Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) (18 page)

It only took a few hours for us to drop out of the immer at our destination
above Parcae. It was even more massive then we thought. We were so close it
was the only thing we could see on the horizon. Our ship unhinged from the
Aelita and began to drop. The Parcae was so large it had it’s own
gravitational force and began pulling us into orbit around it. We pushed on
our thrusters and slowed ourselves down. If we hadn’t we could have lost
control and crashed ending our mission in a flurry of fire. The Aelita released
drone after drone feeding information to both them and us. We did the same
scanning searching for a port entrance.

Hours passed and we found no way in. We
finally decided our only choice
was to make our own. Our three rotors hovered over the Morta. They
stopped and we felt the entire ship pull and settle as the ancient metal clashed
with our own. Each of us stripped down and put on a space suit. It was more
of a power suit weighing nearly a ton. Controlled by our movement inside
through microfibers and touch. We covered our face with a breather and our
eyes with a visor and each of us helped the other tap the helmet into place. A
liquid gel filled in around our body inside the suit. If any part of the suit
became punctured the liquid would harden. This guaranteed we wouldn’t
suffocate or lose pressure. Too many mistakes had been made in the past. We
each took an M77 rifle. This time we weren’t worried about stealth or silence.

Once we were in our suits we sealed the oxygen in the ship and stored it. This
was it. If we came out of our suits now our eyes would bleed and our lungs
would freeze. We let the vacuum of space come inside; inviting it inside like it
was our guest of honor. Then we began to drill against the hard surface of the
halo. Ten maybe twenty minutes passed and the small four-foot hole in the
Morta opened up. The piece of metal we drilled fell to the floor inside the
station. There was gravity. Hayden let loose three little spheres. The spheres
were light weight automatic drones that would map out the station and send
any and all relative data to the wristbands on our space suit.

One after another we dropped inside each of us falling to our knees and then
standing up rifle in hand. I was last inside when suddenly blue soft lights
began to shine all around us illuminating the hallway in every direction. It
was like someone had rolled out the red carpet. When we looked up at the
hole we had cut we saw a field of red and grey honeycombs appear and in a
few seconds our gateway inside had been repaired. Nothing we had could
repair the hull of a starship or space station that quickly. “Nano machines,”
Hayden said, but they were far more advanced then any we had developed.
“The walls must be crawling with them,” he continued. Information given to
us from the drones said there was oxygen but not the right amount for us to
breath. It was a good sign though. This meant Anathem's plan to evacuate to
Parcae could be successful.

We began to walk to what the drone told us wasone of the many control
centers scattered about the station. It only took a few minutes before we
reached a grey metal door. Inside we found a lab. Tubes filled with yellow
liquid held bone and body of animals too torn and decayed to identify. We
could see pieces of flesh wrapped around brittle bone. Some of the faces
inside seemed to resemble human but then the foreheads, nose, and lower jaw
all seemed abstract. Bodies resembled lizards, snakes, birds with a
combination of human limbs, finger, toes and some were a combination of
both. The lab seemed to go on forever as hundreds of tubes spread out row
after row one abomination after another with no two looking alike. Every
kind of chimera you could ever imagine was here. “Is this what the Lethe
did?” I asked. It was a question that would go unanswered. Nobody was
listening. We were all awestruck in horror. Our triumphant return to hell.
We continued to walk until we found the control center. It was a large
circular room. The walls were inscribed with images and a language dead for
hundreds of millennia. Hayden looked around for an interface like a system
familiar to what the Arr7 had told us about. There was nothing. The only
thing we found that was familiar was the language on the wall and even it
seemed different then the bits and pieces we had found before. Wherever we
were it was far older then any of the ruins or ships we had discovered before.

In the center of the room there was a mound. It seemed to almost blend in
with the darkness and light that surrounded us. It was the place everything
ran. All of the language and writing in the room seemed to spiral outward
from it. On top of the mound there was a sphere. It was glowing red. When I
saw it I felt warm. I felt like I was inside the nexus. My body no longer felt
like my body. I was looking through my eyes reaching out towards the
sphere. When my glove touched it the red light dispersed through the room
all around us. Each one of us began to hear a deep gravely voice whispering
louder and louder in our ear until it was screaming. The language the voice
spoke in was nothing we could understand and it was so fast none of us could
even try to repeat it back or keep up with it. By the time we began recording
it was over. We had only caught the tail end.

Suddenly we were all hungry and our mouths dry. When Hayden checked
the PDA on his wrist it had gone black. We had no map and no way out and
we couldn’t take control of the station. Then our comms shut down. There
was nothing anyone could say to each other so we began to use hand signals.
Duv’Mir carved instructions and words onto the Lethe landscape. Lucky for
us we could still move. The power suits relied heavily on the wireless
electronics for comm and information gathering built in but the body itself
had its own backup power supply. We walked and walked until we finally
found a tunnel that would take us into the Decima ring. Hour after hour past
by. Lore and Trevor were now working together to help carry Hayden who
had passed out from exhaustion. Our suits were beginning to feel heavy. The
backup power supply was beginning to run down. We only had hours before
we would stop moving and become encased in our power armor like tombs. It
would be like being buried alive. You wouldn’t be paralyzed you would still
be able to feel and wiggle your toes. Your brain would tell you there was
nothing wrong but you would be held down by the weight of the suit unable
to move. Eventually the visor would go dark and you would be blind. If you
didn’t starve or force off your breather to drown eventually your air would
run out and you would suffocate. It would be like dying inside an isolation
tank. Even if we could breath the air in here there was no way we could take
our suits off now. Even if we were found in a shutdown state if someone tried
to cut us out the liquid gel would harden and crush us.

Lore signaled for us to stand back and hold on. He pointed his gun at the hull
of the ship and relentlessly began firing. Over and over he fired the energy
from his gun slowly began melting through the alien metal. A few minutes
passed as our visors lit up by the light from Lore’s gun. Then there was
nothing. Lore blew a hole eight feet tall and wide in the side of Decima ring
giving his life in the process. Our suits rebooted as we watched the red and
gray honeycombs slowly begin to appear over the gap. We only had seconds.

Each of us took the other’s hand dropping our ri
fles and jumping out and
swinging onto the side of Decima ring. Brecca was last and the gap closed
tearing her arm off. The liquid gel inside her suit hardened keeping her from
bleeding out and numbing the pain. She breathed in an aerosol from her
breather filled with enough painkillers to keep her from going into shock.
Duv’Mir called the Dawn to come and get us. Duv'Mir's signal turned on the
autopilot and the machine tracked us. In the distance we could see Lore
floating away into the black void that surrounded us. There was nothing we
could do to rescue him.

Over the comms we could hear him whispering the names of his family. Then
we heard his last words. There were so many things he could have said before
he was out of range. So many things that would have haunted each of us the
rest of our lives but Lore had said the worst. “Skrav,” he screamed. There was
silence. He was so far away we couldn’t see him anymore. We couldn’t see
any Skrav ships or fighters anywhere. Paranoia began to get the best of us.
We weren’t sure if he was hallucinating or giving us a warning.
We waited for what seemed like an eternity. Staring into the darkness that
surrounded us above and below. The Dawn finally picked us up. One after
the other we crawled into the airlock and then pressurized the ship releasing
oxygen into the air. Each of us took off our helmets and took a moment of
silence to enjoy the air and the freedom of feeling our own bodies as we got
use to our skin again. The Erebus was close by. We had been gone three days.

Duv’Mir took control of the Dawn and began
flying us home. We weren’t
sure what we should report. Parcae was a deathtrap. The atmosphere
wouldn’t support the crew of the Erebus and the ship itself was a maze. We
were walking on thin ice if that was our best hope and what should we say
about Lore’s last words... “Skrav.” They echoed in my head. If they were out
there how long had they been following us. Were they even following us or
were they waiting. Some Skrav ships were faster then our own. It was always
the nexus that gave us our upper hand allowing us to create strategies based
on attacks we knew would happen. Every time we fought them on our own
we lost. We could push and shove them and get a head start running but
eventually they always caught up. Duv’Mir did a scan of the area and only
two ships showed and both of them were ours not counting the Parcae.

When we arrived on the Erebus we were greeted by Balkava and a handful of
guards. Each guard saluted us as a sign of respect. We had become heroes,
the first humans to set foot inside the ancient world of the Lethe. It was
strange. None of the other elders had shown. I had expected to see Anathem
the moment we came down off the ship. Nobody acted like they were in
danger either. The threat of the antliods seemed to have gone away. Even the
barricade that separated the hangar and one of the hallways antliods had
been spotted had been taken down.

“What happened to Anathem?” I asked. The only elder that came to greet us
stood before me. Balkava.
“He has passed,” she said those three words without any remorse. “Dead?” I
exclaimed.
“The consul was having a emergency meeting in the mess when we were
ambushed by antliods...”
She looked all of us over to gauge our reaction.

Balkava had led a group of soldiers through the passageways of the
Erebus herself pushing back the antliods. She amputated parts of the biomass
that was infected and burned. Her actions pushed back the infection that
slowed the starship to a halt. With assault fighters she tore chunks from the
hull scraping off the antliods that crawled on the surface, pilots said it was
like scraping tar from the bottom of your shoe. Parts of the ship had now
become sealed permanently as the vacuum of space leaked inside and
swallowed those that might have survived had we found another way. Those
that weren’t in stasis were now armed and ready to fight. Rumors said
Balkava had been planning this all along that she had waited for the consul to
gather together in one room and that she gunned all of them down herself. It
wasn’t hard to imagine. Either way she now had full control of the ship. She
was captain.

Our mission to the Parcae wasn’t a total loss. Somehow a ton of
information about Lethe had been uploaded to the New Dawn which then
passed into the Erebus like an information virus. We had everything they had
now. It would take years for the Erebus to sort through it all but it was all
there, millions of terabytes of data and secrets. Balkava ordered the Aelita to
work on finding a way to adapt the Nano machines we had seen used on
Parcae to our ships. The Aelita slowly and meticulously began shaving
samples of the new technology and storing it onboard their ship. The Nano
machines were like ants continuously tearing down and rebuilding the
structure that made up the outer shell of Parcae. If a part of the Parcae
became damaged in any way it became a priority for the nanites to fix it. We
were lucky they didn’t see us as a threat or we might have been dissolved.
The Nano machines could dissolve every kind of matter tested against it. It

invasion. I knew I had seen it before. It was a weapon thought lost to us but
now with this rediscovery we could make it even deadlier. Entire worlds
could be purged with the nanites if we decided. We held the weapons of a
culture that once ruled the galaxy.

Both the space debris Hayden and I had investigated months ago and
the Parcae gave coordinates for what we presumed now was Eden. Balkava
had been right about one thing. We were close. Closer then we had been in
three hundred years. We would be there in one or two months. We had no
idea what we were going to find the only information that existed was that it
was a physical place and we would call sanctuary. Many hoped and prayed it
would be a place to start over. A world we could colonize and not worry
about the Skrav or Trepp destroying. Everything seemed to being going as
planned.

The next few weeks we continued to have skirmishes with the antliods
but we were free from the hold they had on the ship. Sightings of leviathan
and seraphs also became more and more common while we were inside the
immer. Several times we had to drop out. The Erebus was getting old and
beginning to breakdown. Caretakers worked harder then ever repairing and
maintaining the hull. Over and over the drives were taken apart and rebuilt
by autons. Everything was turning back to normal and we were back to a
being a society.