Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) Read online

  In the end we do what we have to in order to survive.

  Prelude to Despair It was the second wave of attacks that ended the lives of everyone on the planet. In eight minutes the mega-cities of Earth, the colonies of Mars, Jupiter, and past that the outposts on Pluto as well as every world in the Sol system, the birthplace of humanity became swallowed by the darkness. The Skrav destroyed our sun and with it had made us an endangered species. We no recourse but to flee into deep space. Eden was the only option we had left. It was there that the prophets (the ‘users’ that were a part of the original ‘Sons of Sol’) said we would start over. Looking back it’s hard to say which was worst, the destruction of our home, the genocide of our species as billions died because we lost the war or the fact that we knew it was coming and we did nothing to defend ourselves rather we did nothing to stop it and made the conscious choice to run.

  History will probably say we did the right thing but anyone that has ever seen the blue sky of that pale blue dot will tell you that we should have fought for our home. I can still hear the words of Devon Cross, “Cut the head, another takes its place, so let them bleed and break until we sever every limb and there are no more parts for them to replace,”spoken during the first invasion. Devon Cross was one of the Earth’s greatest heroes (more on him later). We had come so far before the exodus, our departure into the unknown and we have done so little since. From World War I and II to the Resource Wars that nearly destroyed us all the way to the first invasion itself we held our ground and united. It was right before the first invasion we began colonizing our solar system creating colonies on the moons that surrounded Mars as well as Mars itself. We were at the dawn of a new space age, the future was bright. When the Skrav attacked we fought hard and won. Their technology allowed us to expand ever further (obviously as the Erebus itself is reverse-engineered from that technology) all the way to the fringes of our solar system and beyond.

  The Earth had it’s hegemony (though many countries still governed themselves as seperate nations as did colonies) and the human race had it’s own unified army, the Terran Military (at least that is what we know it to be called now). The future was ours because we had fought for it and after the defeat of the Skrav it was destiny.

  I was not quite myself - a vision as seen through a user’s eyes - I was at Freedom park walking with a woman whom I assumed had to be my wife. I was standing holding hands with my son - who was not my son but rather my host’s. I can still remember watching the smile on his face as we looked around ready to play games in the park. I can also remember the moment the rocks began to rise off the ground, my body as it became light, as the wind picked up and lifted the sand from underneath my feet. I can remember the look of fear in the child that was not my own but rather the stranger whose body I had latched onto. I could remember the sense of dread I felt, the shame of not being able to do anything, not being able to save anyone. I felt for a moment as if that child WAS my own and I wanted to cry. I felt ashamed I couldn’t explain to either of them what it was that was happening.

  I can remember my host grabbing the child’s hand and running. Looking around for shelter, somewhere to hide. I couldn’t make it to the car and sure as hell couldn’t make it inside one of the fallout shelters located in one of the mega-blocks. None of it mattered. There would be no place to run. There was nowhere we could have run. I could see the spire, the space elevator in the distance collapsing as gravity fluctuated all around us. My wife -my host’s wife - was screaming. She had been close to us but not close enough I could grab her hand. Everything was going to hell and I watched as she fell to the ground only moments before I grabbed my child - my host’s child - and felt his chest, the two of us were breathing heavily and then everything went dark. The sun had gone black. I can still remember speaking in a foreign language, a language I couldn’t understand, a prayer muttered over and over by my host.

  The ugly truth was that the Skrav had collapsed our sun into a black hole. Humanity had began constructing a ‘Dyson swarm’ around our sun. Another one of the great projects we were heavily invested in during our golden age. The ‘statities’ would have been suspended around our sun by enormous light sails using radiation pressure to coutneract the sun’s massive gravity. Each swarm would have collected an enormous amount of energy from our sun and supplied humanity with ‘free power’. The Skrav had sabotaged the project using the swarms against us.

  In another vision my host was that of the child. I can remember watching as my mother screamed staring into the sky. I stood alone next to my father, not understanding at all what was happening. I could feel the hair on my arm begin to rise before I closed my eyes and faded away into oblivion. Another memory, the same memory, a third time in which I was the wife. It must have been hours earlier. I was staring at the spire, smiling at my child as he played baseball with his father in the park. I could hear a dog’s bark as it’s owner threw a frisbee disc in the air. This was the second time I had ever seen a dog (so different then the first - will talk about that later). The first time it seemed so strange, dog’s were as I knew them creatures partnered with soldiers, bred for war, bred to obey, a monster that walked on four legs loyal only to their master. This dog was different. It was small, maybe fifty or sixty pounds with black and white fur that blew in the wind. It looked soft and majestic as it grabbed the disc out of the air and shook it as it’s front and back legs hit the ground. It was so fragile and so beautiful.

  Another time I was hosted by a stranger walking alone. I think I must have been worried about my job, daydreaming about the future only to have it taken from me as I spent those last few precious moments wishing I had done more cursing the world around me staring at that father holding his son for dear life. I could remember hearing the dog howl in the distance as all things beautiful had come to an end.

  The Skrav were vicious. Their culture as far as we knew was complex but still somewhat similar to our own (though we have many cultures divided between our own kind each have several key points in common). They were somewhat polytheistic as we found the insides of their ships several deities however we had no idea if they were ornaments or artifacts in which they worshipped. They seemed to have some kind of chain of command, an hierarchy with several ruling leader. When one leader fell another would take it’s place. The Skrav were sentient beings, that was for sure. Though we couldn’t open a dialogue (not without trying) and they looked at us as something that needed to be wiped from existence. Elders theorized that somehow the Skrav were afraid of us, that they saw other intelligent life forms as a threat to their existence and so began a crusade to destroy anything alien to themselves.

  Devon Cross beleived that the Skrav were much like a hive. Like his speech above he believed that if we slaughtered enough of them we would break them down in a way that they would lose their chain of command become feral. Cross led his team in several skirmishes against Skrav leaders and it was his leadership and speeches that helped inspire troops and save many lives during the first invasion. “Cut the head and another takes its place so let them bleed and break until there are no parts to replace…” A sick speech from a sick man. It was less about his ideas and more about his fighting spirit. One of the reasons his words have been misquoted from one place to another. He taught his troops that killing another sentient species was the equivalent to killing bugs. This belief made it easier but desensitized many soldiers and only re-enforced our hate for other alien lifeforms.

  The Skrav were not hive-minded. They were just different. Each one was just like us, an individual with a life, a family, and beliefs. Inside the ruins of their ships we found families burned to death or crushed together no different then how we found human remains in Pompeii. It was hard but not impossible for us to sympathize with them. If we had known their reason for attacking us maybe we could have worked out a dialogue not that any of that matters now. They killed billions, committed genocide against us and are now hunting us like wild animals. The Skrav are the enem
y. We will probably never understand them and if we ever do we probably won’t listen. Trying to talk to a Skrav was like talking to dirt. Cross and his men had tried everything. They bribed, tortured, drugged (mushrooms and psychedelics alike) but no Skrav captured would break. Eventually most of the ones that they did capture would find ways to sling themselves around so bad they would break their own necks or they would die of starvation.

  The Skrav-human war began with an attack on Earth around the 22nd century (though it could have been the 21st, some of the data in the archives about the actual time and place are corrupted). It had only taken two world wars and a resource war between several of Earth’s major economic countries and few million lives before we found peace and began spreading outside our pale blue dot but once we banded together setting up way stations on the moon, Lagrange points and small settlements on Mars and it’s moons (and eventually the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and a port on Pluto). It was during that time of expansion when the Earth was becoming re-populated and even the Arctic had become a fruitful paradise that the Skrav appeared in the sky above.

  Hundreds of Skrav ships each resembling a dark dagger covered in sharp edges and black as the space they traveled in appeared. I have seen the terror through a hundred living non-living lives (hosts). Pitch-black clouds surrounded by sharp points and rays of light surrounded their ships trying their best to pierce through. It was an evil silhouette, something you would imagine inside a horror movie. The killer that stands in the doorway - only this time the killer stretched across the horizon. We tried to make contact the minute we saw them and for one instant we believed that there could be peace. We didn’t want to fight them but we knew we had no choice. When the moment finally came it was a single man that held his hand above a control console deep within the crust of the Earth. Sweat ran down his palm and dripped off his fingers and fell straight down on the number seven. Seven was the first number in a sequence of numbers he would push. I can remember seeing his reflection on the dials as he hesitated hoping someone would stop him at the last minute, a blur and not as clear as most visions but I knew there was no one there to stop him.

  I saw dog fight above the skyscrapers of New York City. It must have been the middle of the day. Bridges came under attack as swarms of Skrav assault ships descended upon us like locusts from the sky. The air force already had taken to the sky before their arrival. Each and every fighter and bomber had been given a very specific set of instructions to follow. The Skrav wiped out cities in what was once France, England, Egypt, and parts of China and Japan (and a part of the United States) because of the small moment of hesitation that man in the bunker had. That man who had only one job, to push one sequence of numbers will live the rest of his life alone, full of hate for himself and hate for the Skrav. This hate eventually will one day get the best of him and so many will see him fall further and further down into a hell he will make for himself. Disgraced, this is how he will be remembered… not as the man that unleashed hellfire upon the Skrav but rather as a man that is nameless, broken, and taught to children as a character in a story to never hesitate against your enemy.

  Outside military bases, farms, abandoned silos open. Mines that orbit moos and off-world colonies ignite. Dirt caves into tunnels below as rockets turn lush green grass to brown ash. The rockets and mines all find their nearest target, a Skrav dagger, and dig into them. The bombs explode unleashing a flood of fire as they pour and bleed black metal a flood nanites that devour the inside of the Skrav’s hull and don’t stop until there is next to nothing left. Some ships collide into others, escape pods fill the sky. A few crash into cities or burn in the atmosphere of Earth and Mars. Others become targets for ground troops. The first wave of Skrav ships are destroyed in an instant.

  The Skrav had only enough time to deploy a small unit of ground forces that the military spent the next several weeks wiping out. They were ugly, deformed. Their bodies were built like ours with two arms and two legs (though we later found some with two smaller arms folded around their waists). They wore heavy armor colored in shades of dark gunmetal gray and red. They looked like demons rising from hell. Their eyes glowed red when they were alive but turned white they died. Many journalists followed the ground battles and watched as human soldiers battled the forces of hell. It was a glorious day for the media as the men with cardboard signs and tin foil hats continued to scream, “The end is near!”

  In the years to come we would reverse engineer taking what was left for and using it to build ships of our own. At the time our M16’s, AK47s, microwave emitters, drones, mechs, and shotguns did just fine. We struck the invaders down before they could launch an attack. We made our stand and protected our pale blue dot. We would never forget that (and as history showed they would never forgive that).

  It was another hundred years before the second wave destroyed the ‘Sol’ system. Humanity had been prosperous during that time. Cities on Mars, Titan, Europa, Deimos, and even Pluto flourished. Mega-cities grew on Earth that housed billions and the military had become a peacekeeping organization. There were a few bad guys and small wars here and there but for the most part this was a new golden age. Every world in Sol worked together to govern themselves. Scientists had successfully reverse engineered Skrav technology and built ‘the Trinity’. If not for users’ none of this would have been possible. It is from one of these ‘users’ that eventually joined the Erebus I am descendant from, otherwise of course I would not be alive now. These ‘users’ worked for a small group, a group of people that protected, studied, and used an alien artifact called nexus. I have mentioned them before… they called themselves the ‘Sons of Sol’.

  If I made a list of all the things that were held secret from the world then that list would linger on far more then a million words. I could try I’m sure but I would never be able to truly explain or capture the amount of intelligence that is kept hidden from public consumption and I myself would probably only understand barely a third of it. The ‘Sons’ had their hands in everything dating back to the Roman Empire. The nexus back then had and always was their dirty little secret. Now it is something everyone knows about, everyone knows who the ‘users’ are and what they do but it is a strange idea, a hard concept to follow. A human that can see into the past, present, and future.

  At first it is like staring at the world covered in water. Wet, out of place. You are unable to move. You feel like you are drowning. You see only what is shown to you. The visions can’t be controlled or manipulated in any way. You feel your mind as it is torn from your body and the world you know fades to black. When you open your eyes you are somewhere else, someone else. Seeing was all you could do. You were nothing but a spectator… and the person whose eyes you saw through is known as the host. You are unable to blink, breath, or even feel pain. Your mind gives you a sense of what they are feeling but it is something that can be ignored. You are unable to do anything but watch what is given to you.

  We saw the Skrav destroy our sun. If we had the power to see into the future why not anyone else? When visions changed of a hundred year war to what was the genocide of our species from one Skrav dagger to a dozen we knew then that they had seen something similar. We had been fighting a battle with an enemy that could see the future just like ourselves. It was game of cat and mouse. The future wasn’t pre-destined or determined. Eventually we found we found a way we could win against them. We needed to destroy them before they destroyed us. We subjected thousands our own people to the nexus. Each time one saw the future we created a new strike plan. Over and over until we were closer to the future that we wanted for ourselves. It didn’t matter how many lost their mind or became broke by the process. Each use of the nexus changed our path until finally we mapped out the location of every single one of their ships. This is why we won the first invasion.

  Colonel Ren Kiryu, whom later changed his name and went by Narville, was one of the most outspoken leaders in the ‘Sons’ during that time. He was also an avid user himself subj
ugating himself to thousands of visions. In one of his visions he saw the human race colonizing a world called ‘Eden’. He was vague when it came to details but he had called it a paradise. Funny enough he was the same man that first saw the Skrav destroy our sun. He was a hero and many called him a prophet (some even called him a messiah). After the first invasion the focus of ‘users’ became to learn more about this so called paradise. Few ever saw it. Perhaps it was too far away. Only one thing was known for sure humanity would have to venture into deep space. The few that saw the future agreed on one other thing - humanity’s time in the Sol system had come to an end.

  Ren Kiryu’s last words were never recorded. Instead what we have on record is a manuscript, a small fragment of paper written by a ‘user’ after the launch of the Erebus. Most of it is hard to make out but it is still passed on. Ren Kiryu, known at this time as Narville, committed suicide at the age of 72. At that time that was young, given the medical advances a human could live to be 120-140 years old so long as they lived a healthy lifestyle. The ‘user’ had written that Ren sat in a white metal chair in the middle of a white room. In the far corner of the room was black table that held the nexus. A small cold glass of water sat on the floor beside Ren. The ‘user’ described the sound of a reactor slowly cooling down, a light hissing and grinding that came suddenly to a stop. Ren had just exited the nexus taking off the grey metal visor he used to block out the light of the present. Immediately he dropped to his knees and began crying. When he grabbed his water he slammed the glass down on the ground shattering it. He took several pieces and slit his wrists. As the blood ebbed from his wrist he moved it along the ground and wrote three letter.. S E V.