Resurrection (The Inherited War) (20 page)

“If you are done with the dramatics, we need to go.”  Split wasn’t telling Cole everything.

“What?  What is it?”  Cole asked as he tried to reign in his rebellious stomach.

“We were wondering if you knew how the Esii opened the door?  We have tried everything but have been unable to do it ourselves.”

“Gimme a moment.”  Cole closed his eyes and concentrated.  He grabbed the last set of memories he received from the Pyndingum and watched how he had entered Cole’s cell.  Jarrod was right, he had access to all the stored memories of every Pyndingum for thousands of years.  He could leaf through their knowledge like a book.

‘I think I can do it.  Get me over to the wall with the door in it.”  With Split under one arm and Anastacia under the other, they gently walked Cole to the wall.  Cole leaned forward and placed his hands on either side of where he remembered the opening to be.  He closed his eyes and after a moment smiled.

CHAPTER 15

“Is there anything we can do to speed this up?”  Thalo asked out loud.  He had been thinking that question to himself for some time.

“Yea, hold on.”  Sky turned from the airlock door and went to rummage in her bag.  Thalo never took his eyes off of their prisoner in the main airlock.  It had been over an hour, and he was still out.  Sky’s medical sensors showed that he was still alive and still deeply sedated.  They didn’t have any more time to waste waiting for him to wake up.  Thalo heard the fastener on her medical bag reseal and Sky walk back over to the door.

“How do we do this?”  She asked him.

“I go in first and secure him, then you come in and give him the wake up juice.  You high tail it back out the door and stand by at the controls.  If anything goes wrong, eject his ass into space.  This may get rough, guys like this don’t crack easy.  I may have to smack him around a bit to loosen his tongue. ” Sky nodded at him and he depressed the release on the door.  Splitting in the middle, half the door went up the other half went down.  Thalo shot into the room and had Vinco on his stomach before the door had fully retracted.  He used some super strong steel fiber wire to bind the gangster’s hands and feet.  He waved Sky in after he felt the prisoner was secure.

Sky hurried in and knelt next to Vinco.  She placed a pressure injector up next to the main artery in Vinco’s neck and sh
ot him full of stims.  Thalo waved her back out of the room and he heard the door cycle shut.  Thalo got up and walked to the far side of the room to wait.  He didn’t have long.  In less than twenty seconds Vinco was up and sputtering.  Coughing and hacking he was trying to scream as his eyes rapidly darted around the room.  They finally came to rest on Thalo.  Vinco’s eyes managed to get wider than they had been, and he tried his best to scoot himself away from Thalo.

“Don’t,”   he coughed as he tried to talk, “don’t hurt me please.  I will tell you whatever you want.”  Then, as if to confuse Thalo even more, the great gangster of The Pitt broke down into uncontrollable sobs.  Thalo was caught flatfooted and was dumbfounded.  All his plans flew right out the window.  His mind tried to wrap itself around the image this Archon was projecting, he had to be kidding.  Thalo looked at the door and saw Sky with a bewildered look on her face.  His internal com system activated and he heard Sky.

“Did we get the right guy?  This doesn't seem like the one we talked to on the moon, could we have grabbed the wrong one in the confusion?”  Thalo didn’t want to say anything to tip their hand to the Archon so he just shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Beats the hell out of me.”

“Whoa, whoa.  Calm down there fella.”  Thalo held his hands up and away from his body to show he carried no weapons.  “Get control of yourself and calm down.  Like you said, you cooperate with us and nothing bad will happen.”  Thalo hunkered down across the airlock and waited for the being to get himself under control.

“Please, whoever you are, you got the wrong Archon.  It was my brother.  He is the one you want.”  His speech was halting and barely audible.

“No I'm pretty sure you are who we want,” Thalo started, “Vinco, right?  The one we talked to in the office an hour or so ago?”

“Yes,” sob, “and no.”  He tried to wipe his running nose on his shoulder to clear some of the snot off of his face.  “You talked to me but I am not really Vinco.  He is my twin.”  Now he was rocking back and forth trying to get comfortable.

“Shit,” muttered Thalo under his breath.  “Vinco doesn't have a brother.  So that makes you Vinco and that means you are trying to pull a fast one on me.”  Thalo rose menacingly to his feet.   “I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“NO!  Please you have to believe me.  I am not him.  He is gone, I am all that is left.  He got into trouble and he left me to rot on that moon.  I don’t want to die.  I don’t want you to hurt me.”  He broke down sobbing again.  Thalo looked at the being helpless on the floor in front of him.  He watched as Vinco broke and sobbed all over himself.

“I believe him.”  Sky’s voice broke the odd tableau in front of him.

The sad part was that Thalo believed him too.  He had seen beings in all manner of dangerous situations and this was the classic reaction of a weak mind that holds nothing of value.

“I agree.”  Thalo said out loud.

“Agree to what.”  Vinco croaked out between sobs.

“I said, I am inclined to agree with you.  No self-respecting gangster I know would act like this, ever.  Now calm down and tell me your story.  We need to talk to Vinco, not you.”  Thalo helped matters by moving around behind the Archon and releasing his hands.

The being quickly moved his hands to his front where he rapidly massaged them and helped circulation return to his hands.

“Thank you,” he mumbled.

“What?” barked Thalo, which drew another cringe from the being.

“I said thank you.”  Vinco looked around the airlock and scooted his butt across the floor to lean his back up against the wall.  “As for my story, well it’s rather boring.”

“Bore me then.”  Thalo sat down against the far wall and leaned himself back into a comfortable position.  He was afraid this was going to take a while and be as boring as the Archon claimed.

“Let’s see.  I guess I could begin at the beginning.”  Thalo groaned inwardly and rubbed at one of his temples.  “My brother, Vinco, and I were born fifty standard years ago.  My name is Dolor, by the way.  The one and only thing we shared was a birthday.  I was the intellectual and he was physical.  I earned multiple degrees at the Sector One Academe.  I hold degrees in AI sciences, theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, engineering and acting.  Those first ones were my career the last was my passion. I was hired right out of school by a large firm to pursue creating the first actual Artificial Intelligence. My brother never graduated from anything and ended up running with gangs on our homeworld.  I was being paid a fortune to work with the most brilliant minds in the galaxy and was allowed to spend time with a local acting troupe.”  He stopped talking when he heard Thalo snort out a laugh. 

“Sorry, continue please.”  Thalo waved a hand.

“As I was saying.  I had been working for this company for nearly ten years when I suffered a catastrophic setback.  I discovered, quite by accident, that the AI research team was nothing more than a shill for the company.  They used it to funnel profits to our group and then back to those in charge.  I attempted to report their misdeeds to the proper authority but was set up and made a fool of.  I was discredited by my peers and ostracized from the scientific community.  Then Vinco showed up out of no were.  You must understand, he had guarded me and protected me my whole life.  I had always needed him, I thought I needed him again.  I was wrong.”  He hung his head for a moment.

“For the first time in his life, my brother needed me to help him.  He had heard about what had happened to me and he said he didn’t believe it.  He told me that if I helped him with a little project he had going on, he would set me up with my own company and I could show all my detractors that they were wrong.  At that point in my life what choice did I have?  I sold everything I owned and we pooled our money and bought a ship.  A small surveyor capable of warp travel and sustained periods in space or on undeveloped planets.   May I ask you a question?”  He looked expectantly at Thalo.

“Be my guest.”  Thalo was surprised to find himself a little caught up in the Archon’s story.

“Tell me what you know of as the legend of the Kin?”

“I know what everyone knows,” he began.  “The Kin were one of the Pure Human’s first traveling companions in the galaxy.  Later they were aided in their evolution and became sentient beings.  They also aided us in our fight against the Esii and Roche in the Purge War.”

“More specifically, tell me what you know about their planet?”  Dolor asked.

“Again I know what everyone knows.  Theirs is a unique world that has an outer shell of rock instead of an atmosphere and there are only one or two ways through that outer shell to the interior.  More than that,” Thalo shrugged his shoulders again, “I don’t know.  That is why we came to find Vinco.  I believe he knows or knew.”

“Yes, that is what the galaxy knows about the legendary Kin.  But it is wrong.  You can look at any text, oral tradition or any form of record keeping in the galaxy and that is what it will tell you.  They are all wrong.  My brother found out the truth.  He was on the run from some particularly nasty individuals and he took refuge on an out of the way planet.  He never told me which one but he found some ancient ruins on the surface of the planet to hide in.  A few weeks passed while he waited his pursuers out, and he put that time to good use.  He explored the ruins and he made a once in a life time discovery.  He found a derelict ship.  A Pure Human ship.  On that ship he found one data crystal that was undamaged from the wreckage.  He told me he had a hunch and after leaving the planet he used all the credits he had to get it to a data reader that could still read ancient data crystals.  There wasn’t much on it, so he said, until the end.  It was a personal addendum by the captain in which he describes the breathtaking beauty of the Kin homeworld.  My brother needed my help getting there and down to the surface.”  He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Thalo.  “I want some guarantees, before I continue.  I live through this and you relocate me to a nicer world than Pitt.”

“If you are about to tell me where I can find the Kin then yes I will agree to those terms.”  Thalo responded.

“Good, well to make a long story short, all the histories lied.  The world of the Kin didn’t have a stone outer layer, it was diamond.  Miles thick and impervious to any weapons of the day.  Does that sound familiar to you sir?”  He asked Thalo.

“No, wait.  Not Chrysalis.  It couldn’t be.  Beings have been going there for thousands of years and no one has ever reported anything alive on the surface.”  For the second time today Thalo was left dumbstruck. 

“That is the one truth in the legend.  There is only one way through the outer layer of diamond.  We found it and underneath we found the Kin.  It seems at some point in the planets history the atmosphere was heavy with carbon and experienced a massive amount of heat and pressure that compressed the carbon into one large diamond.  One tiny crack was all that was left open.  The diamonds outer layer trapped the feeble heat and light from the distant sun and allowed life to grow.  The diamonds reaction with radiation and light caused the mutation in the Kin that made them valuable to the humans.  First as a pet/companion and later as allies in their war.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  My brother needed me to create a program to control the scanners and the ship in order to penetrate to the surface.”

“Why, why did he need you?  If he knew what to look for why didn’t he just go himself?” Thalo interrupted him.

“Why, you ask.  Well in all the time that we have been going to stare in wonder at the galaxies largest diamond has no one ever found the entrance or landed a mining crew on the surface to harvest the rare gem.  Because the Kin wouldn’t allow it.  Believe it or not they have amazing mental powers and have kept prying explorers off their planet for a long time.  They have convinced the whole galaxy that that’s all there is to their planet.  A giant diamond in the void.”

“So you did what the rest of the galaxy couldn’t, huh?”  Thalo was a little skeptical at this point.

“Yes we did and I do mean we.  My brother figured it out and I created the means to do it.  All attempts previous to ours had one thing in common.  A living, thinking being in control of the ship.  Someone that could be affected by their mental prowess.  I wrote the program that would guide our ship through the outer layer and to the inner surface.  All while we were asleep and restrained.  I used my research on AI’s to speed our endeavor along.  Finally we were ready and launched our mission.  We flew to the planet and turned on the ships very limited AI.  We secured and sedated ourselves in the crew cabins.  We awoke a few hours later and found ourselves safe and sound on the surface.  From the outside the diamond appears cloudy and opaque, the inside is much different.  From the inside the diamond is clear.  You can see the myriad of ships and stations in orbit around the planet.  It was at this point we met the Kin.  They were a kind and friendly people and were very intrigued as to how we defeated their defenses.  We spent many days with them, and they, in return for our silence as to how to gain access to their world, gave us many gifts that would fetch many millions of credits on the open market.  They gave us one more gift before we left.  They wanted to know the state of the galaxy and asked if we would take one of theirs with us when we left.  If we allowed their representative to travel with us they would reward us again upon our return.  We agreed and took the Kin along with us.  We traveled together for about a year before Vinco found the posting on a bounty sight he kept an eye on.  He had been asking the Kin about why they were so special and why the Humans had wanted them to be their allies.  He pried the information out of the Kin over the course of the next few days.”

Thalo’s eyes lit up.  “Holy hell, you are kidding me right?  Wait don’t answer that, I think I know where you’re going with this.  You guys collected the biggest bounty ever offered on record in the galaxy, right?”  Thalo was excited.  He had wanted to know who had collected that bounty and how they had done it.

“Yes that was us.  The single wealthiest being in the galaxy had lost his wife and daughter to an Esii raiding party.  The body of his wife had been found among the wreckage but no sign of his daughter was discovered.  He was offering billions to whoever found and returned her to him.  With the aid of the Kin we did the impossible.”