only saw duty in the night shift.

“Moore,” German said, “ease sub-light drive up to full at once.”

Moore nodded and focused on his panel.

German turned to his second in command, Rose Marie, who had just appeared on the bridge. Her short brown hair was still wet, and she had missed a button in getting her light blue blouse on in a rush.

“Head us toward that planet we found earlier—the one that’s five years out,” German said to her.

She nodded and stepped to navigation.

German turned back to Moore. “We at full speed yet?”

“We are, sir,” Moore said. “Eighty percent of light.”

“Then push it harder.”

“But…” Moore started to say.

German nodded. “I know all about time issues at sub-light. Just do it. I want this ship going at 95 percent of light speed as soon as you can get it there. When we drop speed, we’ll reset all the clocks.”

Moore only nodded and turned back to his controls.

German took a deep breath. How long until they reached the edge of Empty Space? How big was the void? Maybe too long.

“Davis, Rose Marie, I need you both in my cabin in ten minutes.”

With that he jumped back to his cabin suite, got himself a glass of apricot juice, and dropped onto his couch in his living room. There was a image of Kathy on the end table.

He reached over and turned the image off.

He would let Rose Marie and Davis look at the classified files on the studies of Empty Space when they got here. And then they could talk about it.

And decide exactly what to do or not do.

But now he knew why Seeder Scout Ships vanished at times.

Empty Space.

They didn’t vanish. They just took a trip into the future.

How far into the future was now the question.

III

Chairman Peter German stood beside Davis and watched the screens around the large bridge. So far nothing on long-range sensors had changed. The small galaxy they had been exploring when trapped by Empty Space had not changed at all.

He had no idea what would happen when they crossed over that edge. Or if Empty Space would even let them leave. There just hadn’t been enough data in those classified files to help them even begin to make an educated guess.

But German was betting that once outside the confines of the Empty Space bubble, Pale Light would work just fine. At least, he hoped it would. Because if it didn’t, he would have to order most of the employees on board into suspended animation.

Then, without warning, the Pale Light went through the edge of the Empty Space bubble.

Everything changed.

There were gasps from around the bridge.

As German had feared, the universe they had left when they entered Empty Space was not the same universe they had returned to.

“Not possible,” one person said.

German wanted to say, “Very possible.” But didn’t.

“Slow us down,” German said to navigation. His concern right now was not what had happened to the outside world, but to what was happening inside Pale Light.

Davis was ahead in the thought. He turned to engineering. “Are standard drives working?”

“They are,” Flame said from his panel, almost bouncing in excitement.

“Jump us a few light years away from that Empty Space and come to full stop,” German said. “Then I want reports.”

But German knew what he was seeing on the screens: the chatter from tens of thousands of inhabited worlds. The galaxy they were in had already been seeded and was a good hundred thousand years into development.

The front wave of the Seeder Ships had gotten here and passed right by them.

They had been inside that small bubble for at least three hundred thousand years.

“Find the front line of the seeding ships,” German said, turning to Rose Marie.

She nodded and went back to her station.

German stood there, just staring at the inhabited galaxy they had been scouting. He never went back into the galaxies after seeding. He knew that millions of Seeders stayed behind to guild the seeded human cultures up to maturity. But he had never been one of them.

He always liked being out ahead of the crowds.

Seeing a galaxy alive with human life just felt odd to him. Galaxies he explored never had anything more than lower animal life. If that.

Marie came back and stood beside German and Davis as they both stared at the screens and the data and reports starting to poor in from all the stations around the ship.

“The front line is working about ten galaxies beyond this one,” Rose Marie said. “About a four month trip at normal speeds.”

“We were in Empty Space for three hundred and twenty-one thousand years,” Davis said. “The people on board with families back on the old front line are going to have problems.”

German nodded. “Get the counseling services warned.”

He didn’t let himself think about Kathy.

Davis moved to get that started.

“So now what do we do?” Rose Marie asked, her voice almost a whisper, as if talking to herself.

“The same thing we have always done,” German said without looking away from all the reports flowing in. “We go back to command, get paid, and get back to work.”

“Think we have back pay waiting for us?” Davis asked as he rejoined them.

German laughed. “This might be a very rich ship by the time we go back out again.”

“Three hundred thousand years of progress,” Rose Marie said. “This ship might be very dated.”

German shook his head. “I doubt it will be. Seeders don’t invent new things very often. We just explore and keep moving forward and giving human life to every planet we can find.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Davis said.

German turned to Rose Marie. “Get us to command. We have some reports to file and back pay to collect.”

She nodded, and with that he teleported back to his suite. Then, with a quick search through the Seeder database, he discovered what had happened to Kathy.

Five years after he and Pale Light had vanished without a trace, she married another Doctor.

Three hundred and ten years later, while on a rescue mission to a small moon, she died in a ship crash.

He went into his bedroom, took her holo-image cube from his nightstand, then went into the living room and took her picture from there and put both cubes in a drawer.

And as he closed the drawer over her, he said simply, “Sorry.”

Then he squared his shoulders and teleported back to the bridge. He had a business to run, eighty thousand people on board to help get through this. He would grieve for Kathy later.

Much later.

He had a job to do first.