The High Edge (2015) is the fifth SF novel in the Seekers series, following
Morning Song
. The initial volume in this sequence is
Dust and Kisses
.
In the previous volume, Ray was in the command seat of a Seeker starship. The crew was waiting for the ship they were tracking to come out of Trans-Tunnel flight. As it returned to normal space, it was moving at 98 percent of lightspeed.
Ray contacted Boone and Mundy and asked them to meet him at a lodge, Fisher greeted them and then introduced his wife Callie. Ray and Tacita teleported into the lodge and explained their problem.
Mundy became the Chairman of the Huntington, the largest warship in the galaxy. He and Maria briefed his officers on the situation. They started recruiting crew for the Huntington, including Red and Mattie.
The starship seemed to be an ancient Seeder vessel, but much larger than modern ships. They used The Lady to intercept the runaway ship within the FTL tunnel. They tried to scan the ship, but it transported them to a huge landing area within the ship.
They scanned the ship from the landing bay. They dis not find any living being onboard. Boone believed the vessel to be a Mother Ship carrying smaller ships to another galaxy.
The control room is vast, with many seats for the crew. The command seat is double and clearly marked for a male and a female. They discover that the ship controls are password protected.
In this novel, Benny Slade is a veteran of the Iraqi War. He has problems from his service days, but doesn't want to talk about them.
Gina Helm is a Seeder. She is over two hundred years old. She has served on several planets during this time.
Carson is a Seeder and the Chairman of a ship waiting in orbit for the rescue of the people on the planet below.
Wade Ray is a Seeder, He is very old and married to Tacita. They command the oldest mother ship of the Seeders.
In this story, Benny was in the vault when the pulse hit. When he came out, he found Madge and Maggy dead in the front office. He checked them for a pulse, but they had none.
Benny peeped out the door and was hit by the sound of car alarms. He saw bodies everywhere, some in cars and others on the sidewalks. He didn't hear any sirens or see any emergency crews.
Benny checked out the neighborhood. He did find some people coming up from the subway station, but they ran back inside. He found a man and three college students who had been on a field trip. They were leaving the city, so Benny gave them a card with his cell phone number.
Benny thinks about leaving the city, but is not happy with the idea. He tries to come up with a place to stay with some degree of safety and storage for food and other goods. He decides to live in the Empire State Building.
The first problem is the corpses in the building. He starts moving the bodies outside. He also picks an office with amenities as his living quarters.
Then the progessor and his college kids decide to return to Manhatten. He calls Benney and asks if they can join him. Benny agrees and tells him where to go.
Meanwhile, Gina is living in her apartment on the ship. She is tracking the survivors within Manhatten. Others are doing the same for survivors around the world.
Gina found three hunder and sixty survivors on the island. Most are alone. But some of the survivors commit suicide rather than leave their loved ones.
Over the next ten days, only Benny and another group have brought survivors together. Finally, all the rescue ships have arrived and they are ready to rescue the survivors. Survivors are teleported up to the rescue ships.
This tale brings the Manhatten survivors to a conference room on the ship. Carson welcomes them and tells them that a pulsar beam had killed most of the population of the planet. Only a million or so were still alive.
Gina learns that Benny has the Seeder gene. The next installment in this sequence has not yet been announced on Amazon.
This plot is much like the first two novels in this series. The location seems to be our Earth. But it is almost identical to
Against Time
, the second novel.
All these novels are love stories. Yet this novel has more emphasis on rescue operations and the recruitment of Benny as a Seeder. It is a basically a different viewpoint on the disaster.
Highly recommended for Smith fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of planetary disasters, rescue operations, and a lot of romance. Read and enjoy!
-Arthur W. Jordin
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