Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1)

by Stephen Landry

  There was only one guard in the room with her. It took me two seconds to plunge my knife into his heart. I took off my jacket and walked over to the girl. I couldn't imagine what she must be going through. It made me think of Anna, my mother, my sister. I never felt better about killing these bastards.

  "This is for you, our medic will be here in a minute," I told her, "can you tell me what happened?" She didn't say a word instead she pulled away in fear. It was more fear in her then anyone I had ever seen. She wasn't afraid of dying though, she was afraid of whatever they had planned. That was when I saw it. Her tongue had been cut out and her eyes had been burned black. The green glow was from some kind of phosphoric acid they had used to torture her.

  "What do we do with her?" One of my men asked. Everyone was silent as the medic spoke, "I gave her some painkiller, morphine, powerful stuff... she is bleeding from her legs and wrists, she is blind and can't speak, it looks like she might be deaf as well I can't tell her whole body is in shock." "Send her to sleep," said the French resistance member, "if that was me I wouldn't want to live."

  The medic took our morphine and injected it into her arm. She was bleeding so bad we almost weren't sure it would work but then we saw her smile and pass.

  All around us lay the dead. Male and female body parts played out in design. The girl was a sacrifice. "What kind of god would want something like this?" I said aloud. "Even in the darkest of times life has meaning," said the medic. Then I saw it. A book lying between the girls legs. "This wasn't for a god, this was meant for a demon," I said flipping through the incantations and drawings in blood written on pages of human skin. It was here in the devils handbook we found the map. The American was the one who found it, "There, an island in the South Pacific, Japanese territory, This says long ago an ancient god came to Earth and brought with him the power to see the future." They were sacrificing to their god. I slammed my fist on the table and shot three bullets into the dead guard, "This was their secret weapon. The reason we destroyed an entire city. All for what some voodoo, some black magic that doesn't exist."

  The next day we were given a new nickname, our task force became Cold Squad. Our next mission, infiltrate Black Island in the south Pacific and destroy or hold whatever it is the Nazis believe they have found.

  Dear Anna, I'm sorry. I will be closer to home then I have been in years in the next few days but please don't think I will be coming home. Even if I did I would no longer be the man you fell in love with. This war has taken its toll on my heart and mind. My soul is forfeit but I know if you can live on, if you can find love, raise a family I will be happy. I will see you on the other side for in heaven there is no jealousy between man or woman. I will wait for you. Tell my mother I love her.

  Forever yours,

  - Joseph 19 May 1944

  Machina

  “Get him out of their now!” Balkava screamed as I awoke… I felt my heart stop beating as I went into cardiac arrest. I struggled to breath. I felt like someone had just dropped a weight on my chest. It was a rare side effect of using the nexus too much. After what I had just seen it become witness too it didn't surprise me. I had been spectator to plenty of horrible things inside but that girl, the way she was tortured. I felt like could remember every cut like they were my own. It took the doctor a few minutes to get me stable. In that time I felt like I was floating. It felt like I had woken up inside another world.

  This was my life. I was a ghost trapped in so very many bodies… and there was only one in which I had even the slightest bit of control over. “Sev?” Balkava was sitting next to me. We were lying in bed naked under the sheets. “Yea?” I said wondering what she would be asking or ordering from me next.

  “You haven’t seemed like yourself lately, what’s wrong?” It had been weeks now since I had used the nexus. I was taking a break. My body was in need of healing and the doctor was worried my mind would break if I kept using daily. I had never felt so trapped on this ship. Even simulations felt worthless and fake compared to how the nexus made me feel. I put my hand on her inner thigh and began to rub it with my hand. No one said anything about what I had seen. They didn’t think anything of it but I knew there was something more to it. There was something about what I had seen through Joseph Everett. I knew it was a small part of a bigger picture. “Nothing is wrong,” I said climbing on top of her. I was avoiding the situation the best way possible.

  Balkava had always said I was a better lover then I was a fighter. Not like I had any real combat experience anyway. We had been adrift in the immer for years and I hadn’t seen a Trepp or Skrav since I was a child. She had told me once how when she was a child she had been forced into combat much like I was on Errikus. Only a few times did the Skrav ever manage to board a human ship and she experienced firsthand what it was like. She told me the story dozens of times - a group of 'elite' Skrav had managed to eject from their assualt ships and climb aboard the hull of the Erebus during a small skirmish. They waited several days before killing a group of caretakers and sneaking inside. The room Balkava was training in was one of the first that got hit. She lost her family and most of her friends in the attack. She ran for hours crawling inside vents inside the ship while a group of elders attacked the Skrav. She was lost and found days later wandering the ship. When they found her she had been covered in blood it seemed she had taken a Skrav on in a fight and barely managed to survive. The elders found it unbelievable that a child held their own even against a weakened Skrav but the facts were the facts. This was when the elders saw fit to begin training her for combat and another reason they had no objections to making her a part of there consul. She was a living legend; the child-Skrav killer and merciless Balkava.

  During the few weeks I spent in bed with Balkava a crew led by Hayden pulled in the space debris and began studying it. It was Lethe. They managed to dig out a pair of coordinates from it. Coordinates that the the elders had decided were close enough to our destination that we would make a detour. We weren’t the only ones that had sought out the Eden and come this far. It seemed like the Lethe were leaving us a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. We were nearly there and the Lethe had rolled out the red carpet.

  Hayden and I sat at our lunch table in the mess. It was our daily routine to meet for lunch and talk about our day and the night before. If we weren’t eating in the mess sometimes we would sneak our way into the hangar and sit inside one of the drop ships and just waste the day away. I would usually talk about Balkava and the nexus and he would talk about some kind of scientific breakthrough or new weapon they were developing. Hayden's job was suppose to be non-disclosure but when it came to me he never had any problems keeping his mouth shut. Today I had some strange questions on my

  mind. In all my time on the Erebus I had only seen 1/8th of the ship. The rest was used for stasis, living space or had been deemed off limits by the elders. It was rumored that parts of the ship were crawling with monsters. Why had so much of the ship been made off limits to us? This was our home and we could only wander through so much. Another question popped into my head... something strange I had never asked before…

  “Where does our food come from?”

  “Do you really want to know?” he answered with a question. “Yeah hit me it can’t be worse then some of the things we ate back on Errikus,” I said. It was true on Errikus we had eaten ration snacks made from printed protein, farm animals, and grains but on the Erebus there were no farms, some of the food was printed and there were a few plants from Earth but nothing significant enough to feed a crew that numbered in the thousands.

  “We scrape it off a Chev,” he said.

  “WHAT?” I exhaled.

  “Well it’s kinda like a huge whale or like a giant genetic cow regenerates it’s body parts within a day or two. It doesn’t feel pain when we cut into it, it was created for exactly this purpose,” he said it all so calmly.

  “What does the Chev eat?” I asked. “That’s easy. It sucks up a mixture of grain and sewage a
nd on top of that it uses the same technique that the caretakers use to make energy. It’s so big it doesn’t move it just sits and eats slop all day. It actually has it pretty good from what I’ve heard.”

  "So its a whale that eats shit?" I said watching Hayden smile and nod. My mind wandered wondering what the Chev looked like. It must be larger then a drop ship; I wondered how much of the ship it took up. It must have been engineered to live a very long time as well. How could such a weird creature exist? Hayden would tell me it was years and years of genetic manipulation.

  Food enough to feed the hungry.

  I felt sick.

  I couldn’t finish my meal. I never should have asked where the food came from.

  That night instead of going to my room or Balkava’s room I walked around the Erebus. It was time I explored. An auton sat motionless inside a dark corridor lit only by small phosphorus lights that seemed to make everything glow with a purple aura. It was hard to make out at first. It was so still it looked like it could have been a park of the wall. Its body was made of dark silver metal with loose wires hanging here and there. It had a shape that mimicked a man who slept with a raptor but the proportions were all wrong and there was no face only a rectangular box full of sensors. If we had built them too human we would never know they were machines. The auton must have sensed I was there. They had hundreds of sensors built into their hands. They were created long ago their bodies worn down. If they had been left in the elements they would have rusted and withered away. The auton was watching something... something in the dark. I walked closer and closer standing only a few yards away when the machine rose. It must have stood seven or eight feet nearly touching the ceiling. Then it turned its upper body one hundred and eighty degrees around and faced me. I felt fear. Never had one of our machines attacked a human being but I knew I wasn’t where I was suppose to be and there was so much to this world that I didn’t understand.

  It reached its hand out towards me. Four fingers stretched like silver metal claws. I felt like it was going to attack. Slowly I moved my legs bracing myself. I was ready for the machine to strike. Perhaps I was a better soldier then I led myself to believe. Then the auton took off. It went from standing still to running in a flash. Its body disappeared into the dark where the lights were too dim to see. I felt relief believing I had scared it away.

  I had only walked a few blocks down from the part of the ship I had known. I was nearing one of the stasis chambers. I couldn’t believe I had never been here before. It all felt familiar but horrifying at the same time. I felt alone. I looked close at the first naked body I saw. They littered the walls. I could see inside. The small pods were filled with water. Faces covered with breathing masks, bodies covered in wire and tubes that monitored brain acitivty and kept their bodies alive. This part of the ship seemed more organic then metal. Small jagged strips that looked and felt like leather replaced the straight walls I had become so use to. From the floor to the ceiling it seemed as if I was standing inside a small rib cage. Between each rib there was a body. I stared into the face of a young girl, probably in her early twenties. She would be about the same age as me but she was in reality much older then I was. She could have been a hundred years old for all I knew. She was not any of the crew from Errikus or a soldier. She had probably been in stasis waking up once every few decades. I pitied her. She was living a life made of nothing. All she had were her dreams. This ship was probably all she ever knew.

  The corridor seemed to never end. I must have walked over an hour. If it wasn’t a straight line I would have felt lost. I was lost. My legs were beginning to hurt and my brain was telling me I needed to turn back. I must have been somewhere around the center of the ship. The more I pushed forward the longer it would take me to get back. I sat and decided to rest. I would have brought a backpack if I knew this would be such a hike. It seemed almost as if gravity itself was stronger in this part of the ship. Every few minutes I would feel a force pushing me side to side. The ship must have been turning or slightly moving from left to right. Bodies seemed to sway in their tanks. Out of the hundreds of pods I went past I didn't recognize a single person. There faces all seemed to blend together. I was about to give up on my adventure when I heard a scream.

  I ran as fast as my legs could carry me. I was guided by the dim purple and blue lights spaced throughout the chamber. The scream was a woman. It couldn’t have been someone too young but not too old either. It was clear they were calling for help. I finally came upon the source of the cry. The auton was holding a woman in her mid forties by the neck. It’s claws grasped around her digging its lifeless fingers inside her skin. I watched as she bled over it’s dark metallic hull. I had no weapon. My body would be no match for the machine. I couldn’t just watch. I ran towards the machine and started beating its stomach with my fists. The auton had no weak spots. None that I had been taught anyway. The only way one could be stopped was for it to be disassembled or blown apart.

  Originally the autons were workers built for repairing starships and space stations, mining asteroids, doing the work that most caretakers do now. During our first few years they became one of the first weapons we used against the Skrav. Fighting side by side with soldiers. They were obsolete though. Skrav weaponry could tear through an auton like a knife through butter. Wave after wave we would send only for them to be devoured. They were a joke. They couldn’t strategize the way a human could and no man was about to give them the power of self-preservation. What was I looking at than? The ship’s could have given a command to them but why? Any command would have to be traced back to a human programmer and the ship’s mind was loyal to humanity.

  One of the first lines of code made certain robots couldn't harm humans. My fists began to bleed. The skin around my knuckles tore layer after layer. I put aside the pain and watched helplessly as the woman stared down at me. Her naked body shook. Her hands grasped the auton’s arms as she kicked her legs and feet trying to break the hold it had on her. I wondered if her life had flashed before her eyes. A part of me wondered if she felt relief in the end. Had she been a soldier or had she slept her life away with nothing more then decades of dreams between her birth and now? I finally took a step back. All I could do was watch. I posed like a warrior, my bloody fists ready to attack and defend. I was ready for the auton to turn and kill me but it did no such thing. It laid the woman down on the ground slowly and then on its knees its hand closed the woman’s eyes.

  The auton moved into a position of prayer though it’s disproportion made it seem more like it was a beast hovering over dead prey. Like a wolf guarding a feast. Then a shadow, a black silhouette came forward from the dark. The beast was bowing to its master.

  The Pawn “Don’t they teach you to stay out of this part of the ship?” A voice cried out from the darkness. The auton stood up from its prayer position and faced me its body hunched over like a troll. I had witnessed how dangerous it could be first hand now and I had no idea what I was dealing with. I thought about turning and running back the way I came but already I was so far gone - hours away from my bunk, my bed, my gun.

  “Wait, you are Sev are you not?” the voice said. I still couldn’t see who was speaking to me but I could tell from the tone and pitch of the voice that it must have been an elder. Their voice was raspy and old. The figure continued to speak to me from the dark, “I’m sorry for what you have just seen, that must have been horrible.” The elder began to walk forward. I could see a small part of his dark grey robe in the light. Fear, paranoia, anxiety. All of these feelings began to take hold and overwhelm me. If this was an elder and I was in for a fight I couldn't kill him? I couldn't murder a member of the consul and get away - there was literally nowhere to run and the auton could move a hell of a lot faster then I can. I run anyway. I run before I can even see the elder’s face. I had just seen a machine and an elder murder - no - I saw them execute a living breathing woman.

  I make my way several yards but behind me the elder gives a nod and a
simple order to the auton to take me down. Within a few seconds the auton is on top of me. Pushing my arms to the ground holding my body tightly in place. The blood on my knuckles spills across the floor and over the machine. Its like being mauled by a wolf. “God damn robot,” I scream. The elder speaks to me in a soft voice telling me to calm down. My feelings are too overwhelming and I keep fighting. There is nothing that will make me give up. The auton turns its face one hundred and eighty degrees facing the elder. Then another nod as the elder gives an order to have me knocked unconscious.

  It must have known exactly how much pressure it would take to put me out. It would barely take a second for it to calculate my weight, height, muscle mass, it probably could have put me out several different ways but it chose to head-butt me taking the small one percent chance it could have glitched or somehow cracked my skull.

  I am being carried in the arms of the auton like a child being put to bed. My body is numb. My vision is blurry but it doesn’t matter - there is only the spine of the ceiling to see. I am placed down softly in a chair in a dark room I have never seen before. My hands they are bound by chains and I don’t even remember how they got that way. I must have been in and out of consciousness for hours. There is another figure in the room with the elder and me. The auton stands behind me. I can feel the heat from its metallic body. In front of me there is a bucket of water a few feet wide. The auton pushes my face forward. Its cold metal claw covers the back part of my skull. I feel the water hit my face, my open mouth. I feel the water pour and burn inside my nose and behind the eyes I was struggling so hard to open. The moment I start to feel like I am drowning the auton pulls me up by my hair.