Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  “What happened out there?” He nodded up at the wreckage of the Atlas. “I’ve never seen damage like this before.”

  “You a salvager or something?” Baez asked dismissively.

  “Chief engineer on the station. George Royce.”

  “It’s kind of a long story, Chief,” answered Ada, who had no interest in joining her disgruntled crew mates. She’d seen the enemy up close. She knew that Saito’s decision to quarantine them made sense.

  Royce ran his hands along the battered hull. “Try me.”

  “We were ambushed after a fold jump.”

  “AIC?” asked Royce. It was a reasonable guess.

  Ada and Baez exchanged a glance. “Not exactly,” she said. “Anyway, most of the damage was probably from the attack.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. See this here?” Royce pointed at a large gash in one of the Atlas’ hull plates nearest them. “It’s shrapnel from a shooting star torpedo. AIC uses them to try and cripple ships without killing the people inside. Like a shotgun blast, bird shot, hit as much as you can. But there’s more here. The metal, it’s deformed, twisted. Did this happen in the fold jump?”

  Ada hadn’t noticed it before, but upon seeing how the armored hull of the Atlas was mangled, she felt a little chill run down her spine. She knew that the forces being manipulated during fold jumps were powerful, but she’d never seen the results in person. The Atlas was so desperate to escape that the flight crew might’ve cut a few corners, resulting in a rockier than usual jump.

  That, or the creatures had done it. Which would make them even more dangerous than they’d already seemed.

  Another part of Ada just felt incredibly lucky to still be alive. Royce kept up a running lecture on the damage he was seeing, but her mind drifted. She pictured herself waking to a room full of injured and dead Marines. Then she’d survived the cruel death by the vacuum of space in the Atlas’ docking bay. Then she’d managed to fight her way through the ship alongside her captain. Now she stood in another docking bay, and should’ve felt safe. But she’d seen too much for that.

  Ada knew there was a better than small chance that there were wolves among the sheep. Maybe that was why she chose to interact with a resident of the space station instead of her own comrades in arms.

  “So what’s the plan?” Baez said impatiently. He said it loudly, and there was a general rumble of discontent nearby. “You going to shoot us all and see who survives, and there’s your monsters?”

  Rollins clenched his jaw, waited a moment, then released and simply said, “Some of the staff have agreed to look over some personnel files and ask some basic questions about our pasts. They don’t know any of us, so they’ll be impartial.”

  “I guess we don’t have much choice,” Baez said. He pointed over towards the doors to the docking bay. Standing guard were the police robots. “We try to leave and those robotic assholes are gonna shoot us.”

  “No one is getting shot,” Rollins said.

  The chatter quieted down when Ada heard a familiar voice behind her. “How bad is it?”

  She turned to see Lieutenant Sousa. Unlike everyone else, he had hardly a scratch on him, lucky guy. Ada realized he was talking to the chief engineer.

  “Well…it’s definitely not good. Which is a shame because this, this is one hell of a ship, or at least part of one. I can tell.” Royce stood with his hands on his hips, admiring the engineering that had gone into building something like the Atlas.

  Sousa chuckled. “I’m guessing her maiden mission was her last mission.”

  Royce nodded. “Guess so.”

  Ada watched Sousa with squinted eyes and a raised eyebrow. “You okay, sir?”

  “I’m fine. Why do you ask that?”

  “Nothing,” she said at last. What she wanted to say was that they’d all just been through the shit, and he was the only one with a smile and a light-hearted remark. Maybe it was just his personality. She didn’t know the man well.

  Maybe.

  Sousa seemed to interpret her silence as concern. “I’m fine,” he said. “It just feels good to be alive.” He glanced at the chief engineer. “Royce, is it?”

  Royce nodded.

  “Is anything from the ship salvageable?” Sousa asked.

  Ada backed away slowly as the engineer and Sousa talked. She went over to Rollins, who tried his hardest to keep the peace among the remaining Atlas crew. He wasn’t doing great.

  She tried to get Rollins’s attention. “Commander?”

  “Not now,” Rollins said.

  Ada ignored his brush-off. She grabbed him by the arm, hard. “Sir,” she said.

  Rollins turned to her and hissed, “Can’t you see I’m a little busy, Private?”

  “We have a problem,” Ada looked over at Sousa. “I think we have a problem.”

  “You think so?”

  “I mean, a new problem.”

  Rollins tapped his foot impatiently. “Well?”

  Ada decided to just spit it out. She kept her voice just above a whisper. “That’s not Lieutenant Sousa.”

  Thirty-Six

  Ada

  Rollins glanced casually around again. “That’s a hell of an accusation, Private,” he said under his breath.

  “He took you to the med bay back on the Atlas, didn’t he?” asked Ada.

  “He did.”

  “And he was with you the whole time?”

  “Yes,” Rollins said. Then he paused. “Well, no. Those things attacked. He joined a couple other members of the crew out in the hall and fought them off, protecting the injured.”

  “Did anyone else survive that fight?”

  Rollins was quiet for a second. Ada couldn’t tell if he was just trying to remember or was connecting the dots inside his own head. “No, it was just him.”

  “And without a single injury? Not even a scratch?”

  “That’s not enough,” said Rollins.

  Ada had to admit he was right. Pointing out or accusing Sousa right there in these docks held potentially disastrous repercussions. “Talk to him. Tell me if you don’t think something is off,” she said as she backed away towards the rest of the surviving crew, her eyes on Sousa.

  Rollins glanced back at him and then nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  A tall Japanese man dressed in a Sanctuary Station maintenance uniform arrived just as Ada returned to her seat on the floor of the bay.

  “Okay, my name is Hatori,” he said. He pointed to the women to his right and left. “This is Barbara and this is Maria. I guess we’re the ones in charge of asking you these questions, or tests, or whatever. So, let’s see here,” Hatori had a paper-thin tablet in his hand, as did his colleagues. “First up is Tina Smothers. Tina Smother…”

  A female crewmember next to Ada accidentally shoulder-bumped her as she answered her summons.

  Ada barely noticed. She saw that Rollins, after pawning something off on a subordinate, had decided to approach Sousa. Her eyes were fixated.

  “Lieutenant Sousa?” Rollins asked as he approached. Ada could just make out his lips.

  As Rollins and Sousa talked, something else caught Ada’s attention. She heard a loud argument near the entrance to the docking bay. The argument turned into a little bit of a scuffle.

  A single woman, head shaved bald, covered in unusual tattoos, was held back by two members of the docking bay crew. She yelled, writhed, and screamed, but Ada couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  Ada never saw anyone look as intense as the bald woman being restrained. Veins popped out of her neck and forehead, her face red with rage. She looked crazed. Something was happening, and the private felt a rising sense of dread.

  Suddenly, the woman changed in the blink of an eye. Ada didn’t see the bald, heavily-tattooed woman. She saw her friend. She saw Private Martin.

  That’s not…this isn’t possible.

  Almost as if in a dream, Ada found herself walking towards the commotion near the entrance, near where she saw Ma
rtin. Her legs seemingly moved on their own, giving her a floating sensation as she walked.

  She’s dead. I saw her sucked out into space. There’s no way anyone can or could’ve survived that. Right?

  But for some reason, Ada couldn’t stop moving. She couldn’t make her body understand. She had to go see her dead friend.

  Ada was about halfway to the docking bay entrance when she heard and saw Martin scream to her: “Rejoice! It’s here! The Abyss!”

  The words broke the spell. Suddenly, her dead friend’s visage was replaced by the bald woman’s face.

  “Rejoice!” the woman screamed again. Then she disappeared in a loud explosion.

  The suicide bomb was big enough to kill everyone in her immediate vicinity, including the two restraining her, but it was no bigger than a couple of grenades. Certainly not as powerful as it could have been.

  Naturally everyone in the docking bay was panicked. Ada knew something wasn’t right. On instinct, she turned around to see what Sousa was doing.

  With one snap swing of his arm, Sousa knocked Rollins out cold. Still smiling, he unholstered his pistol and opened fire on the crewmembers around him. Though his aim wasn’t great, he was so close that he easily took out a half-dozen people with the first sweep of his arm.

  Once the shock of the whole situation faded among the surviving crew of the Atlas, they fought back. Most were still armed, and all that could do so fired back at Sousa immediately, hitting him in seemingly every part of his body, from head to toe.

  But he didn’t go down.

  Sousa first started to walk forward through the hail of gunfire. The older wounds closed up, his flesh and muscle moving like living liquid metal. His smile never faded, not even when super-heated bullets burst through his teeth. Both of his hands transformed. All ten fingers turned into something more akin to long talons.

  Crewmembers were backing away now, still unloading on Sousa as they went. The action only seemed to make him move faster. Before long he was in the middle of the group, wildly slinging his hands, cutting and tearing through them. Blood flew everywhere as screams echoed throughout the docking bay.

  Think fast, Ada. What can you use? What can you…there!

  Knowing from experience and what was unfolding in front of her that guns didn’t work on the enemy, Ada looked around for anything else. She just needed another option.

  Sitting on top of a large cabinet-sized toolbox on wheels was what looked to be a large welding torch. Ada ran over to it and quickly tried to figure out how to operate the surprisingly complicated maintenance tool.

  “Submit! Submit and know the joy of the dark!” yelled Sousa as he cut down men and women left and right, with no hesitation or anything resembling restraint.

  How about the terror of the light!?

  “Here!” screamed Royce, rushing up beside her and flipping a power bar on the side of the torch she’d never have known to use.

  Ada ran up behind Sousa, torch in hand. She switched on the fuel and got ready to set the enemy ablaze.

  Sousa spun around with lightning speed. He seemed to float over the ground as he cut the distance between them instantly.

  Ada screamed out in pain as one of Sousa’s talon-like fingers slid through the skin, muscle, and tendons of her shoulder with the utmost ease. She dropped the welding torch and grabbed the talon, tried to pull it out. It didn’t budge.

  Behind the creature, Rollins regained consciousness.

  He stared dumbly for a moment around him, then up at Sousa. Ada screamed something at him. She couldn’t say what. The pain of the talon was unbearable, like her entire upper torso was on fire, touched by flames of red-hot pain emanating from her split-open shoulder.

  To his right, cowering under one of the maintenance racks, Rollins saw Royce. In the chief engineer’s eyes, he saw true fear. That somehow angered him more than anything. He wasn’t a soldier. He was a damn mechanic on a station. All he and his men had done was take in and try to help the Atlas, and look at what that had gotten them.

  Rollins reached for his pistol with his only hand. It wasn’t his good hand, so his aim was a little off at first. But he managed to hit and sever the talon that impaled Ada by her shoulder. He reloaded, then aimed for Sousa’s head.

  Freed from Sousa, Ada immediately picked up the welding torch. She struggled to lift the heavy tool with one arm, but had no choice. Sousa let out a horrible high-pitched screech and spun around to face Rollins.

  Fueled by adrenaline, Ada manhandled the unwieldy torch into position and switched on the flame. “Burn, asshole!” she screamed. Without hesitation, she drove the tip into Sousa’s back, setting his body alight.

  Sousa let out more horrendous screeches as he thrashed around. The fire spread quickly—unnaturally so, Ada thought—and consumed his whole body in moments. Through the flames, Ada, Rollins, and everyone else in the docking bay watched him wildly change shapes and forms several times before falling down in a heap on the floor, still burning.

  “I told you so,” Ada said, before her legs buckled under her and she fell to her knees under the weight of the torch.

  “Yes, you did,” said Rollins as he ran over and pulled the still-lit torch off her shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

  He stared at the open wound on her shoulder. “And I’m sorry for this.”

  He touched the flame to her skin.

  Ada had never felt pain like it before. It was only a moment before the wound was cauterized and the bleeding stopped, but to her it seemed like eternity.

  She passed out a second time.

  Thirty-Seven

  Lee

  Saito, escorted by Washburn and members of the mayor’s staff, entered the docking bay.

  Immediately they were greeted by the sight of the exploded remains of the bomber. Sheriff Wei was with other members of the station police, examining the scene. He glanced up, then made his way over.

  “What the hell happened here, Wei?” Washburn demanded. He was carefully stepping to avoid pieces of human beings.

  Saito could see it was futile. There was just too much carnage here. He felt hollow inside.

  “Suicide bomber, sir,” answered Wei after taking the handkerchief away from his mouth and nose. He practically gagged.

  Washburn’s face turned even whiter as he turned to Saito in shock. “It must have been them.”

  “The cultists,” Wei said, oblivious to Washburn’s odd expression as he looked back at Saito. “The Oblivion people. Yes, we think so. I don’t know for certain it’s connected to what happened this morning, but it’s a good bet there’s something that ties them—”

  “What happened this morning?” Saito demanded sharply.

  Wei was thrown off by the newcomer’s directness. “Uh, well, we had a disturbance with them. One was hurt pretty bad—”

  “You knew this when we talked?” Saito said accusingly to Washburn.

  “I can’t just assume that—”

  “Yet you did nothing,” Saito said.

  “What could I do?” Washburn said firmly. He turned to Wei. “How did the robots miss it?”

  “Dunno. We’re still looking into how they even got access to the docking bay. After you ordered that the Atlas crew be segregated and confined there, we had guards posted on both sides of these doors.”

  “Where are the guards?”

  “We dunno that either. They’ve effectively disappeared. Even their HUDs have been deactivated.” Wei shrugged. “We’ve reestablished the quarantine, for what it’s worth.”

  “Mayor,” Saito said, seeing the panic rising in his eyes, “you have to make an announcement—”

  “Did you bring these things to us?” Washburn asked. “These creatures? Is this your doing?”

  “I thought we got all of them.”

  “You thought?”

  “And if we didn’t, the quarantine was supposed to stop them. I couldn’t guess that you’d have agents on the inside working against you.”
>
  Washburn knelt down and picked up a wallet belonging to one of the victims of the suicide bomb. Somehow it was still intact. He opened it up and saw an old-fashioned physical photo of a docking crew staff member with his wife and baby.

  “How does this happen?” asked Washburn as he closed the blood-covered wallet.

  Saito slipped passed him, further into the carnage. He watched as a sanctuary medic tried to help a man, a kid really, who held his own guts in where something sharp like a knife had eviscerated him.

  “Sir?” Rollins arrived at Saito’s shoulder. He was accompanied by Ada and Baez, two of the few survivors of this latest attack.

  “What happened here, Commander?” Saito asked, as he stared at the kid who screamed and cried as the medic worked on him.

  “It was Sousa, sir. Well, not really. It was another of those damn things, sir. It attacked right after the bomb went off near the entrance.”

  “Where’s…?” Saito pointed at the kid holding in his guts. “Somebody get this kid some help!”

  Rollins glanced over. “The medics are helping him,” he said.

  There were dozens of wounded. Saito knew it was unreasonably to focus on this one, but it seemed like the medic was doing nothing to help the boy’s pain. The look of anguish burned into Saito’s mind. It reminded him of his boy. Of Ben. The resemblance was uncanny.

  “Somebody help him,” he reiterated, as if he hadn’t heard Rollins.

  “Sir,” Rollins said, shaking his head. “Sir, they’re trying, but…” He shrugged and looked at his compatriots.

  “He’s going to die, sir,” Ada said.

  The words cut into Saito like it was his own belly being eviscerated now. “No, he can’t,” he whispered, picturing Ben. Not after he’d lost Bev. He couldn’t lose Ben, too.

  “Sir? Sir!” Rollins tried to get Saito’s attention by shaking him.

  “Lee!” snapped Ada.

  Rollins, Baez, and anyone else nearby gave her a surprised look.

  “I hear you,” Saito said, feeling his mind snap back into the present.