Inherited War 1: Retribution by Eric McMeins Read Free Book Online

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