Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) (3 page)

I saw dog
fight above the skyscrapers of New York City. It must have
been the middle of the day. Bridges came under attack as swarms of Skrav
assault ships descended upon us like locusts from the sky. The air force
already had taken to the sky before their arrival. Each and every fighter and
bomber had been given a very specific set of instructions to follow. The Skrav
wiped out cities in what was once France, England, Egypt, and parts of
China and Japan (and a part of the United States) because of the small
moment of hesitation that man in the bunker had. That man who had only
one job, to push one sequence of numbers will live the rest of his life alone,
full of hate for himself and hate for the Skrav. This hate eventually will one
day get the best of him and so many will see him fall further and further down
into a hell he will make for himself. Disgraced, this is how he will be
remembered… not as the man that unleashed hellfire upon the Skrav but
rather as a man that is nameless, broken, and taught to children as a character
in a story to never hesitate against your enemy.

Outside military bases, farms, abandoned silos open. Mines that orbit
moos and off-world colonies ignite. Dirt caves into tunnels below as rockets
turn lush green grass to brown ash. The rockets and mines all find their
nearest target, a Skrav dagger, and dig into them. The bombs explode
unleashing a flood of fire as they pour and bleed black metal a flood nanites
that devour the inside of the Skrav’s hull and don’t stop until there is next to
nothing left. Some ships collide into others, escape pods fill the sky. A few
crash into cities or burn in the atmosphere of Earth and Mars. Others
become targets for ground troops. The first wave of Skrav ships are
destroyed in an instant.

The Skrav had only enough time to deploy a small unit of ground forces
that the military spent the next several weeks wiping out. They were ugly,
deformed. Their bodies were built like ours with two arms and two legs
(though we later found some with two smaller arms folded around their
waists). They wore heavy armor colored in shades of dark gunmetal gray and
red. They looked like demons rising from hell. Their eyes glowed red when
they were alive but turned white they died. Many journalists followed the
ground battles and watched as human soldiers battled the forces of hell. It
was a glorious day for the media as the men with cardboard signs and tin foil
hats continued to scream, “The end is near!”

In the years to come we would reverse engineer taking what was left for
and using it to build ships of our own. At the time our M16’s, AK47s,
microwave emitters, drones, mechs, and shotguns did just fine. We struck the
invaders down before they could launch an attack. We made our stand and
protected our pale blue dot. We would never forget that (and as history
showed they would never forgive that).

It was another hundred years before the second wave destroyed the ‘Sol’
system. Humanity had been prosperous during that time. Cities on Mars,
Titan, Europa, Deimos, and even Pluto flourished. Mega-cities grew on Earth
that housed billions and the military had become a peacekeeping
organization. There were a few bad guys and small wars here and there but
for the most part this was a new golden age. Every world in Sol worked
together to govern themselves. Scientists had successfully reverse engineered
Skrav technology and built ‘the Trinity’. If not for users’ none of this would
have been possible. It is from one of these ‘users’ that eventually joined the
Erebus I am descendant from, otherwise of course I would not be alive now.
These ‘users’ worked for a small group, a group of people that protected,
studied, and used an alien artifact called nexus. I have mentioned them
before… they called themselves the ‘Sons of Sol’.

If I made a list of all the things that were held secret from the world then
that list would linger on far more then a million words. I could try I’m sure
but I would never be able to truly explain or capture the amount of
intelligence that is kept hidden from public consumption and I myself would
probably only understand barely a third of it. The ‘Sons’ had their hands in
everything dating back to the Roman Empire. The nexus back then had and
always was their dirty little secret. Now it is something everyone knows
about, everyone knows who the ‘users’ are and what they do but it is a
strange idea, a hard concept to follow. A human that can see into the past,
present, and future.

At
first it is like staring at the world covered in water. Wet, out of place.
You are unable to move. You feel like you are drowning. You see only what is
shown to you. The visions can’t be controlled or manipulated in any way. You
feel your mind as it is torn from your body and the world you know fades to
black. When you open your eyes you are somewhere else, someone else.
Seeing was all you could do. You were nothing but a spectator… and the
person whose eyes you saw through is known as the host. You are unable to
blink, breath, or even feel pain. Your mind gives you a sense of what they are
feeling but it is something that can be ignored. You are unable to do anything
but watch what is given to you.

We saw the Skrav destroy our sun. If we had the power to see into the
future why not anyone else? When visions changed of a hundred year war to
what was the genocide of our species from one Skrav dagger to a dozen we
knew then that they had seen something similar. We had been fighting a
battle with an enemy that could see the future just like ourselves. It was
game of cat and mouse. The future wasn’t pre-destined or determined.
Eventually we found we found a way we could win against them. We needed
to destroy them before they destroyed us. We subjected thousands our own
people to the nexus. Each time one saw the future we created a new strike
plan. Over and over until we were closer to the future that we wanted for
ourselves. It didn’t matter how many lost their mind or became broke by the
process. Each use of the nexus changed our path until finally we mapped out
the location of every single one of their ships. This is why we won the first
invasion.

Colonel Ren Kiryu, whom later changed his name and went by Narville,
was one of the most outspoken leaders in the ‘Sons’ during that time. He was
also an avid user himself subjugating himself to thousands of visions. In one
of his visions he saw the human race colonizing a world called ‘Eden’. He was
vague when it came to details but he had called it a paradise. Funny enough
he was the same man that first saw the Skrav destroy our sun. He was a hero
and many called him a prophet (some even called him a messiah). After the
first invasion the focus of ‘users’ became to learn more about this so called
paradise. Few ever saw it. Perhaps it was too far away. Only one thing was
known for sure humanity would have to venture into deep space. The few
that saw the future agreed on one other thing - humanity’s time in the Sol
system had come to an end.

Ren Kiryu’s last words were never recorded. Instead what we have on
record is a manuscript, a small fragment of paper written by a ‘user’ after the
launch of the Erebus. Most of it is hard to make out but it is still passed on.
Ren Kiryu, known at this time as Narville, committed suicide at the age of 72.
At that time that was young, given the medical advances a human could live
to be 120-140 years old so long as they lived a healthy lifestyle. The ‘user’ had
written that Ren sat in a white metal chair in the middle of a white room. In
the far corner of the room was black table that held the nexus. A small cold
glass of water sat on the floor beside Ren. The ‘user’ described the sound of a
reactor slowly cooling down, a light hissing and grinding that came suddenly
to a stop. Ren had just exited the nexus taking off the grey metal visor he
used to block out the light of the present. Immediately he dropped to his
knees and began crying. When he grabbed his water he slammed the glass
down on the ground shattering it. He took several pieces and slit his wrists.
As the blood ebbed from his wrist he moved it along the ground and wrote
three letter.. S E V.

After three hundred years those letters had been analyzed, recon
figured,
meditated on, etc. Everyone believed it was short for seven or the beginning
of some kind of code. Eventually it became a name, a word and nothing more
picked by a pair of human lovers living on an alien colony, the planet Errikus.
It was to be the name of their son. A child born with the gene that would
allow him to become one of the few users and one of the several thousand
post-humans living aboard the Erebus…

That child from Errikus would grow and witness the life and death of
thousands. So you have read this far. Welcome to my world. This child, he
would witness the end of the world through the eyes of a father, a mother, a
child, a stranger. He had been a repairman, a soldier, a lover, a farmer. From
within the nexus that child even saw the death of Ren Kiryu as well as the life
of Devon Cross and several others that history will never forget.

My story begins just as I said. I was born on an alien world not on a ship. I
was one of the lucky few. It had been three hundred years since we fled Earth.
To tell my story properly I need to start where I remember clearly. The planet I
was born on was called Errikus. It had one massive city - an alien trading
colony. It is where I grew up and where I made my first memories long before I
became a ‘user,’ and before I became a soldier fighting against the Skrav on our
journey to Eden. Errikus, my childhood home, an alien world like no other, a
home that fills me with happy thoughts and scars that will forever be etched into
the back of my mind and this was all long before my life went to hell.

Child drawings hung on the wall in the schoolyard. They stood eighteen
by twenty four inches a mix of crayons, acrylics, and chalk. Each drawing
was a rocket or spaceship as only a child could imagine. Starships that would
touch stars or fly through clouds. Each drawing was a story, an idea, almost
like a one page comic created by a kid that showed how they saw the future
as it quickly approached. My drawing was giant rectangle. On the rectangle I
tried to include as many small details as possible combining different shades
of chalk to create shadows and depth. I wasn’t half bad for a young kid. In
some spots you could see little air hatches, turrets, even people crawling along
the sides of the ship. I used red acrylic for the fire that came out the bottom
and blue for the immer that I imagined at the top. My mother loved it. I can
still remember her smile as I first showed it to her. Before it was hanging in
the schoolyard she had hung it on the fridge in our quarters. For some reason
there seemed no better place.

Our colony, Errikus had seen it’s fair share of ships come and go, our
city was for the most part a port sitting on the edge of uncharted territory.
Errikus main export was an exotic herb (an aphrodisiac) made from the
marrow of creatures known as ‘Lahna’ (translated as I have always come to
know them, hellbeasts). The pieces of art that hung around me were special;
created by humans celebrating the return of our three great ships set to arrive
in a little over one week’s time.

I was born on Errikus just like I said but it wasn’t my “real’’ home. My
real home, like the other human children, was one of the three ships. Errikus
wasn’t a place that I belonged and I had spent my life being told that. We
were fourteen years old when it had come our time to leave. The Erebus (and
the other two) had gone on a short journey to visit a world called Epsilon
Eridani. It was a binary star system full of gas giants that would put anything
near us (or near the “old” us) to shame. Errikus was a border world, on the
edge of charted space (and charted immer) and had gone to Epsilon Eridani
to trade with a cybernetic race called the Arr7. The Arr7 were a race of
sentient machines that looked like old Earth Spiders with human torsos and
rectangular heads. Their upgrades included solar sails and equipment that
would both guide us and help us map our route through the uncharted region
of space and immer. I was amazed by the immer as a child, a dimension that
stood on top of our own, it was exciting, the idea of exploring it seemed like
the adventure of a lifetime.

As a child reading about the immer I was fascinated to learn that when it
was first discovered some had wanted to call it hyperspace but it was so
unlike space those that had discovered it decided that would only lessen what
it actual was. It was then decided that it would be a called “the Aether” which
over time got shortened to immer. Those that crossed the immer in the early
days were called ‘immersers’ but now everyone that travels in space is like
that so the term stopped being used. Either way we had no choice but to go, it
was better to be excited to leave then sad to stay.

Humans for the most part were feared throughout the galaxy. Even on
this backwater world the other species treated us with respect but would
whisper of our savagery. At night I could hear it sung in alien tongue from
closed bars and windows, “The Cries of Deimos,” a song about a man
murdering his wife before the Skrav could carry her away. It was a song that
they sang about us in private, a song that they sang to frighten children and
teach them to be wary trusting species that were different then their own and
most of all to teach them of the dangerous Skrav. Most aliens called us human
but they also called us the Terran or Ter. I heard plenty of people say that our
name meant terror in some alien languages or was used as a synonym in
others.

What made us feared wasn’t just our violent nature; we were the only
species in the galaxy (at least living) that challenged the Skrav. For hundreds
of years we had been at war. Any planet caught harboring humans was
considered contaminated. The Skrav would turn civilized worlds into deserts
in mere hours just for harboring us for a day. The Skrav called us a plague, a
parasite; as far as they were concerned we were a blight on the universe and
we had to be eliminated. As far as we were concerned the Skrav were the true
embodiment of childhood fear, they were the blight - to speak of the Skrav
was to talk about terror. They were the ones who should have had songs sung
made about them only everyone was too afraid.