Pull (originally published as Deep Darkness v1)

Prelude to Despair

††† PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO VOTE †††

Original draft - read the revised version and the rest of my novel through kindle.
Amazon http://hyperurl.co/vfj635

Prelude to Despair

It was the second wave of attacks that ended the lives of everyone on the planet. In eight minutes the megacities of Earth, the colonies of Mars, Jupiter, Pluto and every world in the sol system the birthplace of humanity became swallowed by darkness. The alien species we called the Skrav had destroyed our sun and with it had made us an endangered species fleeing into deep space to an area we had designated the void. A last ditch effort to start over. The worst part of all of it, the death and destruction wasn't the genocide of our species, the loss of our cities, capitals, or that we lost the war - it was the fact that we saw it coming and we did nothing to stop it.

I was not quite myself but I was at the same time. I was at a park with a woman who was not and was my wife. I was standing next to a child who was and was not my son. I remember watching the rocks rise off the ground, my body becoming light as the wind. I grabbed the child's hand and ran. Looking around for somewhere to run, somewhere to hide I couldn't make it to the car and I sure as hell couldn't make it to a megablock. We could see the spire, or space elevator collapsing. I could hear my wife screaming. I was barely breathing when everything went dark. The sun had gone black. I was still holding not my child's hand and I was praying in a foreign language I couldn't understand. The Skrav had collapsed our sun into a black hole. They had sabotaged a Dyson Sphere we had been building with some kind of technology years beyond anything we could theorize and turned what should have been our greatest achievement against us.

I was holding the child tightly in my arms as the darkness turned the air cold as ice and a body that was not mine became nothing.

In another moment, in another time I was the child. I watched helpless as the person who was not my father prayed to his God for passage for himself and his family into heaven. Not my mother was screaming and staring into the sky. I alone not understanding stood clutched by the father's side breathing heavy taking in the entire world around me. Another time I was the wife staring at the spire, smiling at my child, playing in the park. Another time I was a stranger, walking alone, worried about my job, daydreaming about the future only to spend those last few moments wishing I had done more, cursing the world kneeling under the dark under a bridge taking in every moment of the end of the world staring at the father grasping his son for dear life.

The Skrav were a vicious group. Their culture was complex, based in hierarchy but with several ruling leaders who were not really leaders at all since at any given moment another Skrav, even a grunt soldier could find himself in charge of an entire planet or fleet. Every grunt, worker, monarch, even child in the Skrav were all-equal. A Terran Military official named Devon Cross during the first Skrav-human war believed they were hive minded like bugs. It was this belief that helped us wipe out entire colonies of Skrav after they attacked us. He would say, "Cut of the head, another takes its place so let them all bleed and break until there are no more parts to replace ". Years later we discovered he was feeding misinformation to soldiers. They thought killing another species the equivalent of insects would make it easier. For many it was - for others it didn't matter. They weren't hive minded they were just different. Each one an individual with a life, a family, and beliefs just like us. We couldn't understand them, not at first anyway. Trying to talk to a Skrav was like talking to dirt. Soon though maybe we would, even before we saw far enough to our future to understand.

The first Skrav-human war began with an attack on Earth, the birthplace of humanity and a place I will never see with my own eyes, in or around the 22nd century . At this time the nations of Earth had united putting world wars, cold wars, and resource wars behind them. It was after we almost destroyed ourselves and turned the nations into deserts that we put aside our prejudice and hate. Humans, all races banned together and began setting up way stations on the moon and Lagrange points and small settlements on Mars, its moons, and even the moons of Jupiter. Megacities ran across the coast of every major continent. Even the arctic had become a fruitful paradise protected by a dome surrounded by ice. It was one wave of attacks that had come. Hundreds of Skrav ships, each ship resembling a dagger, covered in sharp edges and black as the space they were traveling in. I have seen the terror through a hundred living non-living lives. They looked like giant tears filling the bright blue sky. Pitch-black clouds surrounded by sharp points and rays of light as the sun tried its best to pierce through. They had taken hundreds of years of travel across the darkness of space light years from their home to go to war.