Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  The Pale Man put his hand on Lee’s forehead, like he was checking for a fever.

  Back in the memories, Saito was standing on stage behind a UEF general. The general was addressing a group of press and military members who’d gathered on Europa after the UEF’s victory. He couldn’t make out what was being said, but felt it was about him.

  “They did,” answered Saito. “They rewarded me.”

  “Interesting,” the Pale Man said. He stood on stage with him.

  The general presented Saito to the audience. “Private Lee Saito!”

  Nervous at that point, and never good with crowds at his best, Saito slowly walked up to the podium. He looked out at the audience, which had completely changed. Instead of reporters and military, they were all the dead young AIC soldiers.

  The dead slumped in the audience chairs, jaws slung open. Blood covered their uniforms, holes gaping in their chests, stomachs, and heads. Lee felt their cloudy dead eyes gazing back at him.

  “This isn’t right,” said Saito in a whisper as he stepped away from the podium, shaken. “This never happened.”

  “Are you sure? Sometimes the human memory is—”

  “This is like something out of a horror movie,” Saito said firmly. “Not real life.”

  “Or out of your guilt? This system, this technique, it isn’t perfect. Tell me, why did you feel guilty about killing them? Were they not your enemy?”

  “Yes, but…” Dead AIC soldiers were now on stage with Saito, surrounding him. Their dull eyes didn’t blink. No breath escaped their lips. He felt cold, and could feel his own breath quickening. He was starting to panic. His vision blurred.

  “Very well.” The Pale Man grabbed Saito by the arm and gave him a good yank.

  Saito blinked, and he was back on Earth. He was at Bev’s childhood house in Virginia, the one her parents still lived in. He knew it well. They were marking his return home from his tour.

  “What is this?” asked the Pale Man as he walked around, closely observing everything.

  “A barbecue.”

  “A what?”

  “A celebration.” Saito found himself sitting on one of the lawn chairs outside. On one side of him sat Beverly’s father, Cal, nursing a beer. The chair on the other side of him was empty.

  “So are you happy to be back home, son?” asked Cal before taking a sip of his beer.

  “I’m not sure yet,” answered Saito in a quiet voice.

  “What’s that?” Cal said sharply.

  “I’m very happy, sir,” Saito said.

  “I can’t imagine what you boys go through out there. Fighting those ungrateful ingrates…on behalf of our whole family, I want to thank you. Thank you for your service.”

  Saito wasn’t listening to his father-in-law. He was too busy staring past the grill, past the table of food, past the barbecue attendees mingling and talking. He was staring at the edge of the nearby river at the end of the lawn. The kid, the AIC soldier with the Polaroid, was standing there staring back at him.

  The Pale Man appeared in the chair next to Saito. “It looks like this one doesn’t want to go away. That’s intriguing. Why? Why can’t you let that dead soldier go?”

  “I don’t know,” Saito choked out. His throat was dry.

  “Why this memory? Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy seeing your kind in your natural habitat, enjoying a gathering, but what brings us here?”

  “I’m not doing this, you are,” Saito whispered.

  “Only you know,” the Pale Man said.

  Saito did. He could feel it. The words tumbled out of him. “It’s the day I decided I didn’t belong anymore.”

  Twenty-Three

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wasn’t…my life as a civilian, as a normal person, enjoying life, enjoying the little things…” Saito stared at the dead AIC soldier. “That was all over. I was more comfortable at war than at a damn barbecue.”

  “Dad! Look what I found!” Saito saw his son Ben running up to him, holding a frog by its hind legs.

  Saito held out his arms to receive his son. “Get over here. Let me see that.”

  Once Ben was in his arms, Saito was no longer sitting down. Now he was standing on a boardwalk.

  “See? Is that so bad, honey?” asked Beverly. “Showing a little affection?” There was a smile on her face as she half-teased him.

  “Thank you, dad!” Ben separated from his father’s embrace, holding a toy model of a UEF dreadnought.

  Saito should’ve been happy. He remembered being happy that day. But now, relieving it, he felt absolutely nothing inside.

  “This seems like a nice memory,” commented the Pale Man as he walked out of the crowd on the boardwalk. He was eating cotton candy.

  “It was right before I went off to the Naval Academy,” Saito said. “After my transfer went through. It was also the last time we ever did anything as a family.”

  The Pale Man took another bite of his cotton candy. “But you’re not enjoying this one?”

  “It’s…it was a good day. But it reminds me of what I lost.”

  “Can we play some more games?” asked an excited young Ben.

  “Sure, champ. Of course we can. Let’s see if we can get you a stuffed animal.” Saito kept Ben immediately in front of him as he walked hand-in-hand with Beverly.

  “This is nice, isn’t it?” Beverly didn’t look at Saito as she spoke. She looked around at the carnival-like atmosphere they walked around in.

  “Yeah.” Saito was only half paying attention to his wife. He wasn’t fully there. He never was those days. All he could think about was the war, and being on a ship or holding a gun in his hand.

  “Baby? Honey? Are you here today?” asked Beverly. She squeezed her husband’s arm tightly.

  Saito was focused on a clown, juggling for a group of captivated kids; only the clown wasn’t juggling balls or bowling pins. He was juggling grenades and what looked to be human eyeballs. The clown stopped, as if he knew that he was being observed. He stared back at Saito, letting the grenades and eyes fall to the wooden boardwalk.

  “Lee?” Beverly looked at the side of Saito’s head, concerned.

  “What?” Saito tore his gaze away from the clown. “What’s that, hon?”

  “I asked if you were here with us today.”

  “What do you mean? Of course I’m here with you right now.”

  “I don’t mean physically.”

  “Mommy, look! A clown!” Ben was thrilled to see the grenade- and eyeball-juggling creep.

  “You’re right, that is a clown,” Beverly answered her son lovingly.

  “I wanna go see the clown!”

  “No, no clown.” Saito was wary of it. He turned to the Pale Man, who walked next to them, finishing up his cotton candy. “Something’s very wrong here. That’s not what happened.”

  “Oh, let him go see the clown,” Beverly said.

  “No clown!” yelled Saito, loudly enough that everyone around them stopped in place and stared at them. None of the other boardwalk attendees moved.

  “Lee…?” Beverly could see her husband was causing a scene, but she didn’t acknowledge how freaky the other boardwalk attendees were acting.

  “What is this?” asked Saito. “Why did this go from a memory to a horror flick?”

  “Sorry about that, Mr. Saito. Here, is this any better?” The Pale Man waved his hand and the other people at the boardwalk turned back to normal, went about their business.

  “I’m sorry, I just…” Saito knelt down. Ben was crying. He hugged his son. “Let’s go see a clown, buddy.”

  Ben wiped the tears from his face. He smiled a grin missing a couple of baby teeth and ran towards the clown, who had a big bag slung over his shoulder.

  “Ben! Slow down!” Beverly tried to slow her son down, but her efforts were in vain. He was already at the clown, talking to him, but he wasn’t far away. Both parents could clearly see him.

  “I’m sorry, Bev.” Saito apologized ag
ain.

  “I know.”

  “You know, but….?” Saito could feel that there was a second part coming.

  “But it’s getting worse. Your temper. Ever since…ever since Europa, you’ve been different.” She paused. “You’re not the man I married.”

  “I’m the same me,” Saito said, but he knew that was a lie. Everything was different now. The dead haunted him.

  Bev shook her head. “I’m proud of you. So damn proud. But I have to think of Ben first. I have to think of our family.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Saito. They were almost over to Ben and the clown.

  “You can’t come back again like this. I’m going to divorce you. Ben and I will live with my parents,” she said. “I’m sorry. This isn’t because I don’t love you, because I really do. But I love him more.” Beverly left no time for Saito to respond. She knelt down next to Ben.

  Saito stood there, frankly shocked. He knew that things had been a bit rocky since he’d gotten back, but he’d never heard a threat like that, ever. Not from Beverly. She was his rock. And just days before going to UEF Naval Officers’ school for the second time, his rock had just gotten dislodged from the steady wall of support he’d enjoyed for so long.

  “Tough break there, buddy,” said the clown. When Saito got a good look at the clown, he saw the Pale Man in makeup and a costume. The Pale Man smiled at him, then turned to Ben. “Do you like lions?”

  “I thought…I always remembered this as a great day.” Saito stood there, a bit confused. His own memory: was it playing tricks on him, or was the Pale Man? Were his memories being messed with, or was this accurate and he’d just told himself a pleasant lie for all these years?

  “Here ya go.” The Pale Man handed young Ben a stuffed animal, a lion. “King of the jungle for the king of the boardwalk.” He looked over to Beverly and Saito. “You’re such a good-looking family, would you like a picture? No charge, the old-school way.” From the big bag slung over his shoulder, the Pale Man took out a Polaroid camera.

  Saito and Beverly stood next to each other in front of the boardwalk’s wooden guardrails. They both had one arm over the other’s shoulders. Their other hands were on Ben’s shoulders, who stood right in front of them holding his stuffed lion.

  “Say cheese,” instructed the Pale Man. The family gave the camera hollow, dishonest smiles.

  The camera spat out the picture, and the Pale Man handed it to Saito. It was an image of the AIC soldier holding his own Polaroid and staring back at him.

  Twenty-Four

  “We got a plan here, Morgan?” asked Ben as he finally was able to buckle his seatbelts together, forming an “X” with the buckle itself on his chest. He knew he was going to need it. They might be in space, on the edges of Vassar-1’s planetary shield, but that didn’t mean they weren’t already feeling the effects of the planet’s gravity.

  It was artificial, of course. Vassar-1 was small enough that its natural gravity was relatively weak. That had been corrected a long time ago by enormous gravity generators. They not only simulated Earth’s gravity all over the small world, they also exerted gravity outward, far into space, around the world.

  It was, first and foremost, a defensive tactic. The gravity generators created distortion ripples that extended hundreds of thousands of kilometers into space. It was havoc for ships nearing the planetary shield, since they had to contend with more and more g’s while still in space and had to therefore approach the world relatively slowly. On the other hand, it made fold jumps anywhere near Vassar-1 impossible.

  As a result, no attacking force could hope to surprise the world. They could only jump somewhere outside the gravity distortion and make a conventional approach. And if their ships were large, they’d have to approach slowly or risk rending their crew unconscious thanks to the g-forces associated with rapid slowing near the planet.

  None of that seemed to be bothering Morgan as she fired up the thrusters on the Lost, yet Ben quickly understood what Morgan was doing. She had shoved the Lost forward and was weaving wildly in and out of the long line of ships waiting for passage through the main gates of Vassar-1’s planetary shields. The ship’s artificial gravity was struggling to compensate, but so too were the fighters following them.

  “My plan?” Morgan asked. “I’ll start with not dying. Now shut up and let me work.”

  The two AIC fighters had started from a dead stop, and were just now ramping up to full speed. They fired on the Lost. Ben was plenty scared, and not too proud to admit it, but couldn’t deny how impressive Morgan’s maneuvering was. The fighters didn’t score a single hit, but those were just the cannons. If one of them broke out a missile, they were all screwed.

  “If we get through the gate, we’ll be okay,” Morgan reassured him.

  “They can close it,” Ben pointed out.

  “Not with that big sucker right in the middle of it,” Morgan said.

  Ben saw now what she meant. A huge cargo freighter was just beginning to transit the gate. It would take more than a minute to pass.

  “What’s to stop them from just shooting us down once we’re through?” Ace asked.

  “They wouldn’t want to—shit.” Morgan made the Lost take a sudden barrel roll. One of the AIC fighters chasing after them almost clipped their good wing. Instead, the shots grazed the bottom of the ship. Whoever was behind those sticks was a good pilot.

  Francesca and Ada both yelled expletives as they were thrown around as the artificial gravity struggled to compensate.

  “Really? Because I really want to shit. Or throw up!” Ace clearly wasn’t handling things well. Again, he was ignored.

  “They wouldn’t shoot us down once we’re in the atmosphere. There’s too much risk of us crashing into the endless city below,” explained Morgan.

  “Unless they think we’re a serious threat,” added Ben.

  “Yup, unless they think we’re a great enough threat. Almost there, almost kind of to safety.” Morgan was almost close enough to the tight line of frigates, freighters, trader ships, transport vessels, and personal-use ships that the fighters couldn’t fire upon them. Not anymore, lest they risk hitting civilians.

  “Ah, shit,” Ace said. “We got a real problem.”

  “Spit it out, dipshit,” Morgan said, a moment before a flashing light on her console confirmed what Ben suspected Ace was going to say next.

  “Incoming missile.”

  Ben’s heart sank. One of the fighters was bold enough—or stupid enough—to unload a missile this close to civilian ships.

  Morgan didn’t panic. Instead, she doubled down on her favorite move.

  Some pilots came up with names for maneuvers they believed were their own creations, Ben knew. For Morgan, that was the double helix maneuver, or DNA roll. Basically it was rapid barrel rolls, while piloting the ship left and right to evade energy-seeking projectiles.

  The gravitational forces produced from doing a double helix were intense this close to the planet. Everyone in the Lost’s cockpit was pinned to their seats. Ben’s only concern was not passing out.

  Strike that. His first concern was Morgan not passing out.

  The missile that the AIC pilot fired tried its best to keep up. Made to lock onto the energy signature of the ship, it chose the rear thrust exhaust. Problem was, they moved so fast during the double helix that the projectile struggled to keep up. Eventually it was overwhelmed and flew off course.

  “Hold on!” Morgan said.

  Ben was just barely avoiding unconsciousness, and had to assume the same of Morgan. Her words were slurred. But she managed to wrestle the Lost back under control, then flared the thrusters to come to a hard stop. The whole vessel shook.

  Francesca threw up, and Ben just barely kept from doing the same. Tomas was gritting his teeth like he was trying to cut steel with his jaw.

  The errant missile slammed into the side of a freighter ship. It was so big that it wasn’t catastrophic, but someone would have to fool thems
elves to think the impact didn’t cost some people their lives. It was clearly collateral damage the AIC fighter pilot was willing to live with.

  Morgan was flying at full thrust now, moving recklessly fast, weaving in and out of the line of ships. Ben sensed she was pushing the Lost as fast as she possibly could, making everything inside vibrate. It felt like it was gonna shake apart.

  The impact to the freighter seemed to affect the AIC fighters. The both started to fall back. Ben had to assume there were professional, and probably legal, repercussions. At some point, the risk-reward ratio for tagging an unregistered raider-class ship trying to illegally enter the planet’s atmosphere began to tip in their favor, and the fighters backed off.

  Ben exhaled loudly. He wasn’t sure when he’d started holding his breath, but it had been a while.

  When he looked over at Morgan, Ben saw that she was hyper-focused. When he looked back up at the viewscreen, he was glad she was. She’d come within feet of colliding with two different cruisers that were closing ranks.

  Clearly the word was out that something very wrong was happening at the gate. The line of ships was beginning to shift chaotically.

  Ben looked out the Lost’s front viewing window and was stupefied. How the hell is she weaving through all those ships without hitting a single one? He could feel himself getting queasy with all the rapid movement. Left, right, up, down.

  “You sure you got this?” asked Ace. He looked to be in worse shape than Ben. Both his hands were wrapped tightly around his seat’s armrest. His face was white as a ghost.

  “We’re almost there,” Morgan murmured, not breaking her concentration.

  Up ahead, Ben could see the gate entrance. He wondered how the hell they were going to get past it, because the huge freighter that had been holding the gate open was backing out now and shifting sideways. Ben suspected that the ship was getting directed to block their path by the traffic controllers.

  There was a fairly small opening in the Vassar-1 shields. It was held open by a hexagon-shaped mechanical structure, almost like a mini space station. That structure was lined with turrets. When ships reached that point, they had their vessels scanned for illicit goods or stowaways, questioned by the planetary guard, and then, depending on what they found or what a crew’s answers were, they were either let in or told in no uncertain terms to turn and leave before they were blown away.