Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) (9 page)

“It’s mimicking us,” Hayden said. “It’s changing its body structure to
look human.” “That doesn’t look human to me,” I said. Nothing that monster
could do would make me think it was human. As I spoke I saw the leviathan
extend its wings. It was getting ready to take flight. I began to fear we were
the only three alive in the whole city. My heart skipped a beat. The leviathan
screamed. I could see it clear as day now. Debris from the city below swept
up into the air as it began to move its massive wings. Even in my worst
nightmares I couldn’t imagine seeing something like this. My mind began to
race. I had no idea how to fly evasive maneuvers.

“Maybe we are better off on the ground. If that thing comes at us I don't
know if I can dodge it,” I said. Hayden and Aira said nothing in return.“If it
comes at us I’m going to ram it.” I said and I began to maneuver the drop ship
away while keeping the leviathan in my sights (and it must have worked
because the Leviathan at no point slowed its stride, but keep going past us as
if we were some ghost).

“Good job.” Hayden said, patting me on the shoulder.
“There,” Hayden pointed to one of the navigation screen that showed a
massive ship appear above the city. I maneuvered the drop ship and there it
was. From outside the front window we watched as the Aelita emerged in a
cloud of smoke out of the immer.
The drop ship began to lose velocity. Controls seized up and all I could
do was gliding it down to the landing bay which happened to be only a few
kilometers away from the leviathan. The force of the Aelita dropping out of
the immer over the city was the same as dropping a nuclear bomb. We were
just far enough away that we didn’t get caught in the initial blast. Still, we
could see buildings disappear beneath us as waves of ash washed the city
clean. We landed on top of what was left of the human embassy. This building
was presented to us as a gift for trading and joining Errikus during our stay.
It didn’t matter anymore how many species had used this building. We would
be the last. None of Errikus mattered anymore. The Aelita made it clear they
weren’t here to save the city. They were here to slay the beast.
The Aelita positioned itself above the levaithan. It used its massive
thrusters to keep itself afloat and level in the air as it bled the ground with
pressure. Built on the back of an Earth ship, Aelita was equipped with one of
several archaic weapons that were meant to be used in space. The gravity of
the planet only made the energy that Aelita poured down more lethal. If there
was anyone alive within ten miles of the leviathan they were dead now. It
kept screaming. The blast hammered the ground and tore at the thin
membrane that had made up its wings. They were the first piece to fade into
nothing. There were barely any structures standing. It looked like a monster
standing on a black platform. Ash filled the air. We were lucky none of the
energy-based weapons Aelita used had risks of being radioactive. We could
feel the heat even on the ground. The drop ship moved back and forth with
the blast as the ground swayed.
“Are they planning to destroy the planet?” asked Aira.
“This is the end of the world isn’t it,” I asked, my hands hugging the
handlebars placed inside the drop ship, they were initially meant to be used
with turbulence and rough landings. We weren’t even in the air and yet we
could feel the world around us ripping apart.Then there was a cloud of smoke
and darkness. Much like the ground beneath us, the leviathan had had
enough, turned itself to dust only to drift away. It was like it just gave up. The
dust came at us like a hurricane. The drop ship twisted and turned with us
inside. I had forgotten how much pain I was in the day before. The shaking
reminded me that I had broken ribs. I could feel a stabbing sensation hit me
right below my chest. Aira grabbed me as we held each other close. We kept
sliding across the drop ship floor. Hayden hit his head on a suspension bar
and was knocked unconscious but we could still see him breathing. It would
have been horrible to lose each other after everything. We could still see the
Aelita shooting wave after wave into the leviathan’s husk. The leviathan was
bleeding now. The blood was blue just like it had been before when it first
appeared. This proved to us it was a real animal after all. It wasn’t a god! it
wasn’t an immortal! It was flesh and blood and it would die, a slow death
thousands of years overdue!
In the end it only took a few hours for the leviathan to die.
‘The hammer of god’ - that was what name of the technique used to kill
the leviathan would become known as. A day of running helpless through the
city and it took the Aelita only a few hours to stop it. If only the Tritan could
have been so lucky. How many humans died on board? How much of this
could have been prevented? We stayed in our drop ship the rest of the night.
Not sure whether it would work or not we switched on the emergency beacon
and watched the rain pelt our window before falling asleep.
It hardly ever rained on Errikus but now it was raining blue.
That night I dream of a new Errikus built over the bones of the
leviathan. I imagined Eek telling their children about the warriors who slayed
a monster so massive it couldn’t have come from this universe. I imagined
generations passing and the survivors of this battle – if there were any others
left building monuments to the fallen. I dreamt of the simulations that would
be created, the games that would be played and the songs that would be sung.

In the sky the beast came,
Breaking wind and rain,
In the sky the humans fell,
And so the beast was slain.

The next day a group of Autons ripped open the hull of the drop ship.
The Auttons were machines, though some would call them android. They
didn’t resemble humans though. They were bipedal but their bodies were
metallic and came in different shapes and sizes with exaggerated limbs and
little, if not no heads. They were a work force created as tools. They had no
artificial intelligence, only programs and orders. Humans were afraid of such
technology, that if we developed a walking talking A.I. it would rebel. In fact
the only A.I. we had was on the ship and it was kept busy by calculating
turns, checking crew status and making sure everything was in order. They
told us immediately that we were three out of a few hundred that survived the
attack. Then they asked if we were ready to leave.

They escorted us to the spaceport, shooting down any resistance that got
in the way. The leviathan was dead but there were still plenty of babies
around. The ticks had turned Errikus into a living hell.

A human drop ship took us onboard the Aelita. We couldn’t see anything
from inside the cargo bay but we heard that the leviathan had actually made a
few swipes at the hull, killing a group of humans called ‘caretakers’-
apparently there was something special about them. The Aelita didn’t let any
of the surviving Eek onboard. They left them in the ruins of the city. We
weren’t even aloud to see what was left of the city. Even the Arr7 and Pok
that had survived were left to wander the city’s decimated remains. They
would all have to survive on their own against the ticks and against whatever
else was to come. Aelita was a human ship and the only ally we allowed
onboard was the Drok. The aliens that tried to board were shot. Riots by the
Eek broke out. The Eek were shot on sight. It didn’t seem fair. The Aelita and
the Erebus would be the only ships to come to Errikus for days, maybe
weeks. These ships were the only ones capable of giving any kind of relief.
Errikus was a dead planet, abandoned. Those that weren’t human, weren’t
saved. There would be no songs sung for them, no praise for their courage. I
imagined each survivor with their own story just like Aira, Hayden and I.
Ours stories didn’t matter. This was a tremendous loss. The ‘Trinity’ was no
more but the objective of our journey was still the same.

We were given food and then orders. I had only a moment with Aira. I
kissed her goodbye as soldier tore us apart. She was being brought to her
father and Hayden and I was being sent straight to the Erebus. We had been
best friends for seven years and just survived the death and destruction of an
entire planet. Now we were being torn apart by our own kind.

I had spent three days in hell but I knew we were all safe. I accepted my
loss. It was on my way out I listened to soldier’s whisper and learned
something horrible. The Erebus had captured something called a Trepp, a
warrior species enslaved by the Skrav. One of the few the Skrav used in their
war against other aliens. The humans on Erebus had tortured and beat them
to the point of death. They had learned something very important from them.
It wasn’t an accident that the leviathan attacked Errikus.

Out of the darkness a small slender creature crept. It stood just higher
than our commanding officers knee. Its ears stood straight up and its black
fur and long tail swept back and forth. It was gnawing on a huge, white bone
pulled from the spine of some sea creature back on Errikus. It was almost
impossible to tell were the bones disappeared and its sharp teeth began. Its
nose was straight and narrow, sniffing the air as it sat on its long back legs. It
made a small growling sound as we moved closer. Its black eyes looked us
over. This was the first time I had ever seen a dog. It was the companion to
the commander and had been bonded to him since birth. It would die for him,
kill for his master and should anything happen to his master he would hunt
down and kill without remorse whoever was responsible.

It reminded me of the bond I had to Aira. We should have never been
torn apart! I requested immediately to be transferred back to the Aelita. Of
course my requested was declined and there was nothing I could do about it.
I had been drafted to the Erebus since my birth. This was the ship my mother
served on and the ship she would have died on if the leviathan didn’t kill her.
I would live the rest of my life upon this ship!

If they would have granted my request they would have to grant the
requests of all the other residents on the Aelita and the Erebus. Not even the
orphans were allows to break the structure of the fleet.. So this would be the
beginning of my new life.

On my way to the Erebus there was another creature I had seen for the
first time. They were the ones I had heard of before… they were called
'caretakers' and they clung to the sides of the ship’s hull. I couldn’t tell but it
seemed like some of them were waving. They were twice the size of a normal
person but they had no real human features at all except that they seemed bi
pedal Their skin was a mix of bright, neon green. Actually, they looked more
like turtles than humans. I was told that they drew energy from stars and
radiation inside the immer - much like plants they were photosynthetic. They
didn’t need to eat and they didn’t need to sleep. They were the perfect
workers. They had had what seemed like arms grafted onto the shells of their
bodies. There were two arms on their right side and a third on the left. They
would use their third arm to hang onto the outside of ship. They lived there.
Both the Aelita and Erebus had hundreds. The only way for a “normal”
humans to communicate with them was through the ship’s A.I. hey were
remarkable, a perfect creature capable of living in the vacuum of space.

As our transport was
flying down the side of the Aelita, I could see their
enormous black eyes staring at us, observing us. They were already repairing
the giant gash the leviathan had made.

He went on to explain that sometime, in the last hudnred years both the
Aelita and Erebus had begun to decay on the outside. The nanites that would
constantly multiply on the sides of the hull were beginning to die out too. An
eccentric scientist was the cause for this decay. He was caught mixing DNA
from humans and various aliens that we created. Apparently his experiments
involved unwilling citizens that were in and out of stasis. He was to be tried
for crimes against humanity but instead of sentencing him to death, some
elder insisted that he be forced to put his work to good use. End result, he
created the first caretaker. Really it was no more than an egg with human
limbs grafted on various parts of its body. It was constantly in pain. It had no
idea why any of this was happening. It died a few days later and its body was
then thrown out into the vast vacuum of space. The project was a success
though. It showed the elders that the manipulation of DNA was possible.
Their bodies were all clones. They would resurrect themselves every one
hundred to two hundred years. They were constantly plugged into the ship’s
A.I., which constantly processed and copied their consciousness. From there
the scientist’s research was improved and finally he had created the right
hybrid.

“Why can’t we use that technology on ourselves?” I asked. I was
fascinated by it all. The idea of being immortal seemed like it would make our
war with the Skrav much easier. Die, come back to life, then die again It
would be an endless cycle of winning and losing but we would never have
any reason to fear death. “We tried,” the soldier said, “we tried hundreds of
times but every time someone came back they were a mess. They possessed
memories of death or their bodies felt too much unlike their own - they would
quickly lack the will to live or kill themselves all together– others just couldn’t
handle it. The physical process of being in a new body was too much for them
and they would die only after breathing for a few minutes. The caretakers out
there lack all of those problems. They were created in lab and therefor, more
an experiment then human.”

He even went on to explain how we tried to implant a regular human
consciousness into a caretaker’s body. The same thing happened. The human
mind couldn’t process being in the vacuum of space, even if their body was
breathing for them so they willed them to die. He went on to talk about
whether or not they had souls, it was apparently a popular question
something that everyone liked to talk about onboard the starships.