Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1)

by Stephen Landry

  He could feel himself drowning, drowning in the jabberwocky’s cage... With so many ways to fall, this is where he fell.

  The jabberwocky’s breath grew near, he could feel the heat radiating

  from the beast, and he could sense its scales, its presence as it closed in for its kill.

  In that moment he heard a voice cry out of the darkness. It was the crying of a young girl. He thought ‘Was this Alice?’ Her crying became louder and louder. He could tell that the girl was near. In his heart he knew he was never a hero, he was never anything, he was nothing to anybody, he had lived his life being fake to those he was with and never cared about... but this crying girl, somewhere in his heart he knew, he knew that he cared about her. His eyes adjusted to the light as he broke forth from his chains, the adrenaline filled his body. Rage, anger, hatred, and all those things that filled his heart he felt whither away as he crawled forward towards the crying girl. The jabberwocky attacked biting his arm, ripping his flesh, he could feel his bone break under his skin.

  Weakened, beaten, bruised, sore he kept going... Nothing was going to stop him, not even that of the most evil. He finally reached the girl. He felt her soft skin. He could feel the tension that ran through her body, the fear, and the pain. He felt he was too blame... but he knew like himself the girl had fallen into the jabberwocky’s pit just as he had. It was then that he knew the only way they would get out was together.

  The jabberwocky hissed and the boy screamed. In that moment... the boy felt just as every bit as evil as the jabberwocky itself and he realized this fight in the darkness was his own. He stumbled to catch his grip, he tripped and fell, he could hear the girl crying, and the girl he knew in his heart that he loved, his first, and his forever....

  LASTING DAMAGE She was gone. There was little we could do. Hera’s mind had been warped by the nexus and her life, the person she was before had been erased. In the days after she woke up she closed herself off to all of us, throwing fits the moment someone entered her quiet dark room. It was Aira’s Zeesk that became her first friend. It had been following Aira hiding in the shadows ever since we left the bridge. It drank blood but it was sweet at the same time and unafraid of us. Of course I would almost expect anything that drank blood the way it did to be unafraid. Somehow it seemed to know there was something special and or perhaps that there was something very wrong with Hera. It was the first living thing that she saw that brought her happiness. From the hallway and through holos we watched her slowly progress from staring at the animal with curiosity to holding it. Soon enough the two were actually cuddling and sleeping in the same bed together. The Zeesk protected her and watched over her. When any of us tried to visit her or even bring her food Hera would scream even forcing us to at times leave the food on the floor. We would watch as she ate like a feral animal throwing utensils to the side. After a few weeks she began come back to us. Least in some ways. Slowly she began to think of us as a friends viewing us with the same contempt and curiosity she had when she saw the Zeesk.

  She never said my name nor formed words but the fear she had felt slowly faded as her skin returned to its normal tone. She even started to use a spoon again. Neither Aira nor I ever left her side. Talon on the other hand had gathered the remaining members of the resistance and led them to the wreckage of the Erebus. It was in the ruins that we formed a new colony and put several of the Cypher leaders on trial. It became obvious that the Cyphers were full of regret. There was nothing they could do that would make up for the slaughter and crimes they had committed not just under Balkava but also as the secret police that forced the law of the elders in the shadows. They were the inquisition and so many had reason to hate them. Many were exiled given food and a weapon and sent into the wilds of Eden-3. They were told to use their talents for killing against the Skrav and to protect the human race from afar. Many of the Cyphers including the leader that I had first given orders to took solace in their new mission and walked away from the ruins of the Erebus with their head held high proud to serve. A few that had been absent from the slaughter were allowed to stay and rebuild with the rest of the community the only punishment was they were stripped of their weapons though for many the dissent they felt inside was their actual punishment.

  Eventually weeks turned into months. The Erebus had somewhat a nice place. Several of us continued to live inside the walls of the ship. Others began building in the surrounding area using the wrecked ships that couldn’t fly and even pieces of hull from the Erebus that had broken off to create housing and even a few small shops here and there. Aira and I managed the medical center. It was my way of staying close to Hera. I couldn’t help but think Aira did it to stay close to me. The Cyphers that weren’t in exile buried the bodies of the dead that had been hooked to the ship, the hive mind, the secret that had finally been exposed to all. In the end though there were less than a few thousand of us left and a few hundred Drok when the winter finally ended and summer began. The snow melted and with it we began exploring more of our new home. The New Dawn, the dropship of First Descent was rebuilt and given to Aira and myself by Talon.

  Talon made a great leader for the colony and was one of the few smart, caring, and tactful enough to lead it. Below him was the council, a group elected made up of heroes and soldiers that helped break ground both after Balkava’s defeat and when we first landed. Talon was the first to design and build a well that tapped into the groundwater below the settlement and when food became scarce he led a group into the wild and came back with herds of animals that could be bred and milked. We even found a stasis chamber inside the Erebus full of preserved seeds. Plants from Earth and the Drok home world hundreds of years old ready to be planted in the fertile soil that surrounded us. I even found my guitar hidden still in one piece though slightly out of tune inside a storage compartment in Hera’s room. I tried once to play it for her hoping that it would somehow bring her back to me. She stared at me as I sang and played but there was nothing. No matter what song I sang it was all as if she was hearing it for the first time.

  Everyone pulled their own weight, those that couldn’t work were taken care of by others whether in shifts or by full time guardians, mostly veterans that seemed to find a new purpose in life taking care of those less fortunate. Many of the other resistance fighters that were injured became pilots or technicians; some even found their calling in art and writing. For the first time in hundreds of years humanity had begun to think creatively again; thinking outside the box and ignoring the laws the elders had been instilled inside all of us. The dark era had finally come to an end.

  Hera’s eyes were so full of life. Everything was new to her as if she had the mind of a child. I would sometimes lay awake wondering if somewhere inside she was still there; the other part of her holding her own hand in the back of her mind. Hera had always talked about starting over, being reborn. I could still remember the day she told me that she believed in reincarnation. That somehow that was what linked all of us through the nexus. We are all one being living an endless stream of lives neither bound by time or place.

  By the time six months had passed I could no longer remain at her side. I would visit her often but the more I stayed around her the harder it all became for both of us. I felt like I was no longer looking at the woman that I loved but rather a whole new person. A child born into an adult body at the end of a war. There were times I wanted to scream at her to remember all of the things that she had forgotten. Hera represented the innocence our kind. In many ways her affliction had become a gift.

  The Zeesk had grown to be half the size of a grown man no longer small and light. It was Hera’s guardian and keeper now more then ever. Most nights I would wake up screaming. I constantly had nightmares about the Olethro, about Hayden, Hera, and the Skrav. I could never stop blaming myself. Night after night I suffered until finally it felt like there was nothing left. One night even Hera and the Zeesk snuck into my room and she laid beside me. She in my arms and the Zeesk against my feet.
It would be the last time I held her. There was no place for me in this new world and I was no longer any use to anyone.

  It was Aira that found me inside one of the storage lockers in the bowels of the Erebus. I had the tip of an M44 in my mouth holding it in the nub were the fingers I lost use to be. I could taste the metal against my tongue and feel the two cold triggers brush lightly against my palm. One was an energy blast that would disintegrate my face in an instant and the other a projectile that would rip my flesh apart. I couldn’t hear her when she walked in I was too surrounded by my own thoughts voices in my head screaming at me. She pulled the gun away and slapped me. She didn’t say a word she just looked at me sternly and then out of nowhere she smiled and laughed like she did when we were children. She took my hand and led me to the New Dawn. That night we left the colony to see the ruins of the Aelita. She told me there was one more thing I needed to see, then if I really had to, if this world was that dark and cold she wouldn’t stop me the next time I decided I wanted to meditate with a rifle against my lips.

  Talon sent a patrol alongside us not long after we took off. The ruins of the Aelita were twisted in a mountain of metal. You could barely tell it was once a starship it had become so warped. Still several parts of it remained intact. Perhaps even enough for a second smaller city. I followed behind Aira as she crawled through several tunnels that had been slam packed together. Through the dust and remains of we crawled down upward into the driveshaft. It was nothing like the driveshaft of the Erebus, though at one point it had probably been much worst. When Aira had taken over the Aelita against her father the first thing she did was remove the horrors and monsters that had been created. When we entered the core I was terrified of what I was going to see. She could remove the monsters but the Aelita still flew side by side with the Erebus for years so it had to have a cadaver pilot otherwise it would have become immobile.

  The walls that should have held the dead were polished and clean. When we walked through the door into the heart there was only one body in the center. I couldn’t believe my eyes; I felt my heart skip a beat and lost my breath as I began to cry. Dom stood before me fully aged just as old as I was. He was lying in a tank that looked like a bath wires down fromhis head, spine, and arms into a thick white liquid that preserved his corpse all across his flesh. He opened his eyes looked at me and smiled. Aira began to explain how after he “died” his body was found and brought aboard the Aelita. Using Lethe tech on Errikus the Eek had kept his mind alive something they had been instructed to do for any humans that died during our short stay on that planet. After being brought onboard the Aelita and rigged to the wall something triggered and his heart began to beat again. He wasn’t alive and he wasn’t dead, Dom was a living cadaver. Perhaps it was a glitch or maybe perhaps there was something special about him but his mind was enough to pilot the ship.

  Aira soon showed me how to hook up and speak to Dom through virtual reality. It took several hours for the two of us to boot the program up and fix the machines. Once inside the two of us stood on the banks of Errikus. It felt so real, even the air felt fresh just like it did then. Everything was vivid and full of life. Sitting with his feet in the water was the avatar of Dom. I hugged him and began to cry.

  “It’s been a long time,” I felt like I barely recognized his voice. It was deeper, more refined but I guess mine had become that way too. We spent the next several hours catching up. I spilled my heart out. Most of it he already knew, Aira had been visiting him constantly almost as much as I saw Hera and he had been able to monitor most of the events that happened on Eden-3 via what was left of the Aelita. Before I became too weary to stay inside the simulation anymore he told me one last thing, “We are not alone, during the voyage of the trinity there were thousands of humans that left, scattered among the stars, not just those we called remnants or deserts or exots and runners. There are entire human cultures among the stars waiting searching for a world they can call home. Even Errikus now nothing more then ruins of an old world still harbors thousands of human lives.” It was hard to take in at first, the idea that we weren’t the last of our kind, the exposure of another lie the elders had taught us. I felt like deep down in every one of us we knew that though. During our journey we had been running so long and so fast those that couldn’t keep up had no choice but to go into hiding.

  It took several weeks but we soon moved Dom’s body and consciousness to the ruins of the Erebus. Unlike Narville who’s mind was never fully copied to the Erebus Dom’s consciousness could be transferred by his will alone from ship to ship or even from a ship to a drone. It would have made the move a lot simpler but Dom insisted we take his still aging body with us. He explained the process though it was still hard to fathom how they copied his mind, memories, everything he was into the ship. He told us how he truly believed the Dom we knew was actually dead and he was nothing more then a copy. It was hard but Aira and I had spent years mourning the death of our friend. The new Dom was more then a copy to both of us. Even he mourned the death of what he called Dom Prime and thanked him for if not for his death he never would have been given life. Keeping his original body was the ultimate reminder of his humanity and a place he felt he could store himself that felt like home. Bodies were used to process data and control the ship and it was also the most effective and sentimental way to move him from the ruins to his new home. With his body and the biomass still growing in the Erebus he alone could pilot a new ship. Even when Dom’s body decayed and rotted away becoming nothing more then soil inside a metal hull Dom’s mind could live forever. He was immortal. That wasn’t his wish; he felt symbiotic to Dom’s body and wanted to make sure that when the time came his consciousness withered inside whether that was fifty to a hundred years. He said his worst fear was slipping away that he would become something else. Even in the years he has been alive he has felt his way of thinking transform in a way that he felt he was becoming more machine then human.

  With Talon’s help we commissioned and began rebuilding a new ship around the skeleton of the Erebus’s immersion core. The minds inside were purged and Dom was uploaded inside. Several autons from the Aelita were found and programmed to do much of the welding and assembly. They worked day and night side by side with human crews. Parts of the hull were taken and used for the colony while other pieces taken from the ruins of the Aelita and Praxis were used to make the new ship space worthy. Cree and Talon also began a project reverse engineering and cleaning Lethe technology. If we were going to venture back into the stars we would need something to trade and ancient tech was valuable to collectors, antiquity dealers, merchant traders, and relic hunters. In the process of breaking apart pieces of the Erebus we also found a communication relay that could be used at long distances. Dom explained that this was something the Erebus activated called Protocol 17. It was a beacon, a message written in the human tongue that was an invitation with coordinates to our new home. It was one of twenty two fail safes programmed into the ship like a virus by Mace and the Archaeon in case it were to fall in battle to the Skrav or should the human population inside die out.

  ———— — — We had only been building for several months when we saw a Skrav ship in the night sky. Families took shelter in caves that we had cleared and begun using for storage. The colony had been flourishing for almost a year. If they wanted to they could glass us all. For several days they hovered over us as if they were taunting us with their power, waiting for us to fight back before they devoured what little we had left. Then just as quickly as they came they left disappearing from the night sky. Some wondered if it was a mirage, some kind of mass hallucination or trick. We all knew though what we saw. The Skrav would have easily been able to see the colony and the ruins of starships scattered across the orbital’s surface. They could have finally gotten revenge on us for what we did to their world and yet they did nothing. Maybe they thought we were nothing to fear anymore since it seemed we were no longer capable of space travel. Perhaps they made a note of w
here we were and decided to go hunt the rest of the humans in the galaxy before finishing us off. We could speculate for days but truth is no one will ever know why they came and went at least for now we were thankful we were safe.

  Two years from the day of Balkava’s death I brought flowers to Hera. I walked into her room and with the new fingers I had grafted onto my hand I took the stem of one and placed it on the table next to her bed. She was the same as she had been before. Still mute and broken but perfect in her own way. Like Dom she was someone else now. Hera 2.0. I told her the news. I was leaving Eden- 3. I began to cry as I apologized for it. I didn’t want her to think I was running away, even if she had no idea who I was anymore I was still a part of her new life. I was the stranger that visits, that joked and smiled sang her songs and played games with her for no reason at all. Before leaving I made Talon promise to watch over her and keep her safe and most of all to keep her smiling. He would have done it anyway.

  The new starship was named Elpis, named for the Greek personification and spirit of hope. It was smaller then the Erebus but still bigger then the Aelita though we were only taking a small crew of thirty aboard. I guess in a way Balkava was right - in the end we built on the ashes of the old using human and Lethe technology just like she had said. Her ideas were pure but her means to and end were rotten. On the Elpis Dom was the heart of it all, Aira was the commander, and I was going onboard as the first officer. I felt like it was my calling, I finally realized I had people that needed me. Somewhere in my mind I could feel both Hayden and Hera’s voice telling me it was the right thing to do.

  No one knows what the future holds. Once again I was setting off into the stars. The first time I was a mess, lost, and following orders. This time I went willingly into the unknown in a search for the survivors, the humans still alive in the unknown. We had no idea what we might find or what aliens we might run into but we had to offer the humans, the survivors, the ones we left behind a choice; they could stay living among the alien worlds or they could come to Eden-3. For better or for worst we had no idea whether the colony would last or what the people here could become but it was finally a place we could call home.