Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  Sydal stowed away his pistol under his newly acquired rags and walked down the hall. When he reached the end, he found himself in a cavernous room. It was cylindrical. Pipe openings lined the walls. In the middle was a large stack of crates and metal boxes. Two rovers were parked by one of the curved walls, but there was no one in sight.

  A beam of light shined down from the ceiling. Sydal looked up. There was a sewer grate. He could hear the sounds of people talking, and rovers driving by. Through the bars, he saw the Lunar Dome high above.

  Sydal was relieved that he was close to home, but there was no ladder or stairs leading the way out. No, his journey under the moon wasn’t over yet. It was time to finish it. First he wanted to know what was in those crates.

  “HUD, access police code de-scrambler. Authorization echo, niner, bravo, four.” All police HUDs came equipped with a program to unlock doors, vehicles, and in this case, password-locked crates.

  It only took about thirty seconds. The seal of the crate broke, and the top opened up on its own. Sydal didn’t know what he was looking at. Inside was a thick clear plastic tube. Contained within in was a swirling black liquid that looked to him like oil, only it moved by itself, seemingly with a mind of its own.

  Sydal opened another crate. He found the same living oil as the first. The third crate also had the same substance.

  What is this shit? What are they up to down here? And why are they stockpiling it?

  Sydal was perplexed. There was no way for him to form a theory as to what the living oil was. Some ideas did pass through his mind, but none made sense. All he knew was that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  Between the cultists, Aitken Basin, Waterman-Lau, Bausman, the tunnels, and now the crates, Sydal put together that a conspiracy was unfolding beneath the moon. The question was, what exactly were they doing, and to what end?

  You can figure this out once you’re safe.

  Sydal was still in danger; he knew that. Even though he was back, so close to home, he still needed to find a way out. Unfortunately there wasn’t a ladder, or steps under an exit sign. He scanned the cavernous cylindrical room, searching for any escape.

  There was a wide pipe that looked like it had been converted into a walkway. Angled upwards, Sydal decided it was his best bet to move on and get out, so that’s the path he took.

  The pipe kept leading upwards. Sydal measured each step, careful to be quiet, but also hasty. The closer he got to the top of the pipe, the more he heard chanting. It was eerie, unnerving, to hear echoing chants that of course sounded ominous. When he reached the top of the pipe, he saw the source.

  Cultists filled another cavernous cylindrical room at the end of the pipe. Sydal stood at the entrance, looking at rows and rows of the extremists, standing in a circle around something floating above them in the middle of said room. Upon further inspection, it was a rock.

  Is that…is that lava rock? Obsidian?

  Sydal stared at the floating black rock that the cultists were clearly praying to. It was about the size of his head, and clearly not suspended by anything. Which his mind told him was impossible, but after the day he’d been having, impossible was getting easier and easier to accept. They chanted in unison, completely not noticing their uninvited guest.

  At the far end of the cavernous cylindrical room was a ladder. That ladder led to a slightly-ajar manhole cover. The detective had found his exit.

  Sydal psyched himself up. He reassured himself that he could do it. All he had to do was make his way around the outer edge of the cultists and to the ladder. From there he would be home free.

  His heart racing, pulse pounding, eyes wide open and breathing controlled, Sydal tiptoed around and over cultists as he pressed his back against the rounded walls of the cylindrical room. Terrified that he’d be noticed or step on someone, he moved deliberately, and placed each footfall carefully.

  Sydal didn’t breathe easy until his hands were on the ladder, feet on the rungs. It was an old rusty ladder, but he reckoned it would hold his weight. With the finish line in sight, he hurried up, eager to finally be free.

  Everything went according to plan until Sydal was about three fourths of the way up the ladder. One of the rungs was rusted out and couldn’t support his weight. The piece of iron broke and fell off, hitting one of the cultists on the back of the head.

  “...Uh-oh.”

  Almost all at once, the cultists who were praying to a rock looked up and saw Sydal. They started yelling at him and quickly climbed up after him. Panicked, he hurried up to the top.

  At first Sydal tried to move the manhole cover with his hands and arms, but it was too heavy, so he pushed his upper back against it and pushed upward with his thighs. The cultists were so close they almost grabbed his ankles and pulled him down, but he managed to plant both hands against either side of the sewer opening and push himself up and out.

  Though out of the tunnels, Sydal couldn’t quite rest yet. He rolled over on the ground of what was an alleyway and pushed the heavy manhole cover back over the opening with his feet. It slammed in place as he leaped to his feet and took off at a dead run, not daring to looking behind him until he’d gone a full block. Then he finally looked over his shoulder, expecting to see pursuers.

  But he was alone. As he turned a corner and looked back one last time before he lost sight of the manhole, he saw that it still hadn’t moved. Either they couldn’t or wouldn’t follow him.

  Sydal ran for another dozen blocks before slowing. He finally breathed a sigh of relief. He’d made it. He’d escaped.

  Now it was time to do something about what he’d seen.

  Thirteen

  Desperation

  “What’s wrong? Why isn’t this working right?” asked Saito as he stood next to the Pale Man, in the Shapeless’ spherical command ship in Vassar-1’s orbit.

  “It’s fine,” reassured the Pale Man.

  “Is it? There are too many errors. Too many glitches. He’ll catch on to what you’re trying to do and lock away the information you’re looking for.”

  Saito looked at his son, Ben, as he floated just off the floor, tendril attached to his forehead, lost in the replaying and manipulation of his own memories. “Just like this one did.”

  The Pale Man waved his hand above the floor. Out of it emerged a Herald Stone, surrounded by bright glowing blue light. It was small, about the size of a baseball. Little slivers and chips of it broke off and evaporated in the glowing blue energy.

  “We need more power. We need another Herald Stone,” said the Pale Man as he walked around the obsidian rock, examining it. “There should have been one here. Why hasn’t it been found?”

  “The humans have been out looking, but haven’t found a thing. Some think it was destroyed during our initial attack.” Saito raised a valid point. The Shapeless unleashed such wanton destruction that it was easy to believe that they could’ve accidentally destroyed one reason they’d come to Vassar-1. Combine that with their failure to get the AIC’s planet-killing weapon, and they’d failed on two fronts. The Shapeless weren’t used to failure.

  “It wasn’t destroyed.” The Pale Man walked over to one of the room’s fluid walls. He pressed his hand against it and it retracted, revealing a clear view of Vassar-1 below. “It’s down there somewhere. I can feel it.”

  “Then why waste time with this boy? Why not dedicate ourselves to finding it?”

  The Pale Man looked over at Saito. “This boy and the information he has in his head might be the key to reforming the Atlas’ weapon once we have the power. He has his defenses, yes, but he’s not strong. I can feel him falter. And the Herald Stone will come to us. Trust me.”

  Ben was in his classroom at the UEF Naval Academy. Standing in front of the class was the Pale Man. Dressed in a UEF Naval uniform, the Pale Man looked the part. Behind him was a digital holographic chalkboard. All over it were drawn pictures, diagrams, and writing all pertaining to the AIC.

  “Nice of you to finally
join us, Mr. Saito,” said the Pale Man. “Now, we can get started. Today’s lesson is about our enemy, the rebels of the AIC and how we can destroy them. Mr. Saito, what can you tell me about planet-killing weapons?”

  “I…they’re illegal?”

  “Yes, technically they are, but what can you tell us about them other than their legal status? For example, can you describe the effects and where we could find one?”

  Ben felt that the question was weird. Why would a naval instructor ask a cadet where planet-killer-class weapons were? Why would he think that he knew? “I don’t—”

  “Let’s try something else.” The Pale Man snapped his fingers, and Ben was no longer in a desk in a classroom.

  A bouncer grabbed Ben by the collar of his naval dress uniform and literally threw him out of a bar. Shoulder first, the young officer burst through the bar doors and landed on his hands and knees. Immediately, he started throwing up.

  “Jesus, these damn soldiers,” said a passerby as he narrowly avoided getting Ben’s vomit on his boots.

  Ben heard the comment over the booming music from the bar he’d just been thrown out of. If he was sober, he probably would’ve ignored it, but he was the exact opposite of sober.

  “Whaddyaaa saaay?” Ben slurred. He clumsily picked himself up off the Annapolis street. He struggled to stand steady and straight.

  “Get out of my face, soldier boy,” the passerby said.

  “Or whaaaat?” asked Ben. He stumbled a bit, then pushed the passerby. That resulted in him getting punched in the face. Instead of falling back to the ground, he landed on a thin uncomfortable cot inside the local precinct’s jail.

  Ben sat up. His head and jaw throbbed; his mouth was dry. His white UEF dress uniform was stained with his own blood and vomit. He looked down and noticed that the floor wasn’t actually a prison cell’s floor, but the boards of a boardwalk. Through the cracks he could see the ocean underneath.

  When he looked up, Ben didn’t see the cold grey walls of a precinct jail. No, he saw a sight he knew well from his memories. He was just a kid the last and only time he’d been at the beach and boardwalk, so all the details weren’t quite right, but they were close enough that he knew what he was looking at.

  Ben walked up to the jail cell bars, which were rooted in place by thin air. He looked around and saw himself as a child, holding both his parents’ hands. None of this made any sense.

  “What is this? Where am I?” he asked out loud.

  “Saito? Saito!” A police officer came walking along towards the cell doors. He stopped and made eye contact with Ben. It was the Pale Man. “You Ben Saito?”

  “Yes.”

  “You made bail. Get the hell out of here.” The Pale Man opened the cell door.

  Ben stepped out of his cell onto the boardwalk. He followed close behind himself and his parents as they strolled along. This memory always stood out to him. It was one of the only times he’d truly felt he was part of a family. It was one of the only times his father had been there mentally and wasn’t obsessing about the next mission.

  He was so focused on himself and his parents, Ben didn’t notice the surroundings changing. Gone was the boardwalk, suddenly replaced with the narrow streets and neon lights of the red light district. His parents led the younger version of him into a place called “Candy’s Place.”

  Ben followed himself into Candy’s Place. It was as dark and seedy as he remembered. There were the same smells: alcohol, sex and shame. What wasn’t the same was the clientele.

  In the bar area of Candy’s Place, draped in low red filtered light, Ben saw Ace getting a lap dance from Francesca. He saw Commander LeFleur on stage, gyrating her hips. He saw the poor bastards from Ada’s group of survivors, Reinhardt and the priest, laughing at the bar, tipping back drinks.

  Ben saw himself at maybe twenty-two, turn into a room off the bar. He trailed along. There was a short hallway. At the end was an open doorway, which he saw his younger self go into. He followed.

  “You’re going tomorrow?”

  Ben had walked in on an argument he’d had with one of his few serious girlfriends over the course of his still relatively young life. Her name was Gwen, and this was when they’d had a relationship ending argument after he waited to tell her he was shipping out on the Valiant, his first deployment as a lieutenant commander.

  “And you’re just telling me now?” Gwen was livid. She was up out of bed, pacing back and forth in his apartment’s bedroom.

  Ben was still in bed. “I…I couldn’t find a good time to tell you.”

  “So you chose the night before you were going to leave? For a year!”

  “Look, can you...? I’m sorry. Can you come back to bed?”

  “Screw you, Ben! I’m leaving.” Gwen started to put her clothes back on.

  “C’mon, don’t be like that. It’s just a year. I’ll be back before you know it.” Ben was embarrassed seeing himself like that. After all he’d been through since the attacks on Annapolis, it was like looking at a stranger.

  “This is on me,” Gwen said as she pulled her shirt over her head and fit her arms through the sleeves. “I’m the idiot that somehow thought I could change you. That’s on me.”

  Ben looked past himself at the windows of his old apartment. Through them, he didn’t see the lit-up Annapolis skyline. No, he saw the bunker under the Senate Circle in Vassar-1. From the looks of it, they were preparing for the fight against the Shapeless. But then his attention was pulled back to his breakup with Gwen.

  “I’m sorry! What more do you want me to say?” asked younger Ben.

  Gwen sat down on the bed next to him. She kissed him on the cheek and held his face gently between her hands. “Nothing. I don’t want you to say anything. Take care of yourself, Ben. Really, I hope you do.”

  Ben heard alarms behind him. He turned and saw that he was in the corridors of the UEF Valiant. Something urged him to start running towards an open bulkhead at the end of said corridor. A fellow officer, Jake Rollins, stood at that bulkhead, waving his hand and yelling for people to hurry.

  Ben looked behind him and saw scared, frantic crew members moving as quickly as they could through zero gravity towards the open bulkhead. Behind them was a growing fire that moved like living waves of water in those conditions. The poor bastards in the back got enveloped by the dancing cloud of burning death.

  “Hurry!” yelled Ben as he helped some of the stragglers escape the fire, but he saw that it was getting too close. He needed to leave himself; otherwise it threatened to burn him to death, too. “Dammit!” He retracted his outstretched hand and proceeded to try and save himself.

  Ben was the last one to make it to the Valiant’s forward section. Rollins closed the bulkhead behind him and locked it. Normally Ben would agree that was the best course of action, but the unpredictable nature of fire in zero gravity changed that perspective.

  “Wait.” Ben looked through the window on the bulkhead. He saw that the fire had stopped advancing. There were more crew members on the other side that could be saved. He tried to open the bulkhead, but it was electronically locked—not by Rollins, but by someone on the command bridge. Ben knew it was the captain, his father, who’d locked it. “We need to get this open. There’s still men in there. We can save them!”

  “Sorry, sir, but I can’t do that,” replied Rollins.

  “Bullshit you can’t! They can still make it!”

  “Orders, sir.”

  Ben grabbed Rollins by his shirt and raised his fist as if he was going to punch him. Instead he pinned him against a wall and punched the wall.

  The Pale Man appeared behind Ben. “I see. You’re a soldier, a hero like your father.”

  “A hero? We just let them die. We didn’t even try to save them.”

  “But you tried, didn’t you, Ben? You wanted to be the one to spare them from their fate. It’s an interesting trait among your kind.”

  “My kind?”

  “The question is, are you m
ore heroic than him? Did they trust you more? If so, why?”

  “Trust me with what? Who?” Ben walked back over to the bulkhead window. He looked through it to see a row of crew members, calmly standing in a row, on fire, their skin crackling and popping like man-sized strips of bacon.

  The Pale Man grabbed Ben by the back of his head and forcefully pushed it towards the bulkhead window. “Let’s find out.”

  Instead of Ben’s face crashing into the thick plastic window of the Valiant’s bulkhead door, his cupped hands splashed water on it. As that water dripped off, he opened his eyes and looked at himself in the mirror. Dressed in his UEF naval fatigues, and clean-cut, he also looked nervous, and he had good reason to be. Admiral Chevenko had called him in for a private meeting.

  “You got this,” Ben told himself. “Nothing is wrong. It’s just a meeting, that’s all.” But he knew being summoned by an admiral was in no way standard procedure, not for someone at his rank. Considering what had happened on the Valiant, and that he was going to be assigned to the new, secret Atlas Project, he figured that at the very least, he was going to get a good talking to about obeying orders and leaving personal feelings and emotions at the door.

  Ben heard a toilet in one of the stalls behind him flush. Out of one of them stepped the Pale Man, dressed in UEF Navy blues. He smiled and nodded at Ben, then began to wash his hands.

  “You seem hesitant to go further. Been staring into the mirror for a while, almost like you’re stalling. Why? What’s waiting for you outside this bathroom? What are you trying to hide from me?” The Pale Man stopped washing his hands and stared at the side of Ben’s head.

  Ben didn’t answer. Instead he opened up the bathroom door. On the other side weren’t the hallways of the officer’s quarters at the UEF Annapolis Base. In its place was the stairwell from Sanctuary Station-33. The same stairwell littered with corpses stacked on top of each other, hiding the stairs. Without hesitating or even blinking, he started climbing up them.