‘Their entire planet was destroyed in front of us. The human race had spilled the blood of millions of Skrav once forcing us into a war and now we had destroyed their home world killing billions.’
‘An eye for an eye’
Log – 42
00110011001101110011011100110111 ‘In dark corners there is talk. How did we know the Skrav were coming, how did we know they were planning to attack? In those same corners there is talk of a group of people called ‘users’, people who see the future. People that look through the eyes of others and can change the outcome of a fight. This is why Praxis wanted us to keep our eyes open. Even after all these years this was still an experiment. Through our eyes somewhere out there someone saw what we saw. They used us so they could destroy the Skrav. This was our true mission and now we were scrap. There are others out their and both human and Skrav will be at war together for a long long time. If you ever wonder why well now you know. Now you know what we did to them. They must have seen this future just like we saw ours. They weren’t attacking first they were protecting themselves.’
‘My fight had come to an end I won’t be leaving any more logs. I hope if the human race is still out there that we have found sanctuary and may God forgive us.’
01000111011011110110010000100000011001100110111101110010 01100111011010010111011001100101001000000111010101110011 Lore stopped and paused. For a moment it seemed as if he had shut down.
None of us could believe what we had heard. Everything the human race had done for the past three hundred years had been because of this war; a war it seemed we started, or didn’t start or could have found another way to end. We destroy the skrav the skrav destroy us and then we destroy the skrav. All our visions of the future had created a paradox. What would have happened had the Skrav not seen us as a threat? What if we had let them live? The nexus had done more harm then good. It seemed seeing the future was a curse and not a gift as we had once believed.
I was standing next to Hayden and Aira was off in the corner. Lore looked like a statue as if he was in some kind of deep trance or meditation. He was still talking to the ship. We saw his body turn and lift as he moved his rifle into the air. At first he was aiming it towards Aira and then he aimed it at me. Hayden moved himself in front of me and in front of an energy blast that tore a hole through his chest and into my side. Without hesitation Aira lifted her rifle and fired on Lore ripping through his armor at close range using the full force of the trigger. Lore sat against the console and the broken monitors in pieces. His body had become a shell. Aira knew exactly were to hit him.
Hayden lay in my arms dead. I stood in shock not from the pain but from the loss of my best friend. I will never forget his eyes the moment his life left his body. I was too injured to move. Aira pulled me away dragging my body as a trail of my own blood covered the ground behind us. The whole thing must have happened in thirty seconds or less. She shoved my bleeding body inside one of the few stasis chambers that was not completely bashed to pieces. I still remember the pain as the cold liquid oxygen covered my wound. Every breath I swallowed more and more. Drowning in liquid oxygen. We had no idea if this was going to work. I didn’t even care at the time whether I lived or died. Hayden was gone. Dom was gone. Hera was wounded. Balkava was apparently going to kill us all or turn us into slaves. I was staring into Aira’s eyes when the chamber froze around me and I became still.
The Bridge
Help. It’s so dark. I can’t see anything. I can’t feel anything. Anybody? Help me… I feel a shimmer of light hit my eyes and gleam off the stasis chamber door. Slowly I can feel my heart begin to beat and my blood begin to flow as each and every muscle in my body tenses as I scratch away the crust on my eyes waking up for however long it was that I had been asleep. I could feel the shards of nexus inside me like small splinters or glass. Some of the protein wall must have broken down from my injury but now it was sealing itself once more. I could still see a barrage of surreal and blurry faces and images in front of me like I was waking up from a long dream. A few of them I seemed to recognize but or the most part I saw bits and pieces of the lives of strangers, victims of attacks, victims of terrorists and the Skrav. What was it that had driven Lore to fire on us? It had to have been some kind of code written into the machine that saw the information we had gathered a threat.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Errikus. Ten years since the fall.
Humans now calling they the forgotten search for food amongst the ruins of the Tritan. The great starship had been torn apart like it was nothing by the Seraphim. It laid in pieces overgrown with the last of the aeouril biomass that once covered the place I had called home. Because of the biomass the area around the starship had ironically become one of the few places a human could still breathe in the city. Caretakers struggled with themselves over what to do, they no longer have a ship to maintain and life on a planet was never an option for them. Some of them crawled the ground with the husks of dried up ticks attached to their spine while others walk like zombies and fall into piles waiting for the Tritan to speak to them. Like monks having lost their religion they were without hope, without purpose. Eventually they will die out never able to fathom what has happened to them. The few humans left behind by the Erebus and Aelita struggle to survive gathering anything they deem remotely edible and raiding shops, guard posts, markets, and even old nursery’s still lined with the ashes of those passed away. A middle-aged man named Elante wore nothing more then a hazard suit and breather stapled together with various clothes and riot gear walked through what could only be described as a refugee camp. Homes rigged with biomass and mud stitched together by veins drug from the ashes of the tower and fresh water pumps rigged patched together flowing in and out of crevices towards the canal and undertow where Dom died. Off center from the heart of the city and to the side lay a crater and the bones of the seraphim. Part demonic creature, part human, and part leviathan it’s wings shed on the ground poisonous to the touch. The crater itself was full of radiation spikes and since the days after the fall rumors of people disappearing into thin air have spread around the various human and eek camps. The Eek maintained their own refuge amongst the hill some even scattered about across the world. They blamed us for everything that happened but never once did they try to hurt the ones left behind.
Elante walked up to a young woman named Hiraku holding a small crustacean called a chitling or chit for short. It was named for the taste and was only traded when an Eek owed someone food. It was a delicacy to most Eek but nearly impossible to stomach by any other species and yet it had all the vitamins and protein the body desired. Hiraku was much younger then I was, vaguely I could remember the name belonging to a small child. A child that always carried around a stuffed penguin and was never far from her mother or the other guardians. When the fall happened she was too young to remember. This devastated world was all she knew.
In the days after the fall (or rather 'the purge' as most will remember it) humans scattered about through the remains hoping the Aelita or Erebus would send help. Some gathered using sheets to spell out S.O.S. across the ground while others held onto flairs hoping to see a drop ship fly by in the sky above. Others less lucky lay buried under rubble for weeks surviving on the small bugs and roaches that crawled out from the ground and drinking from the veins of the biomass that kept them breathing. Elante was one of the few alive on the surface when the Aelita performed the ‘Hammer of God’ he was only a few hours away on foot from the spot the Aelita was rescuing the few like myself that were lucky enough to escape. As I lay still I watched the various moments in his life when he was hunting hellbeast with Eek, running from and dissecting the ticks and their hosts who still wandered the alleys of the city. I watched as he would walk by various ports and drop ships run dry and rusted from the toxic winds. When I was a child my mother pushed me to be a pilot. She would send me to the simulators several hours a week even when I would cry and scream how I didn’t want to go. Had she known
one day I would be forced to escape Errikus the way I did? Did she know I would be a part of ‘First Descent’ and that her lessons would save my life time and time again? She always told me I was something more then a user and destiny held great things for me. I always wrote it off as just something a mother would say. Even in death she was watching over me and teaching me how to fly, soar, and survive. For two months I saw through the various eyes of Elante and Hiraku and other survivors. I saw the things they did to survive
- some horrible and others amazing. For two months I lay in the still of stasis with nothing but my own thoughts and visions haunted by the death of Hayden.
I had been still for 2 Months. “Sev, are you awake? Can you hear me?” the voice belonged to Aira. I was on the ground inside the stasis chamber my naked body was still covered in the liquid oxygen. “How are you feeling?” she asked. I remained silent only looking up at her. I felt like I had been awake for days on end. I could still see Hiraku and Elante from my dreams. I began to look around. The Praxis looked the same as it did before. I was no longer in any pain and there was only a long thin mark from a surgical laser laid out across my side. “What happened?” I asked. “I hacked the ship and made it sorry about what happened, there is a medical bay here that still works. Moments after I put you in stasis it ran a diagnostic. It thought you were a threat somehow and had I not known how to hack you would be a goner. The lab started growing ghost organs. You’ve been in and out of stasis six times now each time for a new surgery.” “What happened to Hayden?” She looked down at the ground a small cat like creature called a Zeesk was rubbing its head on her legs. Using the mechanical claw that made up one of her hands she pierced her index finger. Slowly blood trickled down into the creature mouth. “I burned his body and buried him, a fate better then most. We’ve been alone out here for two months, a few days ago I managed to get a signal out. There should be someone coming for us any day now.”
I found it hard to believe she had waited so long but then I remembered how archaic this ship was, it must have taken her weeks just to understand the basics. It was one thing to hack it and talk to it but to send a signal she must have rebuilt the antenna array from scratch.
I looked down at my side again while getting dressed. Aira had managed to keep my battle suit ready and functioning for my return, she even sewed up the hole that Lore’s weapon had made. There was no more then a fading scar on my side. I honestly wished it would never go away. It was a reminder of what happened and a reminder of Hayden and how he gave his life for me. Something I would never forget. The only reminder I would have once it fades would be my new ghost organs. They had been grown from matter the Praxis herself gave to Aira. Apparently she had managed to teach the ship humility as well as manners. The organs had been downed and rinsed in chemicals so no cells remained nothing would be left except for cartilage and collagen. I could see it all now Aira placing the pieces inside me and coating them molding it into something new something my body would take. The connective tissue would regenerate while I slept reseeding with my own cells. It was almost a miracle that my body took when it did. Had the stasis chamber not frozen my body I would have bled out. This ‘ghosting’ technology had been lost to the Erebus for centuries. Sure we had access to 3D printers but only a few knew how to sculpt and sculpt correctly. Aira was just as much an artist and surgeon as she was a soldier. Most of the time on the ship we would simply inject some nanites inside someone that would begin healing and mending the wound but in this case we had no inoculations, no exotic alien organics, or even cyber parts. 3D printing was a beautiful art but a slow way to heal.
Aira showed me were she had buried Hayden. She told me how the Praxis had been attacked several times by hellbeast and how she found the Zeesk wandering through the passageways searching for food. She adopted it seeing as it like her felt alone and in need of a companion. I hadn’t realized how frail Aira had become, her skin an anemic white and her stomach and arms thinner then I had ever seen them. She had been surviving on what the ship had given her. Strange fruits that grew inside and the water that covered the control room floor. The Zeesk fed off her blood. I had heard of creatures like this living on exotic worlds that rotated around red dwarf stars. Some of the worlds I could remember Abas, Carath, Havancia, worlds full of strange life. I wondered how it got here and if it had been another experiment created by the Lethe; had it been another animal taken aboard an ark and brought to this new world? Something about this place seemed wrong. Why had the Lethe abandoned so many of their own worlds to come here? It was irrelevant. The Lethe were extinct and we had come here to make this our home. We would adapt just like the Zeesk. Aira seemed to favor talking to it. It reminded her of the dogs onboard the Aelita. Animals that never left their masters side and showed the greatest empathy for those in need. They were a part of the few good memories that she had clung too. Another two days passed before anyone came and when they did I recognized the leader of the scouting party right away. He looked older as if the last two months had aged him quite a bit but I had no doubt. It was Talon.
He came riding up to the Praxis riding on a creature called a Belau. It was had a long neck that stretched like a giraffe maybe ten-twelve feet into the air covered in black hair that dreaded and came down two-three feet all across its neck. It’s face was shaped like a horse with two eyes and an nose except for it had sharp fangs, curved tusks, and long ears that seemed to flail in the wind. Its body was round with two birdlike legs and two short arms that hung down as nothing more then extra appendages. Talon was on it’s back with several weeks worth of supplies. A few others were with him each traveling on the same blue birds each with several weeks’ worth of rations. They’re bodies were covered in red battle armor similar to my own and they each held a M44 to their side. On their way to us they must have had several run –ins with the local wildlife.
The first thing he did when he saw me was pull a gun. Aira blocked his shot and he screamed, “He has to die,” he screamed. I walked up to him unarmed and put my hand out. I didn’t understand why Talon was cursing my name and calling for my execution but I wasn’t afraid of dying. I would just be joining my friends on the other side. He looked angry and full of rage until finally Aira calmed him down and explained everything that had happened from my crash landing to our encounter with the Tesh-Kar and Praxis to my wounds and ghost organs and how I had been asleep and couldn’t have done any of horrible things he had begun accusing me of. Talon looked at me with a dirty smile and said, “Balkava has made you her poster boy, a martyr for her revolution.” “What revolution?” I said, “the one that becomes the reason she must die,” Aira was the one that answered looking me directly in the eye. I knew she had felt like taking care of me had caused her to fail her mission.
Talon began to explain. At first I didn’t need the details when he spoke about the battle and the sacrifice Hera was ready to make. I knew if he had survived then the crew onboard the Erebus never burned up in the atmosphere and that there were thousands of survivors. What I didn’t know was Talon was in fact more then half cybernetic. He was the first one I had ever seen that didn’t wear his implants and augmentations were they could be seen. Looking at him you would think he was hundred percent human. When I confronted him about it and explained how I saw through his eyes because of the shards inside me, something he wasn’t too happy about, he told me as a child he had been in an accident aboard a drop ship with his family. They were doing trade with the Arr7 who fixed his body making him whole again. Unlike Lore and Addax his mind was left untouched. When I told Talon about my visions I was pleased to tell him and Aira about the survivors the other humans alive on Errikus. If they had survived then there could be more on other worlds spread across the galaxy. This didn’t make up for the fact that Talon felt he had been violated but it did help mend the wound between us.
It seems such a harmless act. Seeing through someone else’s eyes and watching what they are doing. It was for the betterment of the world
. If I could have used the nexus to see what Balkava was going to do and stop her I would have. Talon told us ‘First Descent’ was the first to rebel. The moment Balkava landed she began waking people from stasis and using several new deathsquads of soldiers, some nobody had ever seen and others taken from Echo and Delta. She slaughtered dozens just to send a message. She then proclaimed herself empress and ruler as the only surviving elder. The humans and Skrav have all carved out their own territories on this planet. Balkava was the first to attack them sending a few hundred to their death but weakening them enough she could take control of the wreckage of both the Aelita and Skrav ships. She recovered the Aelita’s nexus and said I was the one using it. She was using my name and reputation to bend the surviving humans to her will. She manipulated everyone all the while converting the Erebus into a fortress.
“Using Skrav drones she scanned the inside of Eden-3 and found it was much more then just an orbital. This entire place is energy plant and research station. The Lethe were doing something here, building something that would make FTL look like it was a walk in the park and make travel through the immer obsolete. Before we could find out anymore she hung us up to dry saying it was your order and command. ‘First Descent’ or what was left of them anyway: Trevor, Meddix, and Brecca fought back but they were no match. Meddix and Trevor managed to escape and have been posted on a place we call the bridge fighting Skrav since but Brecca was captured and beheaded. They called it a sacrifice. They made an example out of her and used the opportunity to enforce her new order,” Talon said. Hayden would have been mortified if he was still alive. He loved Brecca though he never said it. I could only hope if there was an afterlife they were together in it.
Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) Page 29