The Drift

The gods were real. They came down in ships.Ten thousand years ago, colonists from a dying galaxy walked the Earth, raised cities, taught our ancestors, and engineered the species that would become humanity. Earth remembered them as Odin and Freyja, as Ra and Quetzalcoatl, as the bright watchers in a hundred scriptures. Then a cosmic disaster shattered their worlds, and the fleet that survived was set adrift, returning to Earth's sky only once a generation, and never for long.The drift has lasted long enough.Their ships are failing. Their fuel is running out. And a hidden enemy aboard the fleet is finishing the work it began long ago. First by drowning the old colonies. Now by loosing a plague on Earth that no human doctor can contain.The fleet's last hope is an eighty-five-year-old engineer dying in a hospital bed, who has no idea that the gods of his grandmother's stories have been watching him since he was a child at his bedroom window, and that they have come back for him.The Drift is a story of endurance and compassion. It is about what humanity owes the gods who helped mold us, and what they owe us back. R. W. Span considers himself a Silicon Valley refugee now retired in Virginia. His writing combines his love of mythology with the possibility of Paleocontact by other life forms. His stories are derived by asking the question, "What if those gods..."