Resurrection (The Inherited War) (18 page)

“Good job Snow that was a great performance.  You had me convinced you were a cowering skimp.” He smiled as he walked by her.

“We are going to have a long talk about how you treat props in your shows.”  She shouted at his retreating head.  Thalo waved to her and continued on.  He made it to the back of the ship were he found Sky looking through a window in the rear airlock door.

“How long till he wakes up?”  Thalo asked her.

“A few more minutes at the most,” Sky said absently.

Thalo knew she was worried and wondering what was going on that they only had two days to be to the Esii homeworld.  They didn’t have enough time.  Thalo looked through the same window as Sky.  The door was the interior of the airlock, Vinco was on the other side and the outer door was up.  The only thing protecting him from the cold of space was a magnetic seal over the open doorway.

“He will talk and talk fast.  What other choice does he have?”  He thought silently to himself, “What other choice do we have.”

CHAPTER 14

Cole was unmoving on his knees.  Thump………thump.  Not long now.  Maybe two or three more beats of his heart then he and the Esii would be dead.  He had surprised the Esii by giving him its missing features back.  He had subsequently trapped him here in his mind.  Cole hadn’t taken control of the torturers mind but he had locked him in a duel of wills, one that Cole was winning.  Thump……thump.

Cole had captured his gaze.  He saw the Esii struggle to break the connection.  He had failed and he knew it.  Cole’s concentration almost slipped when, unexpectedly, a look of pure terror crossed the Esii’s features.  He forced himself to lock his thoughts down before he lost the Esii for good.  Then Cole remembered what his torturers had said.  The Pyndingum were the storehouse for the total history of the Esii.  When this particular Esii died, all that knowledge he contained would die with him.  Thump…….thump.

That was it, the last his heart would ever beat.  Now, just a waiting game.  Wait and see who dies first.  The Esii, knowing what was coming, cowered in fear and did the one thing that it had been trained to do beyond anything else.  It passed its knowledge onto the only living being that was available to receive it. 

Cole was rocked back on his heels as the gaze they shared was charged with pure energy.  Cole felt the power of the Esii’s final act sear into his brain.  Whatever was happening, shred his concentration and allowed the Esii to break free.  Cole couldn’t stop him, he was paralyzed by the sheer amount of information that had just been placed in his brain.  The Esii smiled a cold smile and then suddenly jerked forward.  A slit about two inches wide opened up in his throat and the black fluid they used for blood started to seep out.  Suddenly the small slit began to widen and travel around the Torturers throat until it finally made a complete circuit and the Esii’s head rolled off of its neck.

The head rolled to a stop at Cole’s feet.  Cole didn’t notice anything after the head had fallen.  Cole’s brain was distracted by the last few hundreds of thousands of years of history that just got dumped into his brain.  Thump…thump.

~

Cole found himself adrift in a mass of jumbled images.  He assumed that under normal circumstances the Esii who were supposed to take in the knowledge, would be trained to sort them out and make sense of it all.  Cole was screwed and he knew it.  He couldn’t make any sense of what was happening.

“Cole!”  The voice shouted from somewhere around him, he couldn’t quite tell.  “Cole!”  The voice reverberated, coming at him from all sides.  “Damn it! Concentrate on my voice.”  It sounded familiar but Cole was having trouble concentrating on anything at the moment.  He tried to grab onto the voice with his mind but it was as slippery as an eel.  It was enough apparently because he suddenly felt a presence beside him.

“Cole!”  He felt the presence intruding on his awareness.  “Look at me.  NOW!”  The voice roared and snagged a small piece of his attention.  Slowly, in front of him, a silhouette started to take shape to his front.  Cole focused as much as he was able to on the shape.  “Don’t look away.”  The voice drew him into the shadow.  Finally a face slowly took shape.

“I….I know you?  I think I know you.  Who are you?”  Cole stammered out, unable to control the thought whirling through his mind.

“Yes, you know me. I am your ancestor, Jarrod.  If you don’t want to lose yourself to the mass of information the Esii just put in your brain, then you need to focus on me.  I can help you if you let me.  Just focus on me.”  Jarrod raised his arms out to Cole.  “Come to me let me help you survive this.”

Cole had no answer.  He did the only thing he could, he fell forward into Jarrod’s outstretched arms. He felt a soothing cool envelope him as he placed his fate in Jarrod’s arms.  Slowly the rapid fire images began to slow down.

“Good, yes, find one point and concentrate on it.  The beginning, force your mind to go to the beginning.  Concentrate and pull that first memory to you.”  Cole focused with all his being and the images responded.  They slowed down and finally stopped.  They were all still stacked on top of one another and jumbled together, but they stopped.  “Call it to you and place yourself into it.”  Jarrod’s voice took control of Cole and pushed him where he wanted to go.  “Put the images into a form you can recognize.  Organize them somehow.”

With no clearer instructions than that, Cole forced them into the only shape he could think of, pictures.  The images changed from life size images and shrunk down to an almost infinite stack of photographs.  “Good, not what I would have done, but good.  Now it’s manageable.”

“What happened?  Did I die?”  Cole asked with exhaustion.

“Haha, not quiet.  You are trapped in a single moment in time.  The Esii, at the moment of his death, gave you all of his knowledge.  Not just his knowledge but all the knowledge that had been passed down from the first Esii to start the memory transfers.”  Cole glanced up at his great to the umpteenth power grandfather.  “You have been giving a singular gift.  You have been given all of the knowledge of an entire race going back close to a hundred thousand years.  You have all the insight you could ever need to defeat our enemies.  If you can control it.”

“How-how do I do it?”  Cole forced the fatigue out of his voice.  “Help me, please.”  He wasn’t begging or pleading.  He was asking for help from his only family.

“Close your eyes.  Good.  Now guide the images and bring the first memory to the top of you stack of pictures.”  Cole did as he was bid.  It was hard, harder than anything he had done before. 

“How will I know when I have the first one?”  Cole asked as he continued to focus.

“Go until you feel you can’t go back any further.”  Jarrod had closed his eyes and was lending his concentration to Cole.  “There, that’s it.  Now open your eyes and expand the image.  Make the image our whole world.”  The small photo suddenly grew to enormous size.  But it was still a two dimensional picture.  “Make it real, expand it, and make it real.”

Cole did it the only way he could think to do it.  He walked into the picture and opened his eyes.  He stood on a lush green lawn with a clear blue sky going from horizon to horizon.  He did a complete turn and took in the most breathtaking landscape he had ever seen.  Two suns shone in the sky.  Cole took a deep breath of the fragrant air.  “What is this place?”  He asked aloud.

Jarrod materialized next to him.  “This is the world of the Esii, before it changed.  This was how it looked even before we found them forty thousand years ago.  How long, I don’t know.  When we found them they had two suns but not these two.  Look at the bigger yellow sun.  Do you see the red outline around it?”  Cole nodded his head yes.  “Behind the yellow one is a red giant.  This system is in perfect balance.  The yellow sun or interior sun is the third celestial body in the solar system.  It is roughly the same distance from the primary as Earth was from its sun.  The Esii homeworld is slightly further from the primary than Mars was from its sun.  And finally the last sun was as far from the Esii homeworld as the interior sun.  All three were in a straight line with the primary and orbited around in unison.  The two smaller suns made up for the lack of energy and distance from the primary.  If any of the three stars were not there, life wouldn’t exist.  The nature of red giants is to expand until it reaches a balance and then it slowly goes dormant.  It takes hundreds of thousands of years.  Normally.  Something sped up the process here.  The primary expanded and consumed the interior sun and baked the Esii homeworld, rendering the surface unlivable.  This,” he held his arms out, “is what Esii looked like before that happened.  Now let the memory run.”

Cole closed his eyes and slowly breathed life into the still world.  He felt the breeze caress his cheek and heard the laughter of children drift across the meadow.  He opened his eyes and was stunned at what he saw.  Esii, they were everywhere.  He assumed they were Esii because they looked nothing like they looked now.  They were almost human in appearance.  Smaller of stature and thinner framed than they were now, but they shared some of the facial structures of their descendants.  He was awe struck by the sight.  The Esii in the meadow were frolicking in what must have been a park.  They were ignored as they watched the families at play.

“This is a memory, we were not actually there so we cannot affect the outcome.”  Jarrod whispered, not wanting to distract Cole from his surroundings.  Cole spent several minutes watching the strangers that surrounded him.  Then he heard a low rumbling in the distance.  He looked up along with the rest of the Esii in the field.  Slowly a black speck could be seen in the sky.  As the rumble grew louder, the speck got bigger.  By the startled reactions of the Esii around him it was quite clear that the ship was not an Esii ship, if they even had them at this point in their history.  It was defiantly a space faring ship, Cole could tell by just by looking at it.  It continued its slow flight across the sky, it was heading towards the nearest city.  Cole saw the gigantic craft stop as it reached the horizon.  Mothers were calling for their children and fathers were heading their families toward their vehicles.  They were ground cars that resembled Earth vehicles of the late twentieth century. 

The silence of the park was suddenly broken as a voice boomed across the sky. “Peoples of this world, we have come to save you.  The red tinge around you inner sun is not normal.  Behind that sun is the threat to your world.  A red sun lurks there and it is growing bigger.  The yellow star has been protecting you from its deadly radiation for billions of years, but the red sun is expanding and will soon devour the smaller yellow one.  It has already destroyed the two smaller planets closest to it and it will expand to claim the yellow star.  After your suns destruction, the red will bake your planet with deadly radiation.  It will burn the life from its surface and boil the water from your seas.  Your atmosphere will be destroyed and the surface of this world will be unlivable, forever.  We have studied your people for decades and have come to understand your kind.  We know that you value introspection and building your mental prowess.  We do not have the resources to move you to another planet in time but we can save your people.”  Everyone in the park had stopped what they were doing.  Fathers gathered their families in their arms and held them close.  They all looked to the sky.

“Deep beneath the surface of your planet lies a massive system of caverns.  These caves are buried deep in the mantel of your planet and can withstand the apocalypse that is coming.  We offer you three things in exchange for a promise of future aid from your descendants.  First, we will aid your people in adjusting and adapting to your new environments.  Second, we will alter your bodies in order for you to survive your new home, and third, we will help you advance your technology and add to your already mental prowess.  In return all we ask is that you come to our aid when we are in need.  There is a war coming and when it does get here we will need all the help we can muster.  We have already begun boring a tunnel down through the surface to the caverns. We expect to be done in one hundred days’ time, when the drilling is finished, we will escort those who wish to survive the destruction of their planet down the shaft.  Once all are there who wish to go, the shaft will be sealed and no one shall be allowed in or out, until it is safe to return to the surface.  You have the information you need, make your choice.”  Silence descended over the park once again.  It was finally broken by the sobbing of several small children.

Cole was stunned, he was letting it all sink in.  What was going on here?  “What or who were those people in the ship?”  Cole had paused the playback of the memory. 

“It is as we suspected, they have been aided, since the beginning it seems.” Jarrod's voice was quiet and thoughtful.  “We need to know more, can you move it forward to the exodus to the caves?”

Cole closed his eyes and concentrated on the stack of photos in front of him.  He reached out and grabbed one.  “Here, I think.”  He held the picture up and expanded it with his mind before stepping into the picture.  Cole let the memory play.

He was suddenly surrounded by a milling throng of thousands of Esii.  They were all standing around a tunnel that gently slopped down into the ground.  The Esii were all carrying packs loaded with personal items and mementos of their former life.  A hush fell over the crowd as a voice began to speak from the vicinity of the pit.