Free Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) by Stephen Landry Page A

made it sound as if the monitor only had one voice rather
then the mass that it used to speak to us before. The other voices must be
doing other things, giving orders, clearing commands. The monitor was
leading guards around Errikus and civilians to safety. That was its purpse. It
was an alien that could multi-task hundreds of things at any given time.. Our
purpose, however meaningful or meaningless to the monitor as it could have
been was to rescue our friend. All that mattered to us now was the one voice
guiding Aira and myself through the ruins. I no longer felt terrified. I could
feel my instinct to survive kick in. All I could think about was my friends.
They were my family now. Aira, Hayden were all that mattered. Mother,
Dom, the other human adults that were slain, all of them were memories now.
Memories that would live on in my dreams. It was up to me to live for them.
Seraphim
    We were a mile away from the monitor's bunker when we ran into
Gerad again. This time he wasn't talking. He was sitting with his back against
a wall. A blue holo-projection of himself and a woman dancing played out
before him. His eyes were red and his mouth was bleeding. He did not blink
or say anything to us though we begged for him to follow us. He stared empty
at the dancers. The monitor told us to keep moving. Gerad was alive but his
consciousness had already been lost. Gerad was broken. The voice in our
head continued telling us there was nothing we could do.
    "Is this what war is like?" I asked out loud. We have been at war with
the Skrav for hundreds of years and I have never seen anything like this. I
had never imagined going into battle. I was wrong though. I wasn't thinking
about it at the time but we had lost worlds before. Anytime humanity settles
or slows down death and destruction follow. This is why the monitor said
death followed us like a disease.
    The monitor spoke inside my earpiece, "this is an act of nature, an act of
the gods."
I knew little about religion on Errikus.
I knew that the Eek were polytheistic. They had many temples
throughout the world each devoted to a separate deity. The only thing I really
knew for sure about their culture and the culture of many Errikans was
though they had guards and guns they were all pacifists. Humans would joke
and say they had war bred out of them. Others said that in this part of the
galaxy far away from the galactic core resources were better, life didn't need
to evolve to defend itself. Even if Errikus itself was a hostile planet full of
dangerous life the worlds that the Eek, Pok, Myra, and hundreds of others
came from must have been pretty nice.
The Leviathan was nothing more than an animal. Its home was inside the
immer - far away from here. The Tritan must have hit it or picked it up. This
whole thing was nothing more then an accident. I could hear it now as it
screeched and tore through the city. It was just screaming to go home. It was
screaming for it's mother. The monitor spoke again in my ear, calling the
creature a name that when translated meant Seraph.
    Seraph - Seraphim (plural) - 1. an angelic being, regarded in
traditional Christian angelology as belonging to the highest order of the
ninefold celestial hierarchy, associated with light, ardor, and purity.
    The Eek it seemed believe the leviathan was one of these creatures. That
it had followed humanity in order to wipe us away and purify the galaxy that
they themselves had become caught in the eye of our struggle and would
become pure once the creature had killed all of us. I didn’t want to think
about any of that. I just wanted to survive and not just for myself but for
those that had died. If Aira and I stopped now our entire lives would be for
nothing, the lives of every human on Errikus would have had no purpose. If
we survived the two of us could make a difference.
    “Do you ever wonder why most of the alien’s species we ally with all
have names that end in