Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  Ada watched as another of her shots hit center mass and didn’t slow down the soldier coming at her. “He sure did.”

  Twenty-Four

  Lee

  Saito stepped away from the firing line for a second. “Call Major Chevenko.”

  A video screen popped up in his HUD. It was Chevenko. “Sir?”

  “What’s the status?” asked Saito. “Can we do it?”

  “According to our on-board scientists and all of our instruments, we have enough for one more fold jump.”

  Saito grunted. “Make the preparations. We’ll be back to the bridge in a few minutes.”

  “Sir,” Chevenko said. “You should know … we’ll be jumping blind. There’s no way of knowing for sure where we’ll end up.”

  “Anywhere other than here will do. Start the sequence, we’re getting out of here. End call.” Saito turned to his new group, which now included Ada and Baez. “Everyone get back behind the blast walls,” he said, pointing at the doorway out of the mess hall.

  Rollins and Sousa didn’t need more instruction than that. Ada seemed to pick up on it quickly enough when she saw the grenades in his hand. She grabbed Baez and they started moving, too.

  Saito was halfway to the blast doors when he flicked off the pins and threw them into the growing group of AIC.

  He burst into the hallway, making it out of danger just as the grenades exploded and the emergency airtight walls fell, cutting the mess hall off from the rest of the ship.

  I’m so sorry.

  Saito took a moment to look down at the men he’d lost in the firefight outside the mess hall.

  Though he wasn’t able to save them, he promised them: Your sacrifices, they won’t be in vain. I promise you. We will survive and tell your families of your honorable sacrifice. You will be remembered.

  And with that, Saito left with the survivors.

  The enemy had boarded the Atlas in several locations across the ship. Saito was able to lead a party to close off the one through the mess hall, but there were still roving groups of hostiles, and no one except those that ran into them knew where they were.

  “Marines,” Saito said. Ada and Baez glanced back to him as the small group carefully made their way towards the shuttle that led to the bridge.

  “Yes, sir?” answered Ada as she kept her eyes forward in the same direction that she aimed her weapon.

  “Are you all that’s left? Is there anyone else?”

  Ada glanced at Baez, and he shook his head.

  “As far as we know, sir,” said Baez. “Most of the Marines onboard were taken out in the initial attack on the docking bay.”

  Ada swallowed hard, and Saito could tell she’d seen something that rattled her. She was green, he thought. Then again, she’d gotten this far, and it didn’t seem anyone else had.

  “No sir,” she said. “The attack…it’s just us.”

  Saito nodded. “We need to hurry; the fold jump engines are about to spin up. We need to be on the bridge before they do.”

  He gave Ada a squeeze on the shoulder. He nodded at Baez, who nodded back. Then he took his position in front. He glanced at Rollins, whose complexion was returning. With the healing pack on his right wrist, Rollins was already looking better, and he was just tough as nails.

  You have to ignore it. Some are going to die, have died. But if you’re going to save the majority, the few are going to have to fend for themselves.

  Saito did his best to ignore the sounds of fighting down hallways and corridors as they ran in a tight formation. He had to get to the bridge, and nothing could be allowed to derail him from that plan. If they didn’t get the ship as far away from those remaining dreadnoughts as possible, the enemies onboard wouldn’t matter, because the Atlas would be blown to bits.

  The group finally reached the internal shuttle to the Atlas’ command bridge. He held his breath as he pressed the button summoning said shuttle. There was no telling if it was still operational or not, and the other way to the bridge took a lot longer and would involve traversing more dangerous corridors, and possibly having to fight their way out.

  Saito breathed a sigh of relief as there was a beep, and the doors to the shuttle opened.

  Thank God. Something goes in our favor.

  “Captain, please, you first,” suggested Ada.

  “No. I’m making sure everyone gets to the bridge safely before—”

  “Sir, we insist. We’re expendable. You’re not,” chimed in Rollins.

  “Screw that, I’m not expendable,” said Baez. He got onto the shuttle.

  “No one is expendable,” Saito said. Except those poor men and women I’m leaving behind to fight off the enemy on board the ship. “I go last. This is not negotiable. Get on the shuttle! That’s an order!”

  Ada stayed behind with Saito, along with two other members of the crew. They hunkered down and watched the corridor in front of them as half the group took the shuttle to the bridge.

  Here they come.

  Saito heard a high-pitched screeching noise.

  “What is that?” asked Ada. She loosened, then re-tightened her grip on her gun.

  “Hold steady,” ordered Saito.

  “That doesn’t sound like rebels,” Ada said.

  “Just hold steady and be ready to fight.”

  A single AIC soldier appeared from around the corner at the end of the corridor. Saito waited to give the command to fire until the AIC soldier raised his rifle and began firing erratically.

  Anger replaced adrenaline as Saito emptied a whole clip at the enemy. Most of his bullets hit their mark, but none of them stopped the AIC soldier, much as they hadn’t for the others.

  “Why won’t they go down!?” yelled Ada over the sound of gunfire.

  “Just keep firing!” ordered Saito.

  Whether it was a ricochet or just an ill-aimed shot, a bullet hit one of the coolant pipes that ran across the ceiling of the corridor. It punctured it, resulting in the pipe spitting out super-chilled gas. The attacking AIC soldier tried to walk through it, with no success.

  That’s…interesting.

  “Hold your fire!” ordered Saito. He looked at the enemy, which was frozen in place under the spray of coolant. Yes, the chemical was cold, but not cold enough to freeze a man in place in a matter of seconds.

  There was a beep behind Saito and Ada. It was the shuttle to the bridge returning. And it came just in time, because they heard more screeches coming their way.

  This is…

  Saito, finally with a chance to breathe, looked outside the shuttle window out at space. Pieces of AIC ships were floating everywhere. They were accompanied by the bodies of Marines and pilots who’d been sucked out of the Atlas’ docking bay. Their frozen corpses, like popsicles made of flesh and bone, were haunting in the silent vacuum.

  “This is terrible. How did this happen, sir?” asked Ada, who leaned her sweaty forehead against the glass. Her heart still raced as she tried to come down from all the adrenaline.

  “I don’t know.” Saito lowered his head. For the first time in a while, he lowered his guard and sat down on the floor of the shuttle. “What’s your name, Marine?”

  “Ada. Ada Ericsson, sir.” She pushed herself up and away from the window.

  “Stop with that ‘sir’ shit. At least until we get to the bridge.”

  “Sir, yes…of course, Captain.”

  “Lee. My name is Lee, Ada. And I’m sorry.”

  “For what? There’s no way you could’ve known that this was going to happen,” said Ada. In a way, helping Saito helped her deal with the trauma she’d just gone through. It was a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, but it was better than nothing.

  “I had a bad feeling before we even started this mission. I felt deep inside that something was wrong, that it was too good to be true. ‘A mission of peace to end a twenty-year war’. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.”

  “My Pappa, he always told me that anything worth doing is hard. This was worth doing, s
—Lee.”

  Saito pointed out the window. “That’s the price. All those lives and probably a lot more. Is that worth it?”

  Ada didn’t have an answer.

  Another beep signaled that they’d reached the bridge. Saito stood. “We can’t let this all be for nothing.”

  Twenty-Five

  Wash

  “Good morning, Anna,” Jaime Washburn, mayor of Sanctuary Station 33, said to the holographic image that he awoke to. It wasn’t actually Anna Slavich—a Romanian supermodel back on Earth—but Washburn wasn’t one to stand on principle when it came to his bootlegged companions.

  “Good morning, sexy,” Anna answered. “How did you, you, you, sleep?” Like everything on Sanc-33, the station’s link to Washburn’s HUD was a little glitchy.

  “Nightmares, night sweats, and the overwhelming urge to throw up.” Washburn sat up in bed. “The usual.”

  “Do you need your medication, baby?” A drawer opened in the nightstand by Washburn’s bed. It had anti-nausea medication, painkillers, and Valium in it.

  “Nah, I think I’m—” Washburn shot up out of bed, his socks almost slipping on the floor of his quarters, as he ran over to the bathroom. The sparse contents of his stomach were emptied into the steel toilet bowl, alongside a good amount of bile.

  “Awww, is my baby okay?” asked Anna.

  Washburn sat on his bathroom floor. “Your baby is dying.”

  “Cheer up, baby! Let’s go get some coffee!”

  “Yeah.” Washburn pushed himself up off the floor. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  After getting dressed and brushing his teeth to get the taste of vomit out his mouth, Washburn left his quarters, on his way to Carmine’s Coffee to get his caffeine fix.

  Set up to be like a home away from home instead of a cold, metallic space station, Sanc-33 did all it could to look more like a city. The hallways had screens set up to masquerade as windows showing cityscapes. Others looked out on wild, untamed planet landscapes. Shops and markets lined the halls, selling anything any residents would need. There were churches, mosques, temples, and even a place for those in the cult of the Oblivion to worship.

  All sanctuary stations were exactly that: sanctuaries. Free from the politics of war, any man or woman could find safety there. Fighting of any kind was restricted, enforced by police mech robots that no one in their right mind wanted to trifle with. That made Washburn’s job fairly easy.

  That was, until this morning.

  Washburn’s HUD started ringing in his head. He had an incoming video chat message. “Hey, babe, you got an incoming call from the sheriff,” said Anna.

  Sheriff Wei was probably the only man whose job was nearly as easy as his own.

  “I ain’t got enough time left in this world to waste on talking to that worrywart.”

  “But he’s called a couple of times.” Holographic Anna mimicked intertwining her arm in Washburn’s.

  Fine. Fine. Fine. Let’s hear what he’s freaking out about today. “Yeah? What can I help you with, Wei?” asked Washburn as he walked up to Carmine’s.

  A diminutive Southern Chinese man appeared in the video chat window in Washburn’s HUD. He looked frazzled. Behind him, a growing scuffle was clearly visible and audible.

  “We got a problem here, Mr. Mayor.” Wei looked behind himself, then back forward.

  “Oh no! A problem? That can’t be good, baby,” Anna chimed in over his other channel. Washburn cut it off with a wink of one eye.

  “Come on, Sheriff, I haven’t even had my morning coffee yet.” He waved the HUD dark for a moment as he ordered. “Black, strong, and a little bit of sugar. And I mean a little bit, none of that artificial crap, either. I know y’all got the good stuff back there.” Washburn’s accent was almost extinct, and all but nonexistent off-planet. But his father had had it, and his father before him, and so it was passed down.

  He flipped Wei back up, and it was like he’d never stopped talking. “… there’s trouble at the Oblivion, I don’t know what they call this place. Hey, Daniels! What do they call this place? A temple? A church? What?”

  “Hell if I know,” responded a voice off the video chat: Daniels.

  “Anyway, between the cultists, they’re causing all sorts of trouble down here, Wash. Every one of them seems to have lost their damn minds.”

  “About what?” asked Washburn as he took his coffee. It was hot as hell, and he managed to spill some. He cursed under his breath.

  “What’s that?” Wei asked, because of course that was the one moment he stopped to take a breath.

  “I said what do they want?” Washburn walked away from Carmine’s, down the halls of the commerce floor. It was a large circle that went almost all the way around the station.

  “They don’t want anything. They just keep on shouting that something’s coming. Hold on just one second.” Wei looked around to see if he could get somewhere a little quieter, with less commotion.

  “Everyone wants something, Wei.” Wash passed one of his friends, Pavel, who worked at a diner on the commerce floor. “Mornin’, Pavel! How’s Rebecca and the little monsters?”

  “Oh, you know,” Pavel said as he took out his keys to open up for the day. “The wife’s mad and the kids want to leave to go planetside. So…the usual.”

  Washburn smiled and raised his coffee. “I’d like to tell you it gets easier, but…”

  Pavel waved him on.

  “Wash?” Wei said. “I’m telling you, they haven’t asked for anything, except maybe for everyone on board to give themselves to the Abyss. Just their usual nonsense, but a lot more, I dunno, passionate about it. It’s got folks spooked over here.”

  “Did you deploy the damn robots yet?” Washburn wasn’t too concerned. The cultists, they were probably the worst behaved on the station. “Once they see those big metal monsters, they back down.”

  “We did! And they didn’t!”

  “All right, all right, hold your horses, Sheriff. I’ll be there in a li’l bit,” Washburn said. “End call.”

  That released Anna’s lock, and she popped into view. “Oooo, it looks like a busy day today, Mr. Mayor,” she said in her most playful sexy voice.

  “Not now, baby. Turn off, Anna,” Washburn said.

  “Just pause—” She pouted, but disappeared.

  Wei met Washburn at the elevators. If he’d looked frazzled before in their video chat, Wei looked completely panicked in person. Not to mention, there was a new wrinkle. Even though it involved his clothes, it wasn’t due to the lack of ironing.

  There was blood spattered on them.

  Twenty-Six

  Wash

  “What the hell happened, Wei? Whose blood is that?”

  “There was a, an incident, sir. The police robots, they…one of the cultists ran towards me and they thought he was trying to attack the sheriff.” Wei stuttered. “I mean, me. I didn’t program the damn things—”

  Washburn grabbed Wei and spun him around, and headed down the hall as fast as he could, trying to maintain his smile as he nodded to merchants. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Did it kill…is it a him or a her?”

  “Hard to tell with those cultist types,” Wei said.

  “Whatever they are—”

  “I’m pretty sure they’re dead. It’s right over here.”

  The closer they got, the more details of the police robots Washburn could see. They were each about eight feet tall. Their shape resembled a frog standing up straight on two legs, rather than a human form. Their arms were equipped with both lethal and non-lethal ordnance. Four of them were on scene.

  Washburn could hear yelling, screaming, and arguing as they approached. A crowd of residents began to form, became onlookers trying to see what was going on. Every step he took made him a little angrier—and more concerned.

  Washburn could hear the little voice in his head: the one that wanted him to leave it be, delegate it, and hope it blew over. It was just laziness pushing him to take the easy
way out. He’d listened to that voice more than he liked to admit, but since his uncle had died in office and he’d backed his way into the job of sanctuary mayor, he was trying to turn over a new leaf.

  Trying was the key point.

  “Rejoice! Our brother has joined with the Abyss and found true enlightenment!” yelled a bald Oblivion cult member. He was dressed in clothes that were falling apart, and smelled just as bad as he looked. Most would consider him homeless, if it wasn’t for the cult’s little enclave that housed them all.

  Washburn blew out his cheeks and stepped forward, well aware that Wei was just standing there like a bump on a log. What exactly did he do, other than point the expensive police robots at problems?

  “I’m sorry about your friend here. I assure you it’s never our intention to see harm come to any Sanctuary residents,” Washburn said. He tried to sound sincere with his apology, although he was anything but. If it was up to him, he’d load all of them into the airlock.

  Then they can all be one with the Abyss. Crazed sons of bitches.

  “No, Mr. Mayor, you should be happy!” answered a female member of the cult. “Our brother has finally fulfilled his destiny, his dream, his purpose.”

  Well, at least he knew it was a ‘he.’ “Uh, well, thanks, I guess,” Washburn said, aware it wasn’t his most eloquent moment. “What’s his name? Does he have family on board, on Earth or on one of the colonies? Who needs to be contacted?”

  Washburn was aware that he should step forward, rather than hiding behind the relative safety of the ever-vigilant police robots, but there were limits to his interest in appearing sympathetic.

  “We are his family,” replied the bald cult member. “You are his family; every living thing is his family, and he’ll join them in the sweet everlasting peace of death. Because that, Mr. Mayor, that’s unity.”

  And you’re insane. There’s nothing peaceful about dying. Maybe if one of these nut jobs were in my shoes right now…