solid white and shaped like an old Earth shuttle from the 21st century crossed with a tri rotor drone. It’s wings spread out 30 feet to both the left and the right. Three giant rotors made up the bottom half of the ship. The back was were the small immersion core and ion drive sat. At least one auton was bonded to the back of the ship to help maintain it and supply navigational data.
We left the Erebus at night, at least what counted as night on the ship. Everyone was out of the hangar as we departed. The Aelita was going to be waiting for us just a few minutes away. We looked through our porthole windows and saw the hull of the Erebus crawling with caretakers. That wasn’t all we saw though. When we crossed the bottom part of the Erebus we decided to take a look at where the walls of the underbelly had been. Parts of the hull had been ripped away, chunks blown out from accidental explosions. Small black spots crawled on the surface just outside the holes. The antliods were more adaptable then we had given them credit. They moved slowly through the vacuum of space but they were alive.
After maneuvering around the Erebus we saw the Aelita on the horizon. It was only a quarter of the size of the Erebus. It resembled a cross. Two massive rail and energy based weapons pointed outward from the front while it’s wings spread out. Its body was longer and more slender then the Erebus. I thought about the first time I saw it coming out of the immer and fighting the Seraphim. The way it positioned itself above the ground pointing down and hammering blast after blast into that monster. It seemed so calm now. It sat in wait as we positioned our little ship on the side of its hull. This was the closest to Aira I had been in ten years. We were hitching a ride to the Parcae. After a few moments we took off through the immer leaving the Erebus behind hoping it would catch up to us in a few days.
It only took a few hours for us to drop out of the immer at our destination above Parcae. It was even more massive then we thought. We were so close it was the only thing we could see on the horizon. Our ship unhinged from the Aelita and began to drop. The Parcae was so large it had it’s own gravitational force and began pulling us into orbit around it. We pushed on our thrusters and slowed ourselves down. If we hadn’t we could have lost control and crashed ending our mission in a flurry of fire. The Aelita released drone after drone feeding information to both them and us. We did the same scanning searching for a port entrance.
Hours passed and we found no way in. We finally decided our only choice was to make our own. Our three rotors hovered over the Morta. They stopped and we felt the entire ship pull and settle as the ancient metal clashed with our own. Each of us stripped down and put on a space suit. It was more of a power suit weighing nearly a ton. Controlled by our movement inside through microfibers and touch. We covered our face with a breather and our eyes with a visor and each of us helped the other tap the helmet into place. A liquid gel filled in around our body inside the suit. If any part of the suit became punctured the liquid would harden. This guaranteed we wouldn’t suffocate or lose pressure. Too many mistakes had been made in the past. We each took an M77 rifle. This time we weren’t worried about stealth or silence.
Once we were in our suits we sealed the oxygen in the ship and stored it. This was it. If we came out of our suits now our eyes would bleed and our lungs would freeze. We let the vacuum of space come inside; inviting it inside like it was our guest of honor. Then we began to drill against the hard surface of the halo. Ten maybe twenty minutes passed and the small four-foot hole in the Morta opened up. The piece of metal we drilled fell to the floor inside the station. There was gravity. Hayden let loose three little spheres. The spheres were light weight automatic drones that would map out the station and send any and all relative data to the wristbands on our space suit.
One after another we dropped inside each of us falling to our knees and then standing up rifle in hand. I was last inside when suddenly blue soft lights began to shine all around us illuminating the hallway in every direction. It was like someone had rolled out the red carpet. When we looked up at the hole we had cut we saw a field of red and grey honeycombs appear and in a few seconds our gateway inside had been repaired. Nothing we had could repair the hull of a starship or space station that quickly. “Nano machines,” Hayden said, but they were far more advanced then any we had developed. “The walls must be crawling with them,” he continued. Information given to us from the drones said there was oxygen but not the right amount for us to breath. It was a good sign though. This meant Anathem's plan to evacuate to Parcae could be successful.
We began to walk to what the drone told us wasone of the many control centers scattered about the station. It only took a few minutes before we reached a grey metal door. Inside we found a lab. Tubes filled with yellow liquid held bone and body of animals too torn and decayed to identify. We could see pieces of flesh wrapped around brittle bone. Some of the faces inside seemed to resemble human but then the foreheads, nose, and lower jaw all seemed abstract. Bodies resembled lizards, snakes, birds with a combination of human limbs, finger, toes and some were a combination of both. The lab seemed to go on forever as hundreds of tubes spread out row after row one abomination after another with no two looking alike. Every kind of chimera you could ever imagine was here. “Is this what the Lethe did?” I asked. It was a question that would go unanswered. Nobody was listening. We were all awestruck in horror. Our triumphant return to hell. We continued to walk until we found the control center. It was a large circular room. The walls were inscribed with images and a language dead for hundreds of millennia. Hayden looked around for an interface like a system familiar to what the Arr7 had told us about. There was nothing. The only thing we found that was familiar was the language on the wall and even it seemed different then the bits and pieces we had found before. Wherever we were it was far older then any of the ruins or ships we had discovered before.
In the center of the room there was a mound. It seemed to almost blend in with the darkness and light that surrounded us. It was the place everything ran. All of the language and writing in the room seemed to spiral outward from it. On top of the mound there was a sphere. It was glowing red. When I saw it I felt warm. I felt like I was inside the nexus. My body no longer felt like my body. I was looking through my eyes reaching out towards the sphere. When my glove touched it the red light dispersed through the room all around us. Each one of us began to hear a deep gravely voice whispering louder and louder in our ear until it was screaming. The language the voice spoke in was nothing we could understand and it was so fast none of us could even try to repeat it back or keep up with it. By the time we began recording it was over. We had only caught the tail end.
Suddenly we were all hungry and our mouths dry. When Hayden checked the PDA on his wrist it had gone black. We had no map and no way out and we couldn’t take control of the station. Then our comms shut down. There was nothing anyone could say to each other so we began to use hand signals. Duv’Mir carved instructions and words onto the Lethe landscape. Lucky for us we could still move. The power suits relied heavily on the wireless electronics for comm and information gathering built in but the body itself had its own backup power supply. We walked and walked until we finally found a tunnel that would take us into the Decima ring. Hour after hour past by. Lore and Trevor were now working together to help carry Hayden who had passed out from exhaustion. Our suits were beginning to feel heavy. The backup power supply was beginning to run down. We only had hours before we would stop moving and become encased in our power armor like tombs. It would be like being buried alive. You wouldn’t be paralyzed you would still be able to feel and wiggle your toes. Your brain would tell you there was nothing wrong but you would be held down by the weight of the suit unable to move. Eventually the visor would go dark and you would be blind. If you didn’t starve or force off your breather to drown eventually your air would run out and you would suffocate. It would be like dying inside an isolation tank. Even if we could breath the air in here there was no way we could take our suits off now. Even if we were found i
n a shutdown state if someone tried to cut us out the liquid gel would harden and crush us.
Lore signaled for us to stand back and hold on. He pointed his gun at the hull of the ship and relentlessly began firing. Over and over he fired the energy from his gun slowly began melting through the alien metal. A few minutes passed as our visors lit up by the light from Lore’s gun. Then there was nothing. Lore blew a hole eight feet tall and wide in the side of Decima ring giving his life in the process. Our suits rebooted as we watched the red and gray honeycombs slowly begin to appear over the gap. We only had seconds.
Each of us took the other’s hand dropping our ri fles and jumping out and swinging onto the side of Decima ring. Brecca was last and the gap closed tearing her arm off. The liquid gel inside her suit hardened keeping her from bleeding out and numbing the pain. She breathed in an aerosol from her breather filled with enough painkillers to keep her from going into shock. Duv’Mir called the Dawn to come and get us. Duv'Mir's signal turned on the autopilot and the machine tracked us. In the distance we could see Lore floating away into the black void that surrounded us. There was nothing we could do to rescue him.
Over the comms we could hear him whispering the names of his family. Then we heard his last words. There were so many things he could have said before he was out of range. So many things that would have haunted each of us the rest of our lives but Lore had said the worst. “Skrav,” he screamed. There was silence. He was so far away we couldn’t see him anymore. We couldn’t see any Skrav ships or fighters anywhere. Paranoia began to get the best of us. We weren’t sure if he was hallucinating or giving us a warning. We waited for what seemed like an eternity. Staring into the darkness that surrounded us above and below. The Dawn finally picked us up. One after the other we crawled into the airlock and then pressurized the ship releasing oxygen into the air. Each of us took off our helmets and took a moment of silence to enjoy the air and the freedom of feeling our own bodies as we got use to our skin again. The Erebus was close by. We had been gone three days.
Duv’Mir took control of the Dawn and began flying us home. We weren’t sure what we should report. Parcae was a deathtrap. The atmosphere wouldn’t support the crew of the Erebus and the ship itself was a maze. We were walking on thin ice if that was our best hope and what should we say about Lore’s last words... “Skrav.” They echoed in my head. If they were out there how long had they been following us. Were they even following us or were they waiting. Some Skrav ships were faster then our own. It was always the nexus that gave us our upper hand allowing us to create strategies based on attacks we knew would happen. Every time we fought them on our own we lost. We could push and shove them and get a head start running but eventually they always caught up. Duv’Mir did a scan of the area and only two ships showed and both of them were ours not counting the Parcae.
When we arrived on the Erebus we were greeted by Balkava and a handful of guards. Each guard saluted us as a sign of respect. We had become heroes, the first humans to set foot inside the ancient world of the Lethe. It was strange. None of the other elders had shown. I had expected to see Anathem the moment we came down off the ship. Nobody acted like they were in danger either. The threat of the antliods seemed to have gone away. Even the barricade that separated the hangar and one of the hallways antliods had been spotted had been taken down.
“What happened to Anathem?” I asked. The only elder that came to greet us stood before me. Balkava.
“He has passed,” she said those three words without any remorse. “Dead?” I exclaimed.
“The consul was having a emergency meeting in the mess when we were ambushed by antliods...”
She looked all of us over to gauge our reaction.
“I have control of the ship,” she said.
The Dead World Balkava had led a group of soldiers through the passageways of the Erebus herself pushing back the antliods. She amputated parts of the biomass that was infected and burned. Her actions pushed back the infection that slowed the starship to a halt. With assault fighters she tore chunks from the hull scraping off the antliods that crawled on the surface, pilots said it was like scraping tar from the bottom of your shoe. Parts of the ship had now become sealed permanently as the vacuum of space leaked inside and swallowed those that might have survived had we found another way. Those that weren’t in stasis were now armed and ready to fight. Rumors said Balkava had been planning this all along that she had waited for the consul to gather together in one room and that she gunned all of them down herself. It wasn’t hard to imagine. Either way she now had full control of the ship. She was captain.
Our mission to the Parcae wasn’t a total loss. Somehow a ton of information about Lethe had been uploaded to the New Dawn which then passed into the Erebus like an information virus. We had everything they had now. It would take years for the Erebus to sort through it all but it was all there, millions of terabytes of data and secrets. Balkava ordered the Aelita to work on finding a way to adapt the Nano machines we had seen used on Parcae to our ships. The Aelita slowly and meticulously began shaving samples of the new technology and storing it onboard their ship. The Nano machines were like ants continuously tearing down and rebuilding the structure that made up the outer shell of Parcae. If a part of the Parcae became damaged in any way it became a priority for the nanites to fix it. We were lucky they didn’t see us as a threat or we might have been dissolved. The Nano machines could dissolve every kind of matter tested against it. It
was similar to a weapon we had used in the 22nd century during the first invasion. I knew I had seen it before. It was a weapon thought lost to us but now with this rediscovery we could make it even deadlier. Entire worlds could be purged with the nanites if we decided. We held the weapons of a culture that once ruled the galaxy.
Both the space debris Hayden and I had investigated months ago and the Parcae gave coordinates for what we presumed now was Eden. Balkava had been right about one thing. We were close. Closer then we had been in three hundred years. We would be there in one or two months. We had no idea what we were going to find the only information that existed was that it was a physical place and we would call sanctuary. Many hoped and prayed it would be a place to start over. A world we could colonize and not worry about the Skrav or Trepp destroying. Everything seemed to being going as planned.
The next few weeks we continued to have skirmishes with the antliods but we were free from the hold they had on the ship. Sightings of leviathan and seraphs also became more and more common while we were inside the immer. Several times we had to drop out. The Erebus was getting old and beginning to breakdown. Caretakers worked harder then ever repairing and maintaining the hull. Over and over the drives were taken apart and rebuilt by autons. Everything was turning back to normal and we were back to a being a society.
Even though the ship had no seasons we still celebrated festivals based on the seasons of an ancient Earth. Autumn’s festival came and hundreds of humans celebrated eating and drinking food and wine sent to us from the Aelita. They didn’t deliver it in person but instead they sent their autons who stayed providing even more relief. I played my guitar at the festival with Meddix playing drums and Hayden playing bass. Duv’Mir even joined in on the fun surprising us all by showing us he could play guitar. We spent night after night practicing together. We played music I had learned inside the nexus as well as some songs we had created ourselves. There was very little that beat the rush I felt watching people sing and dance. For hours we played watching everyone celebrate until finally the hours passed by and what would have been night turned into day and everyone exhausted settled back into their quarters. The next several days were spent cleaning up and talking over and over about the celebration.
Hayden developed a cybernetic arm for Brecca. The two of them slowly grew closer and closer until finally they were never far from each other. I even saw Brecca stay the night with Hayden several times. Most would have looked down on a Drok and human spending so much time togethe
r but people knew Hayden. They knew the things he had done to save this ship. The differences between human and Drok were barely visible anymore. Only some of the eldest held contempt and nobody cared what they thought. First Descent as a whole was still one of the best squads on the Erebus. We trained every other day and all of us had grown close. A man named Addax replaced Lore. He had been a friend of Lore’s and volunteered. He had twice as many cybernetics; Addax was more machine then human. Addax had implants throughout his body; his eyes, arms, legs all installed by the Arr7. He even carried an Arr7 consciousness - A.I. inside him. It fed him battlefield data and information but it was so much more then that it was also a companion. He named the A.I. 'Friday'.
I was with Balkava in the mess when we heard someone had spotted the silhouette of a planet ahead of us. We were slowly repairing our relationship with small talk and lunches. Soon the Aelita and the Erebus were flying side by side through the immer. The Aelita was under the Erebus with its topside facing the opposite direction of our own. Together both ships flew faster. The Aelita was close enough you could reach out and touch it though you would have lost your arm given the speed we were flying. The hulls of the ships vibrated together as if they were one. Had the Tritan still been around it would have joined the two ships tearing through the immer and out of the darkness into the real.
When we arrived and came out of the immer we saw a massive star that looked just like our own sun. The star was a dot in the distance our journey from here would be done using the ion drives. We couldn’t risk pulling anything out of the immer so close to our goal. It looked the way I had seen our sun inside the nexus. It was immense larger then the star that Errikus revolved around. The Erebus and Aelita flew through a gas cloud at the edge of the system. We detected several gas giants and one rocky planet alongside millions of asteroids. The way the asteroids were scattered was similar to the asteroid belt that lay behind Mars in Earth’s planetary system. It was perfect. Each asteroid was high in rare metals and natural elements. The rare metals made this area of space nearly invisible to radar and other tools we had relied on for so long navigating the stars. They also blocked the exact location of the planet we had discovered. We let loose several drones and began our final search for Eden.
Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) Page 17