Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  “What can I do to make this right and get y’all to calm the hell down?” asked Washburn.

  “We apologize, Mr. Mayor,” said the female cult member, projecting her voice so all the gathering crowd could hear her. “We simply wanted you all to know what’s coming. To inform you that the rapture, the rapture for all of us, is on its way. And when it does come, oh my, when it does, we will all have the privilege of becoming one with the deep cold black of the Abyss.”

  “So…are y’all gonna calm down?” Washburn said when she seemed to awkwardly stop talking.

  The bald cult member smiled while making eye contact with Washburn. Pupils dilated, eyes bloodshot, he looked high on something. “Of course, sir. Of course.”

  All at once the Oblivion cultists calmly stood down. They retreated back into their enclave, happy as could be. Washburn, on the other hand, was left with a mess to clean up.

  “Uh.” Washburn slowly turned to Wei. The sheriff was a good dozen feet behind him. “Sheriff,” he said respectfully, still aware of the crowd.

  “Sir?”

  Washburn tried to spur him to action with his eyes, but when it was clear that wasn’t going to work before he developed a tic, Washburn said, “Could you please deal with this crime scene?”

  “Ah.” Wei seemed to wise up and walk over so they could talk more quietly.

  Washburn looked down at the dead cultist. He was face-down in a pool of his own blood. “Get this guy out of here. Get this blood cleaned up. And prepare to make a statement to the station residents about this. Make sure to keep it from sounding too gruesome, okay?”

  “Can’t you—”

  “No, Wei,” Washburn said. “I can’t. You need to.”

  Wei ran his hand through his hair. “Okay.”

  “I gotta go do the mornin’, uh, shit—” Washburn’s HUD lit up with another incoming video call.

  “What?” Wei looked up, but Washburn waved him away as he walked from the scene of the incident and answered the call. It was Angie Ngyou, head of the station’s communication department, or Comdep. “What can I do for you, Ms. Ngyou?”

  “Mr. Mayor…” There was hesitation in Angie’s voice, which was unusual. She was a strong, decisive leader in her department who bled an aura of confidence. Not this morning. “You really need to come meet me at the viewing deck.”

  “Why? What is it now?”

  “Sir, I think it’ll be better if you just come see it. Now.”

  “I’m not in the mood for mysteries, Ms. Ngyou. Just give it to me straight.”

  “We have guests, sir. A ship just arrived outside the station from a fold jump. UEF, by the look of it.”

  “Well, y’all know what to do. Offer them boys sanctuary, blah, blah, reassure them that they’re safe here and we got any supplies they might need for sale. What’s the problem?”

  “We did that.”

  “And?”

  “Sir…I really think you should come take a look first.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Lee

  “What are our options, Major?” asked Saito.

  “We have enough juice for one fold jump. The problem is, our navigation is only barely functional, and it’s going to be impossible to pick a precise location. Add to that the fact that we can’t go that far, and, well…” Chevenko spun around to glance up to the captain’s chair that the very tired Saito sat in. “We don’t have many good choices here.”

  “Do we have enough to get to any UEF-controlled planet or station?” Saito knew the answer before asking the question.

  “Nothing UEF, no. We’re too far out, close to uncharted space. Which is our only viable option, unless you want to jump further into AIC territory.”

  “Uncharted space? What do we have out there?” Saito didn’t want to lead his men into space’s version of the Wild West, but he saw no other choice.

  “We’ve been able to lock onto the beacon of a sanctuary station. We can go there, but we haven’t been able to raise them on comms, nor do we know anything about it. It could be one of those the AIC ‘commandeered’ back at the beginning of the war.”

  “Far as I see it, Major, we don’t have a choice. That’s our destination; set the course,” ordered Saito.

  “How about the enemy still on board?” asked Chevenko. It was a valid and important question. No one knew how many hostiles were on board, and no one knew how to eliminate them.

  “Pull up a thermal image of the ship. I want the whole thing.”

  “Sir, yes sir.” Chevenko switched every camera on board the Atlas to thermal imaging. Then she consolidated all of them to make one cohesive thermal map of the ship.

  “Now transfer it over to my HUD,” ordered Saito.

  We need to purge part of the ship. These things don’t like the cold. If we can warn our men and women that it’s about to get really chilly and we’re going to fold jump, they can bundle up and hold on.

  “Okay, you see these spots? Those are the enemy. It looks like most of them are around…damn, they’re around the med bay.” Saito realized that a hard task had just been made so much more difficult.

  We need to warn them without tipping off those things. If we can slow them down with the cold, maybe that’ll give us enough time to get all of our men up here to the front of the ship, seal off the rest.

  “What do you want to do, sir?” asked Chevenko.

  “I, we, can go back out there, bring back as many of our men and women as possible before the jump,” Ada volunteered.

  “No one leaves this bridge until we’re out of this. Major, get on comms. See if they can connect me directly to everyone’s onboard HUD. I want to talk to them through HUDs instead of PAs.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  It took about fifteen minutes, but the communication division on the Atlas was able to connect Saito directly to the remaining crew’s HUDs. He knew he had to be careful; clearly he didn’t know who could be trusted on his ship. He wasn’t even sure the creatures wouldn’t be able to use the HUDs. In fact, he assumed they could, but they were slow.

  “Attention, crew of the Atlas. This is your captain. I understand that you’re in the fight of your lives, for your lives. But I need you to disengage and find safety and warmth. These enemies on our ship are not AIC soldiers, as I’m sure any of you who have encountered them have noticed. Normal weaponry doesn’t work, but we think we’ve found something that has.

  “Migrate to the front third of the ship. Anywhere past section fifty-six will suffice. If able, please help any injured crewmembers from the med bay to safety. In exactly five minutes from the end of this message, I will seal off any section south of fifty-six and completely turn off any life support systems. So please, move fast, be safe, and I hope to see you soon.”

  Just one. We just need one break. Please.

  Seconds after the end of Saito’s message to his crew, the remaining AIC dreadnoughts began to move in on the Atlas. It was either terrible timing, or they’d heard the message. Either way, it was going to squeeze their timetable.

  “With what little armor we have left, it’ll only take a couple of volleys for those dreadnaughts to finish us off,” said Chevenko.

  “We just need to give them a little more time.” Saito’s eyes were trained on the thermal camera images. He watched as his crew moved as fast as they could north of section fifty-six, as instructed. His hand hovered over the button to seal off the rest of the ship south of that.

  “Sir, we don’t have time.”

  “I’ll tell you when we have time,” Saito snapped. “Spin up the fold engines.”

  Come on, move, dammit!

  “Prepared for the fold jump,” Chevenko said. This would normally be the point where Saito would have her inform the crew of the time to jump and tell them to take their seats. Instead, there was simply silence on the bridge.

  “Inbound,” snapped Chevenko. “Full spread.”

  Saito took a deep breath and pressed the button. Immediately the back two
thirds of the Atlas were cut off from the bridge and the front third.

  Chevenko looked back at her captain. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “No time for being sorry right now, Major. How long until we jump?”

  “Twenty seconds, sir,” Chevenko informed him as she and everyone else on the bridge saw, on what screens were left, tiny dots of bright light appearing in front of the enemy dreadnoughts. Those dots got bigger and bigger.

  Saito put on his mag bracelets. Then he addressed the crew, or what was left of them. The die was cast now; no reason to use anything but the PAs. “We’re jumping in seconds. If you don’t have a seat, please hold on to whatever you can. This is going to be a rough one. I’ll see you on the other side, whatever that may be.”

  “Ten seconds,” Chevenko said.

  Saito cut off the life-support systems to the back two thirds of the Atlas. That meant there were no oxygen and no heat. It wouldn’t be long until the halls turned into ice boxes, freezing what he wanted to believe were only enemies. But he knew—he saw it on the cameras—he was leaving men behind to die.

  “Brace for impact!” yelled a crewmember on the bridge.

  “Three.

  “Two.

  “One—”

  Chevenko’s countdown was cut off by the massive impact of several AIC torpedoes colliding with the Atlas at the instant the fold jump initiated.

  Twenty-Eight

  Ben

  “What’re you waiting for, Benny-boy?” asked Ace. He stood behind Ben like a watchful schoolteacher. “Shoot the little bastard so we can get out of here.”

  Ben stood over a terrified Oblivion cult member, pistol in hand. It wasn’t that he’d never killed a man; he was a soldier in a time of war. But he’d never killed a defenseless man, and calling the cowering twenty-something on the street below him a man might’ve been a little generous.

  “We need the data,” Ben said.

  “We don’t need him alive for that.”

  “What we really need is to move,” Morgan said. “The big bad DC police are going to be here any minute.” She kicked a dying cult member on the ground in front of her.

  “What’s the problem?” Ace asked.

  He walked up behind Ben, which bothered him. It was a pushy move. “I’m not killing people that don’t need killing, Ace,” Ben said.

  Ben looked at the pistol in his prosthetic hand. He’d declined the option of faux skin. His entire arm was metal, servos, and wires. That way he’d remember every time he saw it.

  It wasn’t the physical pain of the terrorist attack that made it all come back to Ben. What really stung were all those others there he couldn’t save. That helplessness...

  “For the record, you were the lookout,” Ben said. “This was a simple job until you forgot how to, you know, look out.”

  “They saw us too fast. It happens. Everything is fine. Just shoot him.”

  “I’m not just shooting him,” Ben said again.

  “Have you forgotten what they did to you?” Ace asked. “What they did to your mother?”

  Ben quickly jerked his shoulder up, hitting Ace in the chin. Ace yelped and jerked back, blood on his lip from where he’d bitten his tongue. “Shit, man. What the hell?”

  “I told you not to talk about my mother.”

  Ace wiped the blood away. “Damn, you could’ve just told me to shut up or something.”

  “We have about thirty seconds,” said Morgan, who’d hacked into, watched, and tracked the police’s progress responding to their crime scene. “You two gonna keep flirting up there, or can we get this done?”

  “Got it.” Ben pistol-whipped the young cultist until he was knocked unconscious. It only took a couple of blows.

  “Careful not to hurt him too bad,” Ace sneered.

  Ben ignored him and took out a neural net. It was meant to hack into an individual’s HUD and rapidly download any data. After putting it on the kid’s temple, he knew it would take about ten seconds.

  “You’re soft, Benny-boy. Gonna have to toughen you up,” Ace said.

  “Just find us a way out of here.”

  Ace was looking up at the building facades around them.

  “You get it?” Morgan asked Ben.

  The light on the neural net turned green. “Got it,” he said.

  “Let’s move,” Ace said. “Being this low gives me the creeps.”

  They were on the Washington, DC street level. If they were going to get away, evade capture, the answer was above them. It was more likely they could lose the cops in the multiple levels of the megacity.

  “We meet back at the ship in…” Ben looked at the time in his HUD. “Thirty minutes. Now get out of here.” He used his new-found captaincy to order Morgan and Ace to disperse. Everyone going their own way made it harder for the cops to catch them.

  As Ace and Morgan disappeared into the megacity, Ben heard sirens. Above him he saw slivers of search lights that tried to filter through the levels above the street. He was out of time.

  Ben had two choices. He could run into the alleyways and look for stairs up to the levels above. It would leave him more exposed, but it was the quickest way up. Any elevators and lifts up in the area had surely been shut down by the DC police. Or he could enter the bottom floor of the nearby apartment blocks and go up from there. The advantage of that path was the inherit cover of a building, and he could come out at any level.

  Ben bolted for the apartment block door. The door was locked. After a quick glance around, he kicked at the door with his artificial leg. On the third try, the door burst inward.

  “Freeze!” shouted a robotic voice behind him. “You are under arrest! By the authority of the District of Columbia Police Department!”

  Damn robots.

  “Comply! Or we will open fire!”

  Ben put his hands on his head. “I’m complying, assholes,” he said. He turned around long enough to verify they were the old shit-lickers with modified tract feet. Good for the grimy ground level. Not so good for rushing upstairs.

  He spun around again and dove headfirst into the kicked-open doorway. The robots opened fire almost instantly.

  Twenty-Nine

  Ben

  Ben ducked and dodged, barely missed by the super-heated high-speed rounds that burst through the concrete of the apartment block. Pieces of the walls and melted rebar scratched and burned him as he scurried up the stairs.

  Floor by floor, Ben hurried up the stairwell, leaving the slower-moving robots behind. They would radio ahead, of course, but at least he had a chance.

  On the way, he heard tenants in the hallways beyond, and the sounds of the city. But he focused on his own breathing as he tried to at least reach the twentieth floor.

  Wise to his escape plan, DCPD officers on foot entered the apartment block from above. They rushed downwards, down the stairs towards Ben. He had to improvise.

  Ben looked up and saw the sign for the tenth level. That’ll do, he thought. He shoulder-checked the door and found himself in a concrete hallway with a moldy rug, lined with doors on both sides.

  Ben almost fell a couple of times as he hurried down a long straight hallway looking for an exit. The hallway took a hard 90-degree turn, and Ben shot around the blind corner—

  And collided with a DCPD police officer. They both fell to the floor. Ben was momentarily dazed, but came to his senses quickly enough to realize what had happened.

  He lunged at the officer, who was bumbling for his firearm while getting to his feet. A normal man wouldn’t have been able to punch out a cop, due to their full head-encompassing helmets. But Ben had a robotic arm.

  He crashed his fist into the cop’s helmet just as he drew his firearm. The cop fired wildly, then dropped the weapon as his helmet cracked and he stumbled back, dazed again. He toppled over, completely knocked out. Or worse. Ben suddenly had the mental image of killing the cop with a single blow.

  But he saw the chest rise and fall under the cop’s body armor, and that
was enough for him.

  Ben leaped over the prone officer. Either the officer was playing possum, or he’d just regained consciousness in that moment, but either way, he reached out and grabbed Ben’s ankle as he went over. Ben toppled forward.

  Without thinking, Ben started kicking at the cop with his free prosthetic leg.

  He kicked and kicked, like he had at the door. He was desperate to get away, and didn’t stop until he heard a crack.

  That sinking feeling inside his gut made him realize what had just happened.

  It wasn’t the helmet cracking.

  The officer was perfectly still. His chest wasn’t moving. Ben knew the man was dead. He must’ve broken the officer’s neck.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Ben screamed at himself. Now he was a cop-killer.

  Ben jumped to his feet and continued on, looking for an exit. He found one in the form of thick shatter-proof sliding doors.

  Before emerging from the apartment block, Ben frantically looked around through the glass sliding doors. What he saw was a typical elevated street on the tenth level. Mostly consisting of little stalls and stands selling everything from food to rugs, it was a market, which was perfect. He saw a police cruiser fly by up above, and waited until it passed to go outside.

  Moving through the crowds of the market, Ben had to walk the line between blending in and moving with haste. The ship, the Lost, was docked on level thirty at the public docking bay. Getting there was going to take a little while, especially with the police combing the area for him and his compatriots. Things were only going to get worse when the cops realized one of their own had been killed.

  Ben froze when, through the crowds of the tenth level, he saw DCPD officers slowly making their way through the crowd. They stopped anyone they saw that looked at all suspicious, and checked their paperwork. Naturally he wanted to turn around, but then saw the police cruiser was returning his way. He was stuck between the two.

  Options, asshole, what are your options? Think, think, think.