Slow Burn (Deep Darkness Book 0)

by Stephen Landry

  The battle looks like a firefly in the distance. We jump again. This time we come out firing on the freighter tearing it apart. We are in a straight shot towards Miguel and his transport ship. The guns begin to overload. Suddenly the world stops. Time seems to stand still. I feel us jump inside the immer a third time. Reynold's ship was unique in that it can jump inside the immer. Surely that's something they are working on installing on all the ships. Only a few experimental ones in the 4th and 5th fleet (which aren't even suppose to exist) are suppose to have immersion cores but most of the fighters and transports the trinity is carrying are only equipped with ion drives. I stare down at the skrav sword in my hand for what feels like an eternity. When time moves forward again I feel like we have stopped moving. I can feel us drifting. The screens are black. I feel an immense pressure in the air as if I am falling.

  Reynolds had merged the two ships together and we were crashing.

  I guess this is what happens when an unmovable object collides with an unstoppable force. They both cease to exist and become one. Reynold's ship was fused to the inside of Miguel's transport and we were falling through the atmosphere of Shear. If I wasn't already blacking out before we hit the ground I would have been shitting myself senseless.

  Log - 41

  My eye's adjusted to the low light inside the control room. I was still sitting back against my chair, my gun and sword laying on the ground beside me. I could smell the fumes in the air. The metal on the outside fused with metal on the inside and blood, like the inside of a poor factory. Last time I smelled anything like this I saw two ships collide at a space port. Incidents like that were rare but from time to time they happened. This was intentional. Reynolds knew exactly what he was doing though I doubt this last part was a part of his plan. A creature was standing over him holding a pistol. The creature looked like a god damn werewolf wearing a cloak. Like something from a 1980's horror movie.

  "If you want to do something right you have to do it yourself," the voice. The creature. It took a shot at Reynolds knee. Reynolds body flinched. " I hate getting my hands dirty, you stupid bitch, you couldn't even get one thing right could you, after I SAVED you again and again, all you had to do was blow this geezer's head off," the voice spoke again turning towards me. It looked like it was growling. "All the right people are dead and gone and here we are stuck on the edge of the fucking galaxy," the voice spoke again, it was familiar. Staring at the creature I couldn't believe it but I knew. The creature took another shot at Reynolds other knee. Miguel.

  He already knew what he was doing. He didn't just believe that transgenics were going to be a success he was a variant, a hybrid, the living embodiment of his dream. Half-man half-wolf, bi-pedal, capable of speech but stronger, faster, more vicious. I always knew there was something about his voice when he spoke, a strain as he formed words like a hiss. He took out a knife and stabbed it down into Reynolds hand immediately pulling it upward and hacking at his chest, "old man can't move, plugged into the machine he might as well be a robot, not even human anymore, not even alien like me, just a god damn computer," he was laughing now as he continued to hack away at Reynold's body now gasping for air. Reynolds might now have been able to defend himself plugged into the computers but he was feeling everything. Maybe he deserved it but I didn't care. Not anymore. I wasn't a slave. Not his, not Miguel's. I shot Reynolds in the head as Miguel hacked away. He turned towards me growling.

  "Little Red, what big breasts you have, oh how delicious you are, my meat, finally we meet again, it's been too long," Miguel hisses the words letting saliva drip from his tongue. His armor is covered in Reynolds blood, a few wounds of his own. He's limping towards me. I aim down the sights of my rifle and fire. The blast of energy hits him in the shoulder but he moves quicker towards me. I feel him push the rifle from my arms and plant me on the ground. He uses his weight against me holding me down as he moves his tongue against my cheek. I try and hit him but he grabs my arms. I try to maneuver my legs, shift my weight but nothing works. I stare over at the Skrav sword on the ground next to me as I scream truly afraid wishing I were dead.

  I feel like I'm drowning. Waves crash over me. I'm someplace else. A dream? No. It's a vision. Some kind of magic, hocus pocus, I feel like I have been pulled from my body. When I open my eyes I'm back on Earth but it's not my Earth. Its Earth so long ago. Before the collapse, before the resource wars, before the world wars. People are dressed like they are Victorian. Everyone is smiling as the sun shines bright in the sky. My body isn't moving the way I tell it. My face is turning in different directions. I can feel the muscles on my face smile as a man approaches me with a rose. I somehow know I am in love with him as the endorphins in my body release the closer he moves towards me. I blink and I'm gone. I'm in a bedroom. Another body. I'm with a woman. A beautiful woman. I can feel her hand brushing against my hair. I love it. I never want to leave but soon I am gone again.

  I am digging a sword into a young man right below his chest. I can see the pain in his eyes. Sadness. I am somewhere in the future. It feels like hundreds of years. Everyone looks different, still human but like they have been surviving, living in ruins, living in space too long. Still they are the same. I look down with my eyes and see his hands reached out wrapped around my neck. He's choking me. He's killing me.

  I'm being murdered in two places at the same time.

  I feel my body lose grip on the sword as I continue to try and tear away at his flesh. His hands tighten. The two of us are locked away together in this moment in time forever; an instant that lasts an eternity. I see my reflection in his eyes. I feel the tears falling down her cheek. She lets go and I watch as she takes her last breath. The cold air turns to vapor and dissipates around her. The life leaves her eyes. I begin falling. Miguel is sitting above me. He is trying to tear my clothes off. He dropped his guard for a moment. Must have been while I was in my daze. I manage to turn on my side and grab the skrav sword. I plunge it into his chest and push him off of me. He falls back against the chair. Blood running down from where the sword has impaled him. I stand as fast as I can and kick it deeper inside him.

  Laughing he say, "I thought I had you, thought the Nexus I took from the Aelita would have slowed you down seeing as you have the gift, guess it doesn't last long for all, didn't even get my last fix, been having hell of a time keeping these instincts under control," he chokes on his blood, "one more gift before I go, you and me, our history, you should know. Kal didn't die that day," he chokes again this time pulling out a dog tag, parts of it burned but still recognizable, "they found me, experimented on me, they showed me the future, they showed me what they were planning, the end of the world and all the horrors. We are such beautiful monsters. We keep going through all this trouble to survive and for what? I wanted more," he looks at me like he wants to say more. I'm already fighting against the visions. I feel them. An aura around me trying to pull me in. He called it the nexus. All I see is a stupid rock around laying on the ground. Something he stole. Something alien. I pick up the rifle from the ground. He uses what energy he has left and lifts his hand in the air in front of me. I hear him mumble 'no, wait' before I fire. Kal was dead. He died a long time ago. This monster might have shared parts of him, parts of his charred body underneath but they weren't the same. I had heard the rumors a long time ago. The name Miguel, a title, passed from one leader to another each with their own ideology, each worst then the other. None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered - no one lays their fucking hands on me unless I let them.

  Log - 42

  Cillian and Chel broke through the dropship doors. They moved towards me with a medical kit. I remember falling back in slow motion the world a purple haze around me. I felt like I was in a dream. For the next twenty-four hours I was in and out of consciousness as we abandoned the planet Shear leaving behind Miguel's forces and a few of our own in the rush. We didn't leave them defenseless. There was enough firepower on the ground for them to hold their own aga
ins the Skrav scouting ship that was nearing the planet. They would have to put up a hard fight but if they were as determined against them as they were against their own kind they would have no problem holding their own. Even a few of the dropships left behind could be repaired so if they chose they too could follow us out into the void. Most likely they would search for their own home in the stars. If they were as devoted to transgenics as Kal was I could only imagine what they might be like 200 years from now. They were on a different path then us and when we left we accepted that. The last thing we could do with so few of us remaining was force our own exodus.

  Cillian explained the to me that the shard had been an alien element discovered on Earth known as the Nexus. An artifact that let certain individuals known as users see into the past, present, and future to various degrees. I was one of them. A user. From that moment on my life would be dedicated to studying and using the Nexus to unlock its secrets. It had been the reason humanity fled into the stars in the first place. Possibly even the reason the Skrav had attacked us in the first place. The reason we were always one step ahead.

  We were at least 200 years maybe more from our destination. An area of space called the void. An area which we hoped we could find clues that would lead us to a world we began calling New Eden, a world seen through the eyes of seers, a paradise that would be home to humanity. When I arrived back aboard the Erebus much of the chaos had already been sorted. Not much had changed. The Elders were still in charge but already a few of the refugees that had come aboard had gained enough merit that they had a voice in all matters. Contingencies were put in place to make sure the Elders were kept in check. I was one of them. I was offered the chance to go back into stasis. The chance to sleep away the world, no one would have blamed me after all that I had been through. I declined. I opted to stay awake. To live aboard the Erebus as a passenger with the authority to intervene if any of the Elders stepped out of line. I was the first leader of a black ops team called 'First Descent'. Back at what I did best.

  I started living with Cillian and Chel. The two of them even joined my team. We were three years out from Shear when we received a message from a drone we had left behind. The drone revealed that the survivors of Shear managed to take down the Skrav starship with ease only for a second to appear from the immer a year later. They escaped the planet having poured all their resources into repairing the damaged ships. They even used the prototype immersion cores from Reynold's damaged dropship. They left heading in a different direction than us just before the second Skrav ship glassed what was left of their world. Shear was nothing but dust. They may have been our enemies but they were still human. We prayed for them in the end. We held a memorial and built a small shrine to remember them. We carved their names on the wall of the ship.

  The Nexus let us see the future but nothing was certain. What I saw inside. The battles we would fight, the worlds, the aliens, human colonies lost. All of it was in flux. Even the Elders accepted that the Nexus was no longer our salvation and that it had been a mistake not to have fought for Earth.

  We sent a few drones ahead of us. Their was some kind of relay network inside the immer that made communication with them easier to follow. There were more alien worlds then we could count. Already we had detected another habitable world ten years away. It felt like we were following breadcrumbs. The further we ventured the farther down the rabbit hole we were. This world was inhabited by human like figures. The drones sent us back images of their tanned skin, yellow veins and red eyes. They were what humanity would have evolved into had we stayed on our natural environment on Earth. Wild speculation began forming that maybe we were not the only humans in the universe. That possible our world was one of many created by another species. Ancient astronauts and all that. It didn't really matter. We weren't alone and our survival was dependent on us making friends. Maybe this was our chance to make right what we lost.

  This will be my last log. The last of what I write to you. From here forward I am leaving the future in your hands. Please be patient. Be kind. Be better then what we were. Last but not least I have one final message, beware of the one called Sev.

  The End.

  BONUS

  Elegy

  The night summons her away, 'til day's dawn.

  Once I came here with light... now darkness glimmers.

  Sev

  I swapped out the battery on my rifle for another, breathed in and exhaled as I took my shot around the wall of the cave. I could smell the air burning around me. A tight burst, there and back again of energy glimmered against a Skrav. It fell to the ground on its knee with a thud, the sound echoed around us. I let out a second shot and killed it. Another loud echo. The other Skrav were closing in and they had already taken out the other Eek soldiers that had followed us on our mission.

  "Didn't the Aggregate swear this asteroid was uninhabited?" Aira yelled.

  I could barely hear her voice over the sound of a footsteps rushing towards us. The two of us along with several other human soldiers from the Elpis were trapped deep inside the caves of an asteroid that had been terraformed by an unknown source. We had been running black ops missions for The Aggregate, an alien collective for almost a year now. This was our first encounter with the Skrav since we had left our new world of Eden-3. This mission wouldn't have gone so poorly had they they just done their jobs. I was in charge. Not that I wanted to be. I was the god-killer, but between Aira and I she was the one with the most experience.

  We lost half our people after we took our dropship, the New Dawn, down to the surface. We found no trace of terraforming technology on the outside so we began to dig deep. We found several caverns below and began investigating. Our discovery soon led to our demise. We were trapped in the caves as we took one wrong turn after another. Right now our chance of surviving was nearing zero but I couldn't help but remember I had been in tighter spots then this and we had to complete the mission.

  As a child I was one of the first humans born on an alien world. Inside an alien colony called Errikus I lost everything. My mother, my best friend (long story short but his consciousness now inhabits the Elpis), my innocence. I was trained at a young age to fight, to fly, to trust in my own instincts and survive. I had to win. Not just for myself anymore. I was fighting for a cause greater then my own. The Aggregate were helping conceal humanity's presence in the stars keeping the Skrav in their own territory but here they were.

  "A simple scouting mission to find out why this rock had air," I heard someone mumble. They were talking about our objective.

  "Of course that wasn't the real mission, they wouldn't send humans if they could do it themselves, they only use us for the dirty jobs," said another. They were right. Since we joined the Aggregate in secret they had only used us for suicide missions and dirty jobs and errands nobody else wanted to bother with. A part of the pact we made. We needed to send a strong message if we wanted to be accepted. If we wanted to prove ourselves worthy as a species. I guess holding our own against the Skrav for almost three hundred years wasn't enough.

  An indicator blinked on my wrist PDA. Movement to the south of us. I grabbed Aira and together the two of us moved further back into the caverns. Into the darkness.

  "Sev," she said grabbing my arm, "Sev, come on, we've seen enough, we need to get out of here," she finished trying to motion me to fight with the others against the horde of Skrav that were spilling in from the surface.

  "We need to go deeper, maybe there is another exit," I said not mentioning the blip of movement that had caught my eye. I was curious now. How had something been behind us all this time and not moved. How had I been the only one to see it?

  I opened my eyes letting what little light there was fill my pupils. I felt like I was crawling through a giant's coffin. Trusting my instincts as I always had I continued to move downward.

  As the others held back the Skrav the Elpis sent another team to the surface. We had no idea were they had been coming from. We de
tected no ships in orbit or on the surface. The Skrav that were here had been hiding. Living on this world. Half an hour climbing down the wet rocks into the chasm I found what I had been looking for. Terraforming technology made from bio-organic material surrounded what I can only describe as a giant egg. It was several stories tall inside an open chamber that I assumed was the center of the asteroid. The Skrav had set this place up as an outpost. A research station. Whatever the egg had been it looked like it was thousands of years old. Resting. Sitting still. It unnerved me more then anything. 'Perhaps a leviathan,' I thought. No. Levaithans were creatures born inside the immer, massive beasts that barely came forth into our world. This was something else. A creature born of our reality. Perhaps it was an ambler? I had heard stories of giant whale like creatures that floated through space living in debris and asteroid fields. It just seemed too large, too fragile.

  Quickly I raced towards it. Aira following behind me. I felt like I was being pulled as if the egg itself had been giving off it's own gravitational field. I felt myself enter a trance. I was born a user, genetically modified or rather gifted with the ability to see into the past, present, and future. I had bits of pieces of the Nexus inside my bloodstream from an incident that happened to me a year before and from time to time they had the tendency to turn on. Small nanites usually kept the shards from activating but there were flair ups. Some thought of me as a seer. It had been several months since my last vision. Usually the visions lasted only seconds. Sometimes minutes as the nanites reset themselves. Before it was a part of me I was forced to sit for hours even days at a time for the Elders. I was a prisoner. Now it was nothing more then a curse.