I felt empathy for the creature. I felt remorse. It seemed like a child, a 300 foot child crying out in anger and pain because it was far away from its home. Like us it too was an orphan. If the Tritan was the cause - if they did pull this creature from the immer with them were we not to blame for all of this death and destruction? At the same time I hated it. I hoped that the more it reformed its body it felt more pain.
“It’s mimicking us,” Hayden said. “It’s changing its body structure to look human.” “That doesn’t look human to me,” I said. Nothing that monster could do would make me think it was human. As I spoke I saw the leviathan extend its wings. It was getting ready to take flight. I began to fear we were the only three alive in the whole city. My heart skipped a beat. The leviathan screamed. I could see it clear as day now. Debris from the city below swept up into the air as it began to move its massive wings. Even in my worst nightmares I couldn’t imagine seeing something like this. My mind began to race. I had no idea how to fly evasive maneuvers.
“Maybe we are better off on the ground. If that thing comes at us I don't know if I can dodge it,” I said. Hayden and Aira said nothing in return.“If it comes at us I’m going to ram it.” I said and I began to maneuver the drop ship away while keeping the leviathan in my sights (and it must have worked because the Leviathan at no point slowed its stride, but keep going past us as if we were some ghost).
“Good job.” Hayden said, patting me on the shoulder.
“There,” Hayden pointed to one of the navigation screen that showed a massive ship appear above the city. I maneuvered the drop ship and there it was. From outside the front window we watched as the Aelita emerged in a cloud of smoke out of the immer.
The drop ship began to lose velocity. Controls seized up and all I could do was gliding it down to the landing bay which happened to be only a few kilometers away from the leviathan. The force of the Aelita dropping out of the immer over the city was the same as dropping a nuclear bomb. We were just far enough away that we didn’t get caught in the initial blast. Still, we could see buildings disappear beneath us as waves of ash washed the city clean. We landed on top of what was left of the human embassy. This building was presented to us as a gift for trading and joining Errikus during our stay. It didn’t matter anymore how many species had used this building. We would be the last. None of Errikus mattered anymore. The Aelita made it clear they weren’t here to save the city. They were here to slay the beast.
The Aelita positioned itself above the levaithan. It used its massive thrusters to keep itself afloat and level in the air as it bled the ground with pressure. Built on the back of an Earth ship, Aelita was equipped with one of several archaic weapons that were meant to be used in space. The gravity of the planet only made the energy that Aelita poured down more lethal. If there was anyone alive within ten miles of the leviathan they were dead now. It kept screaming. The blast hammered the ground and tore at the thin membrane that had made up its wings. They were the first piece to fade into nothing. There were barely any structures standing. It looked like a monster standing on a black platform. Ash filled the air. We were lucky none of the energy-based weapons Aelita used had risks of being radioactive. We could feel the heat even on the ground. The drop ship moved back and forth with the blast as the ground swayed.
“Are they planning to destroy the planet?” asked Aira.
“This is the end of the world isn’t it,” I asked, my hands hugging the handlebars placed inside the drop ship, they were initially meant to be used with turbulence and rough landings. We weren’t even in the air and yet we could feel the world around us ripping apart.Then there was a cloud of smoke and darkness. Much like the ground beneath us, the leviathan had had enough, turned itself to dust only to drift away. It was like it just gave up. The dust came at us like a hurricane. The drop ship twisted and turned with us inside. I had forgotten how much pain I was in the day before. The shaking reminded me that I had broken ribs. I could feel a stabbing sensation hit me right below my chest. Aira grabbed me as we held each other close. We kept sliding across the drop ship floor. Hayden hit his head on a suspension bar and was knocked unconscious but we could still see him breathing. It would have been horrible to lose each other after everything. We could still see the Aelita shooting wave after wave into the leviathan’s husk. The leviathan was bleeding now. The blood was blue just like it had been before when it first appeared. This proved to us it was a real animal after all. It wasn’t a god! it wasn’t an immortal! It was flesh and blood and it would die, a slow death thousands of years overdue!
In the end it only took a few hours for the leviathan to die.
‘The hammer of god’ - that was what name of the technique used to kill the leviathan would become known as. A day of running helpless through the city and it took the Aelita only a few hours to stop it. If only the Tritan could have been so lucky. How many humans died on board? How much of this could have been prevented? We stayed in our drop ship the rest of the night. Not sure whether it would work or not we switched on the emergency beacon and watched the rain pelt our window before falling asleep.
It hardly ever rained on Errikus but now it was raining blue.
That night I dream of a new Errikus built over the bones of the leviathan. I imagined Eek telling their children about the warriors who slayed a monster so massive it couldn’t have come from this universe. I imagined generations passing and the survivors of this battle – if there were any others left building monuments to the fallen. I dreamt of the simulations that would be created, the games that would be played and the songs that would be sung.
In the sky the beast came, Breaking wind and rain, In the sky the humans fell, And so the beast was slain.
The next day a group of Autons ripped open the hull of the drop ship. The Auttons were machines, though some would call them android. They didn’t resemble humans though. They were bipedal but their bodies were metallic and came in different shapes and sizes with exaggerated limbs and little, if not no heads. They were a work force created as tools. They had no artificial intelligence, only programs and orders. Humans were afraid of such technology, that if we developed a walking talking A.I. it would rebel. In fact the only A.I. we had was on the ship and it was kept busy by calculating turns, checking crew status and making sure everything was in order. They told us immediately that we were three out of a few hundred that survived the attack. Then they asked if we were ready to leave.
They escorted us to the spaceport, shooting down any resistance that got in the way. The leviathan was dead but there were still plenty of babies around. The ticks had turned Errikus into a living hell.
A human drop ship took us onboard the Aelita. We couldn’t see anything from inside the cargo bay but we heard that the leviathan had actually made a few swipes at the hull, killing a group of humans called ‘caretakers’- apparently there was something special about them. The Aelita didn’t let any of the surviving Eek onboard. They left them in the ruins of the city. We weren’t even aloud to see what was left of the city. Even the Arr7 and Pok that had survived were left to wander the city’s decimated remains. They would all have to survive on their own against the ticks and against whatever else was to come. Aelita was a human ship and the only ally we allowed onboard was the Drok. The aliens that tried to board were shot. Riots by the Eek broke out. The Eek were shot on sight. It didn’t seem fair. The Aelita and the Erebus would be the only ships to come to Errikus for days, maybe weeks. These ships were the only ones capable of giving any kind of relief. Errikus was a dead planet, abandoned. Those that weren’t human, weren’t saved. There would be no songs sung for them, no praise for their courage. I imagined each survivor with their own story just like Aira, Hayden and I. Ours stories didn’t matter. This was a tremendous loss. The ‘Trinity’ was no more but the objective of our journey was still the same.
We were given food and then orders. I had only a moment with Aira. I kissed her goodbye as soldier tore us apart. She was being br
ought to her father and Hayden and I was being sent straight to the Erebus. We had been best friends for seven years and just survived the death and destruction of an entire planet. Now we were being torn apart by our own kind.
I had spent three days in hell but I knew we were all safe. I accepted my loss. It was on my way out I listened to soldier’s whisper and learned something horrible. The Erebus had captured something called a Trepp, a warrior species enslaved by the Skrav. One of the few the Skrav used in their war against other aliens. The humans on Erebus had tortured and beat them to the point of death. They had learned something very important from them. It wasn’t an accident that the leviathan attacked Errikus.
Living Space Out of the darkness a small slender creature crept. It stood just higher than our commanding officers knee. Its ears stood straight up and its black fur and long tail swept back and forth. It was gnawing on a huge, white bone pulled from the spine of some sea creature back on Errikus. It was almost impossible to tell were the bones disappeared and its sharp teeth began. Its nose was straight and narrow, sniffing the air as it sat on its long back legs. It made a small growling sound as we moved closer. Its black eyes looked us over. This was the first time I had ever seen a dog. It was the companion to the commander and had been bonded to him since birth. It would die for him, kill for his master and should anything happen to his master he would hunt down and kill without remorse whoever was responsible.
It reminded me of the bond I had to Aira. We should have never been torn apart! I requested immediately to be transferred back to the Aelita. Of course my requested was declined and there was nothing I could do about it. I had been drafted to the Erebus since my birth. This was the ship my mother served on and the ship she would have died on if the leviathan didn’t kill her. I would live the rest of my life upon this ship!
If they would have granted my request they would have to grant the requests of all the other residents on the Aelita and the Erebus. Not even the orphans were allows to break the structure of the fleet.. So this would be the beginning of my new life.
On my way to the Erebus there was another creature I had seen for the first time. They were the ones I had heard of before… they were called 'caretakers' and they clung to the sides of the ship’s hull. I couldn’t tell but it seemed like some of them were waving. They were twice the size of a normal person but they had no real human features at all except that they seemed bi pedal Their skin was a mix of bright, neon green. Actually, they looked more like turtles than humans. I was told that they drew energy from stars and radiation inside the immer - much like plants they were photosynthetic. They didn’t need to eat and they didn’t need to sleep. They were the perfect workers. They had had what seemed like arms grafted onto the shells of their bodies. There were two arms on their right side and a third on the left. They would use their third arm to hang onto the outside of ship. They lived there. Both the Aelita and Erebus had hundreds. The only way for a “normal” humans to communicate with them was through the ship’s A.I. hey were remarkable, a perfect creature capable of living in the vacuum of space.
As our transport was flying down the side of the Aelita, I could see their enormous black eyes staring at us, observing us. They were already repairing the giant gash the leviathan had made.
“Pay them no mind.” one of the soldiers onboard said. He went on to explain that sometime, in the last hudnred years both the Aelita and Erebus had begun to decay on the outside. The nanites that would constantly multiply on the sides of the hull were beginning to die out too. An eccentric scientist was the cause for this decay. He was caught mixing DNA from humans and various aliens that we created. Apparently his experiments involved unwilling citizens that were in and out of stasis. He was to be tried for crimes against humanity but instead of sentencing him to death, some elder insisted that he be forced to put his work to good use. End result, he created the first caretaker. Really it was no more than an egg with human limbs grafted on various parts of its body. It was constantly in pain. It had no idea why any of this was happening. It died a few days later and its body was then thrown out into the vast vacuum of space. The project was a success though. It showed the elders that the manipulation of DNA was possible. Their bodies were all clones. They would resurrect themselves every one hundred to two hundred years. They were constantly plugged into the ship’s A.I., which constantly processed and copied their consciousness. From there the scientist’s research was improved and finally he had created the right hybrid.
“Why can’t we use that technology on ourselves?” I asked. I was fascinated by it all. The idea of being immortal seemed like it would make our war with the Skrav much easier. Die, come back to life, then die again It would be an endless cycle of winning and losing but we would never have any reason to fear death. “We tried,” the soldier said, “we tried hundreds of times but every time someone came back they were a mess. They possessed memories of death or their bodies felt too much unlike their own - they would quickly lack the will to live or kill themselves all together– others just couldn’t handle it. The physical process of being in a new body was too much for them and they would die only after breathing for a few minutes. The caretakers out there lack all of those problems. They were created in lab and therefor, more an experiment then human.”
He even went on to explain how we tried to implant a regular human consciousness into a caretaker’s body. The same thing happened. The human mind couldn’t process being in the vacuum of space, even if their body was breathing for them so they willed them to die. He went on to talk about whether or not they had souls, it was apparently a popular question something that everyone liked to talk about onboard the starships.
I said nothing. I wasn't even sure if I had a soul. I couldn’t stop thinking about Aira or the other aliens and humans we had left behind. We were so quick to leave.
As we came over the top of the Aelita it was only then that we could see the Erebus. The hull was black but there was enough light so we were able to make out the ship. It had the slight shape of a rectangle with two massive engines coming out the backside of the ship. One pointed out at one end more than the other and like the Aelita, the front of it had two, maybe four massive points. Four massive warp core engines were on the back and a smaller ion engine was located on the top. Somewhere inside it was the immersion core (the engine we used to create the tear through the immer an travel through space). There was a swarm of caretakers surrounding the hangar like crustaceans on a shark. We were slowly moving closer and closer to the Erubus. It felt like we were about to be swallowed by a massive beast.
“Nothing to be afraid of. No caretaker has ever killed another human. It’s the regular humans on board the ship you need to worry about,” the officer next to me said. I wasn't afraid. On the surface of Errikus I had gone through hell. Nothing on this ship would scare me.
Our transport set down inside an engine bay near the bottom of the Erebus. As soon as the bay door opened we could see the room was full of humans, mostly wounded from exposure to the surface of Errikus. I slowly unfastened my seat belt and proceed to walk out the hanger door but I was tired and worn down from the travel. I was over exhausted. The room immediately began to spin and lights flickered in and out of clear view like hazard lights on oil rig. Minor radiation damage was starting to take its toll. The officer I was on the transport ship with had called a doctor for me, telling them it was urgent. That was the last thing I heard before I passed out. I was new to space flight and it had arleady begun to take its toll on my bruised body.
“Lucky to be alive you are,” the man in white said. My eyes followed his voice. I immediately though he was a Doctor. What kind I did not know. The room around me slowly began to clear. I was sitting naked on a dark blue table. I had several tubes filled with fluid running into my wrist and another running into the back of my neck. I wasn’t in any pain though. I actually felt euphoric when I woke up. I rubbed my head. I could barely make out the fact that the man in white was a
n older gentleman with a bald head with a black goatee; he seemed to glow like an antique crystal or star.
“My name is Damon, I’ll be monitoring your vitals and helping you adjust to life on board,” he said. I opened my mouth to respond, then shut it. “Whats the point of living I would just spend the next fifty to hundred years of my life in solitude separated from Aira,” I paused. “Why even exist?” “It doesn’t matter what you’re thinking now... “ he said. “But what right did he have to invade my mind, my thoughts!” I thought. What right do you have to know her!” “I know you had an awful experience but soon this will feel like nothing but a bad dream...” His voice seemed to soften and his expression seemed to slacken. “I know you had a horrible experience on Erikos,” he struggled to pronounce the name. How did he not know the planets name? Were all those tens of thousands of lives lost that meaningless – nothing more than another stop? “It doesn’t matter now...” he finished. “How long do I have to have these needles in me?” I asked. “Just long enough for us to cure you.” I hated the indirect answer. “That’s not an answer, and what so you mean by cure me?” I said with a sarcastic tone. He gave no replied, by passing my question. “Do you have somewhere to be Sev? Or is it Severance? What an awful name,” - “It’s Sev,” I said. Now I really was starting to feel angry. “Sev like Sever. Who knows. Maybe you’re the one from the prophecy. Perhaps I should let you die.” The doctor began to laugh. My first interaction with a human being not from Errikus or from Aelita was anything but pleasant. I was off to a bad start.
“I’m just kidding... you’ll have to pardon me. I am usually acting as a medic on the battlefield so when I’m not in stasis I tend to have a rather dark outlook on things. There have been hundreds over the years named Sev, of course none of them were the Sev from the prophecy. That would be ridiculous. Not like anyone knows what that fool Narville was trying to get at when he carved those three letters in the dirt. People tend to lose their heads when death approaches, I would know I’m the doctor.”
Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) Page 8