Slow Burn_Deep Darkness Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Note from Author

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  Bonus

  Bio

  Other Works

  Deep Darkness 0

  SLOW BURN

  A Novella

  Stephen Landry

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the author. In such case neither the author, or distributor has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  If this book is being sold by a vendor other than the following large and established vendors / distributors: Createspace.com, Amazon.com, Apple.com, BanresandNoble.com, Smashwords.com, Kobobooks.com, or any distributing partners listed on the aforementioned websites, there is a high degree of certainty this book was purchased as a pirated copy. It is requested that you contact the author immediately so that the vendor in question can be notified to cease and desist their practices. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted material in violation of the author's rights.

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephen William Landry

  [email protected]

  Cover Illustration by Brettarts Illustration

  Edited by D.C. Daines

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database, retrieval system, or torrent web service, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This book is for all my friends who have helped me to never stop writing.

  Danny Daines for helping push this project to completion.

  A.J. Moceo who helped me with the military aspects of my other novels and short films in the past that now echo throughout my work.

  Thank you.

  A note from the Author

  Slow Burn in a prequel to my Deep Darkness series. Set almost 300 years before Pull, Slow Burn takes place not long after humanity has fled the Skrav. This is a story about a kickass heroine who doesn't take crap from anyone.

  This full length novella is something I thought I would never finish. It began as a small project, a short story that grew into an epic tale of action and survival as Elyse is forced to confront her past as a soldier and the life she once had in a new alien world.

  I'm so thankful that I am able to share it with you and hope that you enjoy the ride.

  Log - 1

  I am a sociopath. Let me see if I can make that a little more clear. I am FUCKED. I am a calculated killer. I'm what most people call a player of games. I don't do it because I enjoy it, I do it because it is me. I have fucked and killed more people than I can count. I have been trained since I was a teen to maim, strip, and cut. My mind is not merely twisted but broken and sprained in all the worst ways. I am a worthless human being who not merely destroys lives but rips them apart and ends bloodlines. DO NOT feel sorry for me. This story isn't meant to be about me. My story is more about revenge than redemption. I am telling it so that others won't make the same mistakes I made. If you get anything out of this let it be that we as human beings all deserve a chance to live. We are all gifted. We are all unique. Some of us have chosen darker paths than others but there is always a glimmer of hope. Let that sink in for a moment. I really needed to get that off my chest. Feels good to somewhat say it aloud. Now let me tell you about my present situation. I am a sociopath on a ship of saints, a vessel of lies called the Erebus. Ok... that was vague. The Erebus is a starship. I'm in deep deep space and probably only about 1/3 of the people onboard actual deserve to be here (or to breathe for that matter). I am stranded somewhere in a place called the immer. The immer is kinda like a wormhole. Point A and point B are closer when we travel through the immer and while it's not as fast as light speed or anything exotic it gets the job done. We tore through the immer a few years ago and since then we have been on a voyage to a place called Eden. More then likely I will never see Eden since the Erebus is a multi-generational ship (basically I'm supposed to have babies who will then have babies and maybe if their babies have babies and they are lucky they will see Eden). None of that really matters. What you should know, what you need to know is that my name is Elyse and I am AWAKE.

  I should have been in stasis for at least another two hundred years. I'm not even suppose to be on this ship let alone awake. In fact, I should be dead. Only weeks before the Erebus launched I picked up a contract from Callus Industries, one of the many cyber companies responsible for funding this project and I was assigned bodyguard duty to a man by the name of Slen. I was under the impression this was a test flight. We would be there and back again in less than five years and I could retire early from the lucrative payday. Lucky me right? Maybe. Better alive in space then dead back home I suppose. Shit hit the fan when we launched. Humanity had colonized most of our solar system and for years it seemed like we were living in some vague resemblance of a utopia (course if it was a real utopia people like me wouldn't exist.) Sure tensions were high between this nation and that one looking to control resources and all that but we had just cured cancer. The average life span had doubled. We had made it past the world wars, the diseases, the starving countries. We were living in the wake of an alien invasion that we won. We began reverse-engineering their technology and had made leaps and bounds in space travel fusing organic processors with metal tech. Seriously how much better could it get? It was all a lie. The Skrav, the alien's that we thought we had won against came back and this time they took with them the Earth, Mars, and every colony in our solar system. They fuckin blew up the sun. How's that for revenge? This wasn't a test flight. Slen and the others were running away. They knew what was coming and they did nothing to stop it.

  Since then we have been on the run. We have been hunted. It's only been a few years in deep space but already we are beginning to realize that we are in over our heads. We could speculate all day as to what we did to piss them off but it doesn't really matter. They are out there and they want us dead.

  I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating but I'm not. We lost the war. We lost everything. All we can do now is try our best to survive.

  Welcome to the Erebus.

  Despite all that has happened the Erebus isn't such a bad place to call home. Callus Industries and the other private investors that put this ship together went all out. The idea was to make a ship that would function as both a hybrid of a seed ship and military vessel. The Erebus moved on ion drives through the immer. The ion drives alone were the size of a small state. The entire Erebus was bigger than the city of New York with several layers
spread out on top of one another. It would take an entire year just to explore every room. There were several mess halls, hangars, holo decks, and places to mingle, socialize, and train. Most of the population on the Erebus was suppose to be asleep. There were thousands of us on board sleeping inside stasis when we left Earth. Only a few hundred were awake and it was their job to make sure nothing went wrong, continue to do research, guard and maintain the ship. Someone messed up bad.

  When I first woke up I thought I was waking up in my own bed back on Earth. I had a small apartment no bigger than most closets but it was what I had called home when I wasn't traveling. The day I woke up – nothing would ever feel the same. There was no sky anymore. Nothing but walls. We had an observation room but there was nothing to see. Staring out into the blackness of space or the purple hue of the immer only made me nauseous. I was rumbling down one of the narrow access tunnels which threaded the Erebus when I first got word that everyone was waking up early. I thought maybe it was just my time. When you wake up from stasis it's not like waking up out of bed. You don't feel refreshed. It feels like time has skipped. One moment you are taking off your clothes feeling naked and vulnerable as some doctor probes you and tells you to bite this and breathe into that attaching small pieces of tape to your skin which will tell them whether you're dead or alive and the next you just wake up inside a glass tube and you feel like a fish. The doctors are gone. The colors on the wall are slightly faded. The glass coffin opens and you immediately gasp for air as some kind of psychological comfort even though you weren't suffocating and you are physically fine. You start to wonder how long you have been out of it. Days, weeks, months, years. You search for someone, anyone praying you aren't alone thinking about the horror stories and films you have seen of people stranded in space alone.

  The first person I ran into was a male soldier dressed in black armor. He was holding an M17 and looked like he was in a hurry. He looked at me as if he was annoyed. I felt wrong for having been alive. He immediately pointed his rifle down at me. Immediately my mind flashed back to Earth. So many times I had been in this situation. Staring down the barrel of a gun. My instincts told me to grab it from him and blow his brains out but I knew that would be a mistake. There was nowhere on this ship I could run or hide. I could probably last a little while in the bowels or in the tunnels but I would starve. I needed to belong. If he was pointing his rifle at me he must have had a good reason. I could tell something was off. I should have been woken by a crew member. There should have been someone there to greet me. Slowly everything began to make sense. "We have another live one," he said into a comm on the collar of his black armor. His gun and armor had no wear or tear. It looked the same as something I would have worn into the battlefield. I thought having woken up in the future everything would be different somehow. He lowered his weapon, it was obvious by his facial expression he was being given new orders via an earpiece. "Come with me, we're going to haven," he said. I was gracious he lowered his guard. "Sounds like a nice place," I said. He gave me a small smile as he looked me up and down. I realized how naked I must have looked. I had gone into stasis in my underwear and it was quite revealing. I gave him a quick smile back as he put his rifle behind his back and began leading me down a wide hallway. I thought for a minute about giving him a good lay. I had been asleep how long? The thought quickly went away.

  As we began walking I began to slow down. Slowly my long strides became shorter and shorter and my legs began to feel weak. I felt as if I had been in bed for weeks. When I began to feel dizzy the young soldier let me lean on him. It was obvious now whoever or whatever he was alarmed about earlier wasn't something that was on his mind now. Getting me to haven, whatever that was, had become his priority. After about ten minutes of walking through hallway after hallway surrounded by hundreds of stasis chambers, most of which were empty I noticed one in particular. It was covered in broken glass and blood. There had been some kind of firefight. It was there out of the corner of my eye I saw Slen laying with several bullet holes carved out in his skull. Guess my mission was a failure. Some bodyguard I turned out to be. I didn't say anything but the soldier looked at Slen's body in disgust. It bothered me that neither of us was talking. I suppose it was protocol. Haven would be where I get the answers to the questions that were scratching at the back of my mind.

  I lost consciousness before we reached haven. When I woke up I was surrounded by the dark. I felt trapped isolated from the outside. There was only a small dim blue light hanging above my head. It provided just enough light to see. The room was empty, the soldier was gone. There were no other soldiers guarding me. I was sitting back in a slightly uncomfortable chair. I thought they would be walking through the door at any moment. Perhaps they were watching me from some info-red camera. They would regret it if they were testing my patients. There was something familiar sitting on the table. A small pistol? No. It was scattered about. It was an M17 rifle that had been disassembled. I began to get a very bad feeling. The feeling quickly became worst. I reached my hand up and felt a slave collar wrapped around my neck.

  Log - 2

  Who killed Slen? I wondered that small three-word phrase for hours. There was something wrong with everything that was happening to me. From the look on the guard's face to this place, he had called haven. I could remember the blueprints and maps I saw of the Erebus perfectly and never was there a place called haven. It could have been something they created or renamed I guess but that didn't make much sense. It didn't make much sense that if I had been asleep for a long time that the guard's rifle and armor would look so new.

  They had left me inside the blue room for hours. Slowly it brought back bitter memories. I thought about assembling the rifle or using pieces of it to pry the damn collar off my neck. It would have been a waste of energy. What good was a rifle without ammunition? Worst what if I attempted to pry the collar off my neck and it triggered some kind of explosive mechanism and I lost my head. I was better off staying put. I had never been a patient girl but I had plenty of ways to occupy my time. The last thing I wanted to do was get too inside my own head. When I was a soldier I trained for situations like this. In my early twenties, I had been picked multiple times for isolation experiments. Time inside a tube filled with water cut off from all your senses was nothing compared to this. The reality was I was alone in a starship with no guidance and for all, I knew everyone was killing each other and I was waiting in line to go out an airlock. Were they forcing everyone to wear these collars? No. The guard didn't have one.

  "How is our patient feeling?" said a male voice from the wall.

  I didn't answer. I didn't see the point. I wasn't about to be interrogated by anyone I couldn't see.

  "Four years, just incase you are wondering," the voice said.

  The voice seemed nice. I thought about talking for a second but then I figured whoever it was on the other side of that wall was also the one responsible for leaving me here in nothing but a slave collar and my underwear. "I'm sure you have many questions, please let us talk," the voice said.

  "I would like some clothes," I said aloud.

  "Tap the wall behind you and a drawer will open. Inside you will find a black unitard, military issue. You can wear that for now. It should conform to your skin, one size fits all," the voice said. I slowly moved from my chair and did as the voice had asked. The wall opened just like he said. Inside I found the unitard but more than that I found a full clip of ammo for the M17. I slid the unitard on as quickly as I could try my best to ignore the clip. When I had the unitard draped over my body it was loose but sure enough, I took a few deep breaths and it slowly conformed to my skin changing in dimension tightening its threads around my skinny legs and arms. I felt naked. The unitard was like an extra layer of skin. The unitard was a military issue but it had no insignia, not that it mattered. The Erebus wasn't owned by any one nation and rather than fly under a single flag it had none. It had been stripped of symbolic gestures before we even launched. We cou
ldn't even wear symbolic clothing onboard. It was a part of our dress code. Everything we needed would be provided for us once we awoke. That was the plan. All we could take with us on this journey where our talents and a bag full of heirlooms or photographs. I didn't pack a bag. At the time I took the job I had no idea what I was getting into. Slen had told me that this would be a five-year mission and that I would be asleep for the majority of it so I wouldn't have to worry about aging. He had also promised me a very large sum of money. Enough I could have quit being a freelancer and retired. I even had a dog picked out. Since I was Slen's bodyguard the only contact I made with anyone involved in this mess was when I was boarding with him. A few checkpoints here and that was that. The next thing I knew I was in my underwear getting inside a pod. A five-year mission my ass. How many others had been under that impression?

  I thought about the answer to that question. There were probably none. I was being used. A mouse in a maze. Slen had wanted me here for some other reason other than protection. Unless of course, he knew he would need protection and that was why he manipulated me. Whoever it was that had been after him didn't really matter. He got what was coming to him. Too many bad deals on Earth. Maybe if they had waited till after we woke up I would have seen it coming, an assassin out of the corner of my eye but that wasn't the case. They got to him in his sleep.

  "Everyone is waking up, not just you," the voice said.

  "How long until we are back to Earth," I asked.

  "Earth has been destroyed," the voice said. It had no emotion. No sympathy. It said it in a way that it seemed to have expected that.