Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  What did this?

  Engano had seen many terrible things in her life. She’d seen the atrocities of war firsthand. She’d overseen and undertaken assassinations herself. Once she’d even walked through a plague-decimated colony in unknown space. But she’d never seen carnage like this at the Oblivion temple.

  Engano almost tripped over a severed arm as she slowly approached the pitch-black temple entrance. That was when she heard a gunshot inside and saw brief glimpses of muzzle flashes.

  In another life, one that she’d lived before the transport had set down outside the walls of the Bowery, she would have announced her entrance. “This is AIC Intelligence,” she’d say. “Anyone in here needs to come out now! Put your hands up and surrender.”

  But not anymore. Now she crouched low and slowly approached the temple entrance, quiet as a mouse, her head on a swivel.

  Inside was a long hallway. The further she went, the darker it got. She’d give anything for her infrared eyes right now, the ones she required of her agents. Reluctantly, she switched on the flashlight attached under the barrel of her newly-acquired gun, knowing how much of a target it made her.

  At first, all Engano saw were more mutilated bodies and body parts. There was nothing but death in the temple. It was already starting to smell of feces and bloated flesh, and she knew that would only get worse as the rot set in. She shook the thought from her mind.

  Then, as she slowly surveyed the innards, something caught her eye.

  In the middle of the temple, which seemed to consist of one large, almost cavernous room, was a display case. A piece of black rock floated behind plasma. Unlike the plasma fields found in the average ship’s docking bay, this plasma field was designed not to let anything breach it.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Engano whispered out loud. “This is where they’re hiding it?”

  She knew what the shiny, fist-sized black rock was immediately, even if she’d never seen it in person before. The few agents that had gotten in and back out had described it clearly enough, and really, even without their first-hand accounts, she’d know it. This was a piece of the Herald Stone.

  The Herald Stone was the only solid, quantifiable thing the Oblivion cult worshipped. There might or might not be more than one in the galaxy. There were rumors of one on Earth, and on at least two of the colony worlds.

  But she’d always known there was one on Vassar-1, ever since her spies had told her so. The Bowery, at the heart of the slums and home to the largest of their temples, was an obvious place for it. But she’d imagined it somewhere other than here, sitting prominently in what appeared to be a not-particularly-sacred portion of the temple.

  Then again, what she knew of what actually happened in the Oblivion temples was diminishingly small, especially for someone who prided herself on intelligence knowledge.

  Engano knew that the Oblivion claimed it was a piece of the very thing that had birthed their mysterious saviors. She wasn’t convinced. As far as she was concerned, it was just a damn rock. But if the terrorists valued it so, it was worth taking. At least something would come of this disastrous raid.

  Engano was well beyond caring about security alarms going off. She just wanted the Herald Stone. So she used all her strength to kick at the display stand, eventually dislodging it from the floor and sending it tumbling over. When it crashed down, the plasma shields disabled themselves, and the shiny black rock fell.

  As she bent over to pick up the Herald Stone, Engano heard whispering behind her. A woman’s voice, she thought. She slipped the rock into her pocket as she swung her rifle around, the light whipping across the far wall.

  Shadows stretched everywhere.

  The room was big, so she could’ve missed someone. She slowly started running the light back across the far wall of the temple. She tried to ignore the sounds of chaos and devastation outside, and homed in on the whispered voice she heard. Definitely a woman’s voice, she decided as she considered it in her mind.

  Then Engano saw her. A woman was pinned against the far wall by a man in black robes. Her eyes grew large and frightened for a moment, and then they turned lifeless and cold.

  “Don’t move!” yelled Engano. She pointed her rifle at the man in black robes. His back was to her. He slowly stood and turned around. “I said don’t move,” she barked out, before her words caught in her throat as she saw the man’s features in her flashlight beam.

  His face was human, but simultaneously not. His jaw hung unnaturally low, slack, filled with needle-like teeth and dripping with the now-dead woman’s blood. His eyes were as black as the Herald Stone she had in her pocket. Both of his hands were lined with talons instead of fingers, and he let out a horrible screech that made Engano jump and her ears ring.

  “Nope, not doing this,” Engano said aloud, forcing herself out of her state of shock. She immediately turned and ran for the front entrance.

  When she emerged from the temple, she was confronted by three AIC soldiers.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Engano said. She took two steps, then stopped.0

  Her next words died in her throat as she saw their faces. These men weren’t with her team. They were with the other team. The one she’d seen in pieces.

  She blinked, trying to make her mind pull the pieces together. Was she wrong? It had been chaotic. Maybe…no. The men standing in front of her were too clean. No dirt. No mud. Not a single drop of blood on them or their uniforms.

  “Boys,” Engano said, nodding slowly as she tried to walk around the far side of the entrance steps and as far from the soldiers as possible. “Maybe I’ll just go ahead and you stay here,” she said, babbling now. “For cleanup. And to meet the other teams that I’ve called and that will be here very, very soon.”

  She nodded along to her own words, as if she was willing them to sound better.

  The solders started to fidget. The way they moved wasn’t natural. It looked like old-fashioned film, skipping frames.

  The moment Engano reached the bottom step, every instinct in her told her to run. So she did.

  The nearest soldier reached out for her. Fueled by adrenaline, Engano barely felt as he sliced into the back of her calf with something. She didn’t look back to see if he kept following, or if the others joined in. She just kept moving.

  Engano was stopped by the sight of a family blocking the alleyway. She urged them to move, but they just stared at her blankly. The mother of the family opened her mouth wide, revealing sharp teeth, screeching as she charged the Director of Intelligence.

  After firing half a power mag into the screeching mother, Engano realized the bullets were doing little to slow the mother, who was a monster of some kind. Even more shocking, the wounds started closing on their own.

  It was clear that she couldn’t get past whatever the family was, and she didn’t have time to climb upwards.

  All she had left was right under her feet.

  Four

  “Wait, what about Morgan?” Ada asked as she climbed down the ladder that connected to the dank hidden room behind LeFay’s food dispenser.

  “Clarissa,” LeFay answered. “And she can’t come with us.”

  Ada tried to stop on the ladder mid-descent to argue, but LeFay kept coming down above her, forcing her to keep going. “We can’t just leave her,” Ada insisted.

  “We can and we will,” answered LeFay coolly.

  “Then what did we do all this for—”

  The smell of the sewers hit Ada hard. It was a warm sewage smell that she could feel cling to her clothes and skin. It wafted up from below, and she suddenly had a sense of how they were going to sneak away from LeFay’s building. It was better than dying, she figured, but as the smell intensified, she wasn’t sure just how much better.

  “What did you save her for if you’re just going to abandon her?” Ada tried again. She gagged a little on the question. She was going to have to hold her nose soon.

  “Agent Moreno wouldn’t want us to die trying
to save her.”

  “Agent who?” yelled Ace from further down the ladder. “And please, dear God, tell me this isn’t leading where I think it’s leading.”

  “Morgan,” LeFay said, eyeing Ada. Ada could see that LeFay was considering just spilling the beans on Morgan as an undercover agent, and maybe that was for the best. It was Ben, after all, that seemed to have a problem with just telling everyone, not Ada. “Morgan wouldn’t want us sacrificing ourselves to save her, especially in the state she’s in. I know her well enough to know that.”

  Ada finally reached the bottom of the steps and found herself standing next to Ace. LeFay was the last one down. She hopped down and splashed into the black water and sent it splashing up on the others.

  “Screw me,” Ace said. “If I’d known I’d end up standing in a foot of sewer water—”

  “You’d what?” LeFay asked. “Change your mind? There’s still time.” She hooked her thumb up the ladder behind her.

  Ada didn’t want to come across as a whiner like Ace, but she had to admit that she wasn’t thrilled to feel her socks get soaked as she stepped away to make room for LeFay. This was a bad time to learn that her boots were leaking. The smell, combined with the rats that scurried about in the darkness, confirmed that they were indeed in a sewer.

  “Can’t see a damn thing,” Ace said sourly.

  “Calm down,” Ada said. She had bigger problems—like who the hell those guys were back at New Dawn Bio Hacks, and why they’d acted so strangely around Ben. She glanced up at him. He was acting no differently than usual, which was to say slightly irritating, in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “I’m sick of people telling me to calm down!” Ace spat. “What about our current messed-up situation is conducive to being calm?”

  “Conducive?” LeFay asked, as she lit a flare that painted the surroundings blue. “I barely know ya, pretty boy, but that feels like a big word for ya.”

  “Yeah, you don’t know me!” Ace barked. He swung the business end of his rifle menacingly at LeFay. She didn’t flinch. “And I don’t know you. None of us do. So why should we trust you? How do we know you just didn’t call those weird bloody-face bastards on us? How do we know you aren’t Oblivion, too?”

  LeFay walked toward Ace until his rifle was in her face, then kept coming until he was forced to decide between shoving it in her mouth or lowering it. He lowered it.

  “You don’t. And you’re right not to trust me. I don’t trust any of you, either, but I trust that woman up there.”

  She hooked a thumb at the ceiling, and Ada knew she meant Morgan. Or rather, Agent Moreno. Clarissa. Damn, she’d have to wrap her mind around that.

  “And if she vouches for you, then I’ll help you,” LeFay continued. “As much as I can. Now, we need to get moving before they get wise and give that food dispenser a good look.”

  “She’s right,” Ben said. He’d been silent since they’d dropped down into the sewer. “We have to move.”

  “I don’t like leaving anyone behind, even Morgan,” Ada said. She glanced at Ben, knowing he was the only other one besides LeFay that knew the truth about her.

  “Especially Morgan,” Ace said icily. “She’s the reason we got down in one piece to begin with.”

  Ben put his hand on Ace’s shoulder. “We aren’t abandoning her. We’ll figure something out. But right now, we’re literally wading in shit, and we need to find a way up to some safe fresh air. LeFay, I’m assuming you know a way out?”

  So now he was going to be a leader again, Ada thought. Flip that switch when it suits you.

  “I do,” LeFay said. “It won’t be in the nicest part of town, but I don’t think locals are the biggest danger at the moment.”

  “Lead the way,” Ben said, letting LeFay pass him; then he followed along with the rest of the group.

  “Thanks,” she said sarcastically, and Ada had a feeling LeFay felt the same way about Ben’s fickle leadership that she did.

  “Ada?”

  Ada glanced over at Francesca, who walked right beside her. “Yeah?” she said as she gingerly stepped past some floating trash.

  “Why is this happening?”

  Francesca sounded genuinely confused. Ada was reminded that, for all intents and purposes, she was just a kid. How could a kid process all that was happening to her?

  “I wish I knew. Really. I wish I did.”

  “It’s because those damn cultists called their alien saviors to come kill us all,” Ace said angrily. “Morgan knew the score as well as I did. That’s what’s happening. Crazy people doing crazy shit, and now all the sane people have to deal with it.”

  “Cool it, Ace,” Ben said. “The last thing we need right now is to listen to you.”

  “You have answers, big shot?” Ace shot back. “You’re the one who set us on this damn mission. Morgan and I, we just wanted to hunt bastards like those guys up there, hunt them and kill them. Simple, clean justice. But nooo, you had to go looking for daddy and the aliens that killed him.”

  “Morgan was fine with going along,” Ben said under his breath.

  Ada suspected that was true. Morgan had more in mind than just hunting and killing. And now that she understood what Morgan was, Ada knew why. She wanted to understand what had happened to the Atlas just as much as Ben did, but for different reasons.

  But Ace didn’t know that, and didn’t look like he cared anyway. He looked like he wanted a fight. Which, to be fair, seemed to be his default position.

  “Still not an answer,” Ace said.

  “You really need to shut up,” said Ben.

  “Or what? You’ll kill me? Beat me up with your damn robot arm? Both of those sound better than this.”

  “Don’t listen to them,” Tomas said. He’d slid back to be beside Francesca and Ada, allowing Ben and Ace to argue as they followed right behind LeFay. Ada didn’t want a huge separation in the group, but a little distance wasn’t a bad thing at the moment.

  “But what is happening?” Francesca repeated.

  “None of us got the answers on that one, kiddo,” Tomas said. “Just gotta put it out of your mind.”

  Five

  That was ludicrous advice as far as Ada was concerned, and she doubted that Tomas really believed it either. The group’s lives had been on the edge of a knife ever since Sanctuary Station-33. Francesca wasn’t wrong to look for answers.

  But Ada could try to occupy the teen’s mind, at least.

  “Where are you from?” she asked, cursing herself for the awkward abruptness of the question. “I’m just curious. I never thought to ask before, and now I feel shitty for that.”

  Francesca looked genuinely surprised. “It’s not your fault,” she said. She looked down at the grey water as she continued to answer. “Me? I’m originally from Earth. A small town in the Central Sector of North America, just outside Boise.”

  Tomas jerked his head up. “One of the regulated gen-mod farms?”

  Francesca nodded in surprise. “You know about that?”

  Tomas laughed. “I was born on the GMO pipeline to the supercities,” he said. “A little place called Topeka. Ever heard of it, farm girl?”

  Francesca snorted with laughter. “Topeka, a little place? More factory than farm.”

  “More automation than half the world, that’s for sure,” Tomas said. “But that’s regulated agriculture for you. Besides, we kept those farms in business.”

  “Barely,” Francesca said. “City farmer,” she said with a little sparkle in her eye, opening up like Ada hadn’t heard in a long time.

  “Hayseed,” Tomas shot back playfully.

  Ada was suddenly far less interested in what Ben and Ace were arguing about up ahead. “So you’re a farm girl?” she laughed. “And I thought Tomas was the only one.”

  “Did you just call me a girl?” Tomas asked smartly.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Francesca laughed too. “I’m the real thing, unlike this city slic
ker. I used to milk cows when I was a kid. Hard for me to imagine now.”

  “So what brought a farm girl to a Sanctuary Station in the outer edges of known space?” asked Ada. She wanted to keep the conversation going, for her own sake as much as Francesca’s.

  “Same thing that brought my dad to the Central Sector. Farming. He was a scientist. I don’t know for sure what he did. I should’ve asked him,” Francesca said, shaking her head. “Why did I never ask him? Anyway, he figured out a way to grow cereal grains faster than normal, with half the resources and no sunlight. As you can imagine, it was a valuable discovery.”

  “Daddy got rich,” Tomas said.

  “Not quite,” Francesca said, “but we did okay.”

  “I never would’ve pegged you as a kid who came from money. A little spoiled, maybe.” Ada playfully punched Francesca on the arm. “But not a rich girl.”

  “That’s because we were never rich. You see, my dad, he...so, for example, when I was five I got attacked by the neighboring farm’s dog. It was bad. I almost lost an arm.” Francesca rolled up one of her sleeves. There was a large scar on it. “My dad didn’t call the police. He didn’t go over and shoot the dog. Instead he asked if we could watch it for a couple of weeks. As I was in the hospital, it learned to trust new people, was treated like our own by my family. And when I got back, all stitched up and scared, he made me interact with it.

  “At first I was terrified, you know. But, then it jumped up and licked my face. My dad explained to me that the dog was just scared of me and had attacked out of fear. He said that everyone is decent, every living thing, until it’s scared. And my dad’s invention, we called it his magic corn, since it was a maize variation; it scared the government and the companies that owned the corporate farms in the Central Section.

  “As soon as my dad refused to sell his magic corn to the UEF and the corporate farms, the death threats started coming in. So he moved us to the big city, to Seattle, tried to get work in a lab there. No one would hire him, and the death threats kept coming. Then one night my mom was attacked on her way back from the grocery store. The guys who did it told her at knifepoint that if her husband sold his formula to any of the colonist groups, they’d cut her and the baby in her belly. My brother Tom.” Francesca’s gaze was back down again, staring at the sewer water.