Inherited War 1: Retribution (4 page)

“Slowly walk out of the airlock human.”  He recognized
Captain Stubing’s voice.  “Keep your hands up above your head and my men won’t have to hurt you…too much.”

“If it isn’t
my old chum Captain Stubing.” Cole said as he placed his hand on his head.  What the hell was he thinking? He had to start controlling his stupid mouth.  “Err okay guys I’m coming out.  I got my hands on my head.”  He slowly started moving towards the door.  The hallway on the outside was brightly lit, with floor and ceiling lights running the length of the hallway.  The hallway itself was a shiny grey steel color.  He could see doorways on the opposite side from his.  “Not that I mind getting out for a bit but mind telling me where we’re going?’

“Someone wants to talk to you and there is only one place to do it
, so you get to see if you can control yourself or if my men get to blow your legs off.  All I need is you alive, legs are a bonus.”

“
Aye, aye Captain,” he said back, “lead the way.”  The Captain turned and went through the opposite door from Cole’s cell.  They went about a hundred feet before they got to another door that opened to what looked like an elevator.  They got on and the Captain said “AI core level.”  The elevator started to move down, at least that is what it felt like to Cole. After a few seconds it stopped and the doors opened to a perfectly spherical room.  Floating off the floor in the dead center, with a walkway leading to it, was what looked like mercury, also in a perfect sphere.  “Wow, that’s cool, does it turn into a T-1000?”

The
Captain turned and said to Cole “I gave it ten minutes to talk to you.  Do not waste it being a smart ass.”  He then turned towards the floating globe and said “Ten minutes, then I get my answers. And he will be bound here at the door.”  The guards pulled his hands off his head, put them on either side of the railing, and then cuffed them together.  They turned and walked out with the Captain.   Cole heard the door whisk shut.  He turned and looked around as much as he could. “Hello.”  He shouted.

“Hello Cole, I have been waiting a long, long time to meet you.”  That was odd, the voice seemed to be coming from the globe of mercury but there were no speakers that he could see, or no person for that matter.  “We only have a short amount of time and I have much to tell you.”

             
“Who are you?” Asked Cole.

             
“I am the ships AI and the Captain is about to foolishly let me into the main systems and allow me to take you to where you are destined to go.  To the Last Fleet, so you can free the Galaxy from the tyranny that replaced the rule of man twenty thousand years ago.”

8

Exactly ten minutes later the door behind
Cole whirred back open and in came goon one and two, followed by Captain Stubing.  “Thank you Captain for allowing me to talk to the Human, I have not had the pleasure in a very long time.”

“I hope you enjoyed it because
it’s not gonna happen again.  Now I want that information.”

“
Captain as I told you before, I have to acquire access to the original encrypted files to be able to break the code and open them for you.  So I need to be allowed into the ships memory banks and given access to the main processor.  This ships AI core was designed to contain me and limit me and I just can’t do what you ask without more resources.”  Silence filled the room.  Cole coughed uncomfortably and started humming the theme from final jeopardy.  Feng backhanded Cole in the mouth and snarled in frustration.  He turned to the tech team and said. “Can you keep tabs on it and get it back into the core when it’s done? And make sure it doesn’t access any other ship systems?”

“We think, I mean
, yes Sir we have a program up and running that no AI can get through, Ancient or not,” said the team leader.  “We are ready when you are Sir.”

“Do this and don’t screw it up.”  He grabbed the team leader by his shirt and lifted him off the floor. 
“Because if you do we’re all dead.”  He dropped the shaken being back to the deck.  “Guards get him back to his cell and make sure he doesn’t touch anything on the way back.”

             
Two days later the AI cracked the code protecting the files, if he had a mouth he would have smiled.  He didn’t need the files to tell him were to go, he knew where the fleet was already. He had been one of the AI’s specifically built to inhabit the last ships ever built by the powerful humans.  In fact, they were the only warships humanity had ever had to build.  Much like everything else they did, the ships were meticulously crafted for their purpose but unfortunately never used, well not yet anyway.  No, the AI needed the information in the files for personal reasons.  It told him much about the organization that Feng had worked for and contained some solid information on leads toward finding out what had happened and who was behind it those many years ago.  He also got all the info that they had amassed on young Cole and his people.  That was a bonus because there were many ships and ships need crews, specifically human crews.  A planet with almost seven billion humans on it would do nicely for starting a fleet.  Yes, he would definitely smile if he could.

              “Captain we have the AI firmly secured back in the core and there are no traces of it anywhere in any system.  I would say our firewall program worked perfectly.  I also am now transmitting to you the coordinates the AI got from the Admirals files, looks like it’s not that far from here on the outer disk.  I am also shifting the Admirals personal files to your cabin computer terminal as ordered.  If there is nothing further, I will begin rebuilding the hardware walls around the AI core.”

The
Captain punched the coordinates into the nav computer.  It appeared to be in a previously unexplored part of the outer galactic disc. 
Hmm
he thought,
out of the way, just like Earth
.  He was starting to see a pattern of how the pure strains set up their fall back plan, which made him wonder what, if anything, else was out here for him to find.  “Navigation set following course and make best speed.”  He rattled off the long list of numbers.  “Turn and burn, we have a galaxy to conquer.”

Dr. Sky sat quietly in her cell.  She felt the ship
s power core spool up and the gravity drive engage.  The Captain must have got the answers he had wanted from the AI.  Her time was running out, she needed Cole, his name still sounded odd in her mind after calling him The Savior for so long, to find a way out for them some time soon.  She had done all she could to prepare for this day now all she could do was wait and hope he didn’t hate her for what she had done to him.

Cole also felt the ship power up and the drive engage just before the airlock door closed.  But he didn’t know what it meant until he looked out the airlock door’s viewport and recognized what he had seen in countless Sci-Fi movies throughout his life.  The light stretching tunnel which always meant the ship had just jumped into light speed, hyper speed or warp speed.  The name always changed but the effect was mostly the same.  He hoped the AI was right about where they were going and what it meant for Cole, because if it was, things were about to change for everyone on the ship.

The rhythmic hum of the ships engines had a sort of hypnotic effect on
Cole.  So far, if his internal clock was right, they had made three to four jumps a day for the last five days.  Cole didn’t understand faster than light travel by a long shot, but to him it seemed like they might be trying to lose a tail.  They would run in what Cole thought of as warp speed for an hour or two at most, then drift for a few hours pick up a new heading and warp out again.  He had just finished a short work out and was sitting with his back to a bulkhead droning and dozing off.  Whoever had the duty to open and close the outer airlock door had gotten lazy after the first few jumps and had just left it closed. 
Guess he got tired of hitting a button,
Cole thought to himself, and chuckled imagining someone whining about having to do that onerous job.  His head started to lull forward when the inner door cycled open.  In walked the oddly feline looking women called Dr. Sky. 

“Hello Doctor
,” he said.  “Can I offer you a seat on the deck?”  He said with a smile.  “Afraid I don’t rate very good accommodations.” 

She smiled a little bit at the joke and sat down across from him and leaned back.  “First
, I would again like to deeply apologize for my part in your being here and am very glad I could make sure you survived the procedure.  After much arguing with the Captain, I have secured his permission to answer some of your questions.  I cannot tell you where we are going or what you will do there, but anything else I should be able to answer.  I know if I was in your position there would almost be no end to the questions I would have.”

“Yea I have a few questions.” 
Cole chuckled a little, “well maybe more than a few.  First and foremost is how, if you people are aliens, I can understand a damn thing you say.  I took Spanish class for two years in school and I could maybe order a beer or two at the most and be understood.”

“That is the easy one
,” she said.  During your last operation I sent some modified bacteria to the spot in your brain that process input into electrical signals.  Once there, the bacteria started to build a small processor, memory, output unit and a receiver.   After their work was done it was just a small matter of downloading the pertinent information to your new hardware.  Now when you hear communication of almost any form it automatically translates it into your native language.  You can talk to almost any being in the galaxy with minimal effort.”

“So I got a thing in my brain that thinks for me now?  Cool.”
Cole thought for a moment.  “I guess we should start from the beginning.  How did we come to this?  Why did things come to this? It sounds like my ancestors were pretty smart guys.  How did they end up getting their tails kicked so bad that they disappeared from the Galaxy and our only hope is now a nobody like me?”

“You are far from nobody
Cole, you are one in a million, maybe even a billion.  We searched for years to find the right combination of genes, DNA and a few other markers before we found you.  But I will get to that in a bit, hmm…… were to start.  Approximately fifty thousand years ago the original humans achieved faster than light travel and set out to explore the galaxy.  They were peaceful people.  They had stopped warfare years before they left for the stars.  They lived life by a series of rules called The Calling.  Now you must remember that most of this is made up of stories told in the oral tradition.  After the purge of your people, the traitors set about destroying any recorded lore or history of the original or Pure Strain humans.  My people were the greatest of the human’s allies and have kept the stories alive for twenty thousand years.  So the humans began to spread out into the greater galaxy.  The Calling was the book of laws that governed their society. They all lived by its teachings and used it as a guide to evaluate other races should they find any. It took years before they found the first non human sentient.  About a thousand years to be exact.  They found us, the Nixa.  We were a people just coming into our own.  We had not yet conquered space but we had advanced scientific study, medicine and did not war on each other.  We were a race united for the common good.  They watched and studied us for years before they made first contact.  We were at a disadvantage from the beginning.  Our bodies were much more closely related to the creatures we evolved from.  It was more comfortable for us to move around on all fours and we had no opposable thumbs.  This held us back mechanically to a certain degree.  We worked closely with the humans for a few years and finally broke the species barrier between us.  Human and Nixa could successfully mate and produce healthy offspring.  The radical combination of our two DNA’s changed us in ways we could never repay the humans.  We became what you see now.”   She stood up and turned a slow circle.  “We became totally bipedal.”  She held out her hands.  ” Four fingers and a thumb on each hand.  And we slowly lost our thick fur to be more of a smooth skinned species.   We have maintained to a certain degree our facial and head structure, which does look vaguely like your Earth cats.  From then on we traveled the stars with the humans.  Always as equals and friends.  For eighteen thousand years we worked with the humans.  We defeated disease, slowed aged, discovered new people, and explored the galaxy.

“Not everyone received the same treatment we did
, though.  Some sentient peoples were so steeped in their patterns of war and abuse that the humans could not see unleashing them on the galaxy at large.  They always monitored them to see if they changed enough to warrant another chance.  Some eventually did, others didn’t and still others advanced far enough in science to succeed in wiping themselves out.  This was the hidden enemy in humanities own home.  No one knows who or what did it, but something got a few of the most powerful of the left behind species and armed them with advance weapons and ships.  Humanity hadn’t fought a war in over twenty thousand years.  They, we, were not prepared.  The two main forces of the opposition were the Esii and the Roche.  The Esii were the assassins in the shadows.  Able to move about almost completely undetected. They are foul beings who gorge directly on the energy of living beings.  Theirs is one of the few worlds that developed two different, but totally sentient beings.  The ones in charge are the Esii the others are just known as cattle.  The Esii were the commanders of the attack force and the assassins who drew the first blood by killing much of the humans’ leadership structure.  The Roche on the other hand, were the hammer the Esii used to destroy all human occupied worlds.  They breed faster than any other known species and they are deeply indoctrinated into fighting and wars.  They were the ones who did the most damage to humanity as a whole.  They sterilized more planets and killed more humans than anyone else.  The other thing going against humans was that their life expectancy was so high they ended up with low birth rates.  Compared to the rest of the galaxy, there were very few humans to begin with.  There were a few other races who sided with the Esii and Roche but most of them met their ends at the hands of their allies.”

“Wait, what about
Earth?  Why didn’t they level Earth with the rest of the planets controlled by humanity?” Asked Cole.  “Get us all at once, so to speak.”

“Simply put
, until about fifty years ago no one knew you existed out here on the fringe of the galaxy.  We knew the last surviving humans had devised a plan they thought would save them, but rightly so, they kept it secret.  I think that Earth was a part of that plan.  We may never know for certain but I believe that humanity had singled out Earth years before to study aided evolution and had already been manipulating creatures on your Earth.  They would have already had facilities in place there to plant the dormant genes in the earliest homosapiens.  At their level of mastery, they could have easily programmed the early Earthling’s genetic structure to eventually bring about you, Cole.  Granted, I think it was still years away from happening naturally but it was coming.  You have the genetic memory of the most learned beings this galaxy has ever seen deep within you Cole, and over the rest of your life it will be coming to the fore.  I believe that you will start remembering things from the distant past, sciences, mathematics, medicine, information about every possible subject will sooner or later start bubbling up in that head of yours.  I hope you are ready for it.”  She said with a slight smile.  “I would give anything to know the things you may come to learn.”

Cole
whistled, “Man that’s a lot of pressure to put on a guy. Heir to all the knowledge in the galaxy. So what’s the situation like out there now? Everything fall apart without us around? Or did the universe just continue humming right along.”

“Well the humans knew they were going to lose so they made all their close allies, us included, distance ourselves from them so we could save our own people
, but they promised that if they could they would come back again.  So the galaxy basically fell apart.  The destruction of so much of the human knowledge databases started a slow process of regression, technologically speaking, for some of the furthest planets from the core systems, and much general knowledge was lost as well.  Whole systems and clusters pulled away from long time friends and allies.  War was reintroduced to the galaxy and everyone scrambled to build their own fleets and armies.  Dictators and tyrants arose, kingdoms formed and fell, and chaos reigned for years afterwards.  Finally, with alliances formed and pacts signed, from one once great civilization dozens of small nations arose.  Democracies and dictatorships, kingdoms and empires, the strong dominating the weak in some cases, and others working together to reclaim what they had lost.  It is still the same today, from single planets and systems to whole sectors controlled by a few.  My world and a few nearby allies stayed together through our shared experience with the first humans.  We aided and defended each other, shared technology and ideas and still do to this day.  We have grown powerful enough that most everyone else is wary about attacking us.”