“Swoop,” it was Lore’s scrambled voice that spoke.
“That’s right I almost forgot we originally landed here because we saw some skimmers we were going to try and salvage,” she said almost smiling.
I went on to tell her about the one I had found several miles away. It seemed both the Skrav and Scourge were spread out in the area. We waited several hours for Hayden to become conscious. When he did he woke up screaming. The last thing he could remember was crashing, grabbing his gear and walking for what seemed like an eternity in nothing but a white haze. He talked about seeing several yeti like creature but we had no way of knowing whether he had been hallucinating or not.
Hayden was just as surprised to see Aira as I was.
She told him the same thing she told me. She wasn’t the same person.
We left Hayden alone as he learned from the holo and the three of us began to eat some of the rations found in the wreckage. The two of them seemed to have an understanding with one another. Some deep way of communicating that I didn’t quite understand. I could see something else buried deep in her eyes. Aira no longer felt like the person she was on Errikus but she was still compassionate. She still had the same heart.
“We have to get back to the Erebus, I don’t care what you do to Balkava but there is someone there I want to protect,” my voice was stern when I spoke as I wanted to be clear that I was making a statement and not a request, “a woman named Hera is there inside the bunker waiting for me.”
“Then she is in the core, that not a place you want to go Sev, not on that ship,” Aira said.
“Sev isn’t the only one with family on that ship, Brecca, one of our team and someone special to me is still there as well,” Hayden added.
“So I am suppose to help the two of you save your girlfriends over saving the future?” Aira smirked adding, “I will help both of you return to the Erebus but once we are there they are none of my concern, neither are the two of you, my only concern is with Balkava and if you or they try to defend her I will not hesitate to kill you,” she finished and with that we were back to silence. I noticed that when Hayden mentioned Brecca Lore’s head lifted as if he was remembering. I guess he was more then a pile of junk after all. Slowly my heart began to fill with hope.
“Why do you want to kill her so bad anyway? I know what you said in the holo, destiny, protecting humanity, protecting the fabric of reality and all but why bother, we’re here and already the future has changed so much. Zeus is dead so that future may not even be plausible now. All you are doing is putting your life at risk,” I said to Aira as I finished the last of my rations.
“Balkava has done more to hurt me then you will ever know, it was her order Zeus followed, there is so much more to the Erebus then you realize,” she replied. Aira was vague. I hated the way she spoke to me as if she was talking in riddles. It didn’t matter. I needed her help for better or worst to save Hera.
Midday We left the shuttle about midday. Up above us we could see several birds in the sky. The first non-predatory animal we had each encountered on this world with the exception of a few small insects here and there. Aira traveled on Lore’s shoulders while Hayden and myself walked behind the two of them. Lore was the gun and Aira acted as his eyes. Anything that looked hostile we shot at. It only took us several hours to get to the waypoint they had spotted the skimmers several miles from their camp. They were right. There was an entire squad of dead Skrav lying on the ground. Each looked like they had been torn apart by some kind of wild beast.
“What happened?” most Skrav could put up a good fight and their armor was most definitely stronger then ours and yet there were tons lying on the ground defeated and dead.
“Hellbeast, Scourge, something on this world we haven’t seen, you name it,” Aira answered. Every word she said seemed demeaning and yet it was easy to see she was just being straightforward telling me something we already knew the answer too.
There was one body among the dead I did recognize.
Laying facedown in the snow was Addax.
“He must have fallen all the way down, of course knowing him he might
have grabbed hold of some Skrav ship and glided down,” I was trying to remember him for the strong and funny man he was but my comment probably came off far more uncaring then I liked. I felt like Lore remembered his fallen friend the way he stood over the body.
“Addax fought bravely sacri ficing his body so that the rest of First Descent could survive. He was alongside Duv’Mir in the end but somewhere they must have gotten separated,” I said.
Lore looked at Addax and without hesitation lifted his old friend from the ground. The entire front side of Addax had been grinded to tiny bits, there was nothing left but flesh and metal.
Lore turned Addax around again as if waiting for his old friend to come back to life then it became clear. Lore was searching for Friday. Somewhere there was an invisible signal being transmitted across the snow-clad landscape. It was a message only Lore and others like him could hear. Aira though she had plenty of augmentations never had any kind of digital A.I. inside her head.
Lore took a small piece of wire from out of a storage capsule he had hidden behind his elbow. The wire had a small self-guiding needle attached to the end. Lore jabbed the needle into the back of Addax’s skull. A small amount of coagulated blood came oozing out of the new hole. It was disgusting and brutal but in less than a minute Lore had uploaded Friday and what little pieces of Addax’s consciousness remained into his own.
“So none of us really die after death do we?” I was half-joking but Aira replied by saying, “You have no idea.”
“Can he tell us anything about what happened here?”
Hayden chimed in wondering how Addax had ended up in this spot.
“Fell,” was all Lore/Addax could say.
He was processing the data Friday had collected and then slowly Lore/ Addax began to talk in a two voices at once…
“Moments will be gone, falling, ruins,World-eaters, sun-killers, leviathan-seraphim, dark-ones, past future,run,Falling, ruins, world-eaters, sun-killers, leviathan-seraphim, dark-ones, past-future,
Run, falling ruins, world-eaters, sun-killers, leviathan-seraphim, dark-ones, Past future, run, falling, ruins, world-eaters, sun-killers, Leviathan-seraphim, dark-ones, past-future, run, falling ruins, world-eaters, sun-killers, leviathanseraphim, dark-ones, past-future, run, falling, ruins, world-eaters, sun-killers, leviathan-seraphim, dark-ones, past-future, run, falling ruins, fell,Ruins, world-dead, sun gone, gods—dead, Immer-gone, time-dead, worlds-gone.” It kept going on until finally the Friday A.I. and Addax consciousness faded into nothing. Lore was silent once again. This was the song of two cybernetic friends; the words echoed coded line after line set on repeat it was Addax’s way of saying goodbye.
Moments later Lore buried Addax under the ground. Digging his grave with his brutish metal hands and in that moment Addax had become the first human buried on Eden-3.
Using the skimmers we made our way past ruined Lethe architecture entire cities ruined and buried beneath debris and snow. The entire orbital looked was like graveyards yet there wasn’t a single body or fossilized remain. Pieces of the Erebus, Aelita, and Skrav ship were spread out across the entire plain. We only took three skimmers as Aira rode on the front of Lore’s. He was her bodyguard but sometimes the way she looked at him reminded me of when we were children, she looked at him like a big brother, the same way she use to think of Dom, Hayden, and myself. She never did explain to me what happened to Dom. All she did was say I would find out for myself. I wasn’t sure what that meant but then again I didn’t really want to know. There were too many other questions that needed answering. All that was important now was reaching the Erebus. Dom was dead I watched him drown - I looked at him inside a coffin. I watched his family cry and for years I could never accept it. Haunted by it in my dreams.
It only took us half an hour at half speed to reach a mountain pass we couldn’t go a
round. Inside the pass we found our way blocked. The Erebus has scraped the top of the mountain while descending and caused several avalanches. There was no way up or through. We were stuck. On the other side of the mountain was everything and everyone.
We stood around for hours while Lore found a vantage point and began scanning for other possible ways around. Going around the entire mountain would take days. Time we didn’t have.
Lore scan luckily found an underground passageway. A natural cave system that ran inside the hollows of the mountain that had been carved out by the Lethe. Using his heavy weapon rifle he blasted a hole and forced an entrance wide enough we could fit our skimmers through.
The tunnels were lit by a strange white coating of crawling aphids and ash bugs that clung to the wet surface. None of the tunnels we were in were made for anything larger than small cargo though and we soon found ourselves walking once again.
“Once we’re out of here on the other side we should be able to see the Erebus, from there we can asses what to do and make our move against Balkava,” Hayden said.
It seemed he had no quarrel with killing Balkava though for some reason it still seemed wrong. I know that I couldn’t - there was never anything she did on the Erebus that I saw her do that would have made me think she was going to be the end of the human race. Both Balkava and Aira had saved my life many times without either of them I wouldn’t be alive now. Aira saved me when I was a child and Balkava saved me from Celes, an elder that had gone rogue and insane. An elder from her own ship. The elders were what had been wrong with the Erebus for years. Condemning the weak and favoring the strong; Balkava did this to an extent but never to the tyrannical levels I had read about in the past and most definitely not the past I had seen. The ‘Sons of Sol’ were never as bad as the ‘Black Suns’ as seen in my visions. One of the things Aira explained was that the ‘Black Suns’ were in fact a splinter group of the Templars the basis for which formed the ‘Sons of Sol’. In the end I wouldn’t be the one pulling the trigger, this was Aira’s vendetta and I just wanted to see Hera again. I had to stay out of it and hope for the best.
Inside the underground passage we found more ruins of what was. Each seemed to tell a story. The longer we stared at a wall the clearer every image seemed to become. Parts of this Orbital had been ripped from the dead world but other parts were ripped from Errikus itself and other planets that we had never heard of. There were millions who lived on this world and it had once been joined together by several others creating a cross like shape. The other orbitals had all but disappeared nothing left but ancient drawings and graffiti on the walls. Some of the images even looked like the Lethe had been at war with another strange alien race. War never seems to end. An endless cycle of violence found in nature as two or more species fight for dominance.
Halfway through the passage we found a small river. It was here we got to see the first animal (aside from a bird) that didn’t attack us or want us dead. It was floating on the edge of the riverbed like a jellyfish only it was four feet wide and two feet tall. It had three large white blemishes on top of it that looked like they could have been eyes or some other kind of sense we don’t know about. When we approached it we saw it slowly begin to move away as if it was afraid of us. In the river we could see strange looking fish and algae that seemed to glow. It was a magnificent creature. We rested for a little while and watched it gorge itself on fish that seemed to crawl inside of it. It reminded me of us, the whole of humanity seeking shelter inside the void only to find the Skrav and everything else we hate about the universe waiting here for us; we had become the fish and Eden had become our final resting place. It was tragic that the fish would die but yet it had to so that the jelly may thrive and survive. Was that our destiny? Where we to die so that the universe may find a way to survive without us? Whether we were here as a species or not it didn’t matter the universe would continue like nothing happened.
Hayden looked over at me, he could tell I was thinking pessimistically and told me to stop. Our moment of solitude and peace came to a quick end though. We weren’t alone inside the tunnels. The Skrav were making their way through from the other side.
It was an Eel that attacked us first.
I had only ever seen one in my visions. It was more threatening and scary then I had ever imagined. In real life I could feel my body tense as it slithered it’s way through the dirt and snow and emerged its mouth agape and teeth ready to shred any living matter to pieces. We fired on it the moment we saw it. It’s blood left a trail on the ground in the shape of a snake. Our weapons were far more advanced and lethal then the weapons fought with during the first invasion. As menacing as the Eel was we made quick work of it.
When it finally stopped moving the ground shook and emerged several Skrav. The scouts began their attack. Lore did the most damage to them tearing them apart with his heavy weapons rifle. Aira, Hayden, and I probably could have just set back and watched as the Skrav fired on his metal body leaving nothing but small dings and scratches. Black blemishes that covered his yellow hide. The scouts were unprepared and it showed. The entire firefight was over in one maybe two minutes and we had not a single casualty.
Hayden wanted to look closer at both the Eel and dead Skrav but no one else could stomach being in the area any longer. Even Lore seemed hard press to move on. We should have listened. The Skrav were so weak because they were nothing more then a small scouting party. Each of them had been marked with a tracer. It would have been easier to take our chances turning back. When we walked into the next chamber of ruins we found ourselves inside a domed city surrounded by Skrav elite. The Skrav elite had armor bonded to their bodies blades grafted to their wrists and even their second pair of arms the small ones near their stomach had been retrofitted with metal claws.
Lore was the biggest target and the first one hit.
He fell to the ground. We weren’t the only ones fighting with heavy weapons anymore. Each of us went to take cover behind the nearest dilapidated building we could. Hayden and I separated to one side while Aira ducked behind Lore for cover. We were outmatched and outnumbered.
On a ledge high above us they had a sniper. A really good one.
Aiming down at us from a high pillar above our heads in all there must have been thirty or forty of them surrounding us. It was too late to turn back. Each shot seemed to echo throughout the chamber. The Skrav were beginning to rush us.
Hayden was the first of us to go down but not dead.
A Skrav came over the side of the ruin we were hiding behind and struck him with a shot to the left shoulder. Neither of us had time to react or block the shot. Hayden threw his right hand in the air the sword he always carried with him. It pierced the visor and helmet of the Skrav.
In the gloom we could see shadows surrounding us, like dark paint against a light canvas one was holding what looked like it could be a rifle. The dark silhouettes didn’t look like Skrav though, could it be the Scourge had found us as well?
Silence fell.
Not a single shot was fired.
I was doing my best to stop Hayden’s arm from bleeding but he was nearly passed out against a wall. The Skrav blast had given him a bad dose of radiation on top of hitting an artery. My best friend was bleeding out and there was nothing I could do. The aphids in the chamber seemed to scatter and fade out. Soon we were overcome with darkness. The Skrav could be anywhere. All we were doing now was waiting for the inevitable. Lore lit up like a light bulb. When he did we could see throughout the entire chamber. Most of the Skrav had been slain and lay dead across the alleyways. The strange shadows stepped into the light in front of us. They were humanoid, pale as the white around us with black charcoal markings along their naked flesh. They had adapted to the cold so much so they needed very little if any clothing at all. Their faces seemed stretched upwards and curved at the top making it seem like their faces bulged. They spoke in a language none of us could translate not even Lore though no one can say he didn’t try. Ea
ch of the pale white figures was holding a bio-organic rifle that seemed to blend with their arm. I wasn’t sure if they were holding it or it was a part of them. Then one opened its mouth. Its jaw split in a trifecta creating a triangle of tongue and sharp pointed teeth. They had killed the Skrav and challenged us like an animal would any other trespassing on their territory.
Several shots to the face killed one. Several shots to the torso killed another. They died just as well as Skrav or any human would. It seemed strange now that this was our enemy. After Lore killed several dozen I almost felt sorry for them. Then they changed color. Their bodies shifted and blended with the snow while another turned black and red his flesh no longer naked but muscular and solid. Their weak fragile flesh had turned hard as a rock. It grabbed me by the throat and there was nothing I could do as it pushed me onto the ground. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Aira digging her claw into the body of another ripping away at it’s hardened flesh using all the strength she had.
Once it fell to the ground several limbs sprouted from its upper body. It wasn’t dead. It was evolving.
Terminus I can’t breath. There is too much water and nothing to grab onto. Why can’t anyone hear me?
Am I not screaming?
A light breeze blew over my face and produced a cold chill waking me from my unconscious. I wasn’t sure how long I had been out or even how I got that way. Everything around me was upside down and I couldn’t feel my arms or my legs. I was being carried.
‘What am I doing here,’ I asked myself. Not aloud. I didn’t want whoever it was carrying me to think I was awake. The answer was obvious - I was trying to get home. I just had to remind myself. Home seemed so far away now and I felt so helpless. On the ground below me I could see footprints from whoever or whatever it was that held me over their shoulder.
Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) Page 26