by Joshua James
When Ben reached the top of the stairwell filled with dead bodies, he was faced with another door. He waved his hand in front of it and stepped out into Annapolis’ raised city streets.
Ben got out on the thirtieth floor, which also happened to be the thirtieth level of Annapolis. It was the level that provided access to the skyway, a high-speed magnetic rail line that circled the entire city. One of the stops was the Naval Base, where his parents lived.
The heat was punishing. Millions of air conditioned fans across Annapolis did their best to relieve the never-ending summer.
“Call ‘mom’,” Ben ordered his HUD.
“Hello? Ben?” Ben saw his mother, Beverly Saito, appear in the holographic window in front of him. Seeing her again, after so long, it made him feel warm inside. Made him feel strangely safe.
“Hey, mom!” Ben had to shout over the commotion of the streets. He noticed something odd. The people on the usually bustling streets moved in slow motion.
“Where are you? We’ve been waiting for what, two hours? The party started at four.”
Ben was distracted by seeing Ada in the crowd. She made eye contact with him, then disappeared. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’m on my way right now.”
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s good, I just…I lost track of time, but I should be there soon. I’m actually about to hop on the skyway right now. Want me to bring anything?”
“Just you and your darling face, honey. And the location of the UEF’s secret weapon.”
“Okay, wait…what?” he asked.
“Seriously, it would mean a lot to me. And to your father.”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see me. Especially now that I’m late.”
“Don’t be stupid, Benny. Stop trying to fight it,” Beverly said.
“I—”
“Hello, friend. Have you ever looked into the abyss?” Vesta appeared in front of Ben. She was covered in blood, face partially decomposed.
“No, can you move? I’m trying to—”
“Have you looked into the abyss? What did you see?”
“Sorry, mom. See you soon. End call.” Ben managed to walk around the dead zealot.
“Have you ever heard of the Oblivion?” Vesta’s persistence ignored Ben’s polite refusal to engage.
“Yeah, a bunch of terrorists and crazies, right? Now, please, leave me alone. I got places to be.”
Vesta followed. She took a small hyper memory drive out of her black, oil-filled mouth and tried to hand it to Ben. “There’s no place to be other than the right side of history, sir. Here, see for yourself.”
“No, thank you.”
“Please. I insist, sir. I insist, Lt. Saito.”
Ben stopped. He turned to Vesta. “How do you know my name?”
“Take it. Please.” Vesta extended her arm, with the hyperdrive in her outstretched hand. Ben saw over her shoulder, high above the gigantic stacked skyscrapers, a large sphere made of what looked like liquid metal.
Two cultists appeared out of nowhere. They were dressed in rags, which had badges pinned to them. Both subdued Vesta and pulled her away.
“Sorry, sir. We’ve had a problem with these cultists here on this level lately,” explained one of the cultists as his partner tried to drag Vesta away.
In the struggle, Vesta dropped the hyperdrive. Ben waited for her to be dragged away and disappear in the crowd before walking over and picking it up. The Pale Man stood right in front of him, looking puzzled.
“When did this happen? What’s on that drive? We’re wasting time. We need to go back. I need to see what happened in that meeting.” The Pale Man grabbed Ben and pulled him hard.
Suddenly Ben was back in the UEF Annapolis Naval Base officer’s quarters' bathroom again. He checked his uniform. Satisfied, he took a deep breath and went to leave the bathroom when he felt someone tug on his arm. He looked down and saw the same all-black figure from earlier, glowing yellow eyes staring at him.
Without warning, or a transition that made sense, Ben was on a mag train on his way to his parents’ apartment. He instinctively knew he was two stops away from their stop.
Ben saw three people board the crowded train. Something about them felt off. Then all three of the suspicious passengers appeared keen to hide their faces. Two of them, men, wore baseball caps, and scarves up over their noses. The third, a woman, put on a plastic mask of a skull.
“Behold!” yelled the woman in the mask. It got some of the passengers’ attention, but not all. “Behold this great day!”
Ben tried to make his way forward towards the three masked strangers. Squeezing his way through the street was different and easier than doing the same through a packed train car. He made little to no progress.
“You are all privileged to sacrifice your lives today. You will sacrifice your lives to the abyss! Rejoice!” The woman in the skull mask took out a small baseball-sized metal sphere.
Ben knew it was a scatter grenade. But then it changed, morphing right in front of him, into a black face with glowing yellow eyes.
When it exploded, Ben was transported off the Earth and whizzed through the universe at dizzying, impossible speeds. He went so fast that the stars were little more than streaks of light, like high-speed super-heated bullet trails.
Finally Ben’s trip stopped on a desolate rock, empty except for a grey humanoid-looking bald alien with those same glowing yellow oval-shaped eyes. It turned and motioned for Ben to follow.
The sky above was red, with three visible moons. There was a city that looked to be built directly into the rocks of the mountains surrounding them.
“This isn’t my memory,” said Ben out loud. “This isn’t what happened.”
“This is what will happen,” answered a calm, monotone voice inside Ben’s head. “We were once like you. Prosperous, spread across galaxies. But then they came, it came.”
Ben followed the alien up over the top of a rocky hill. When he reached the top, the two of them looked out on a vast rock-covered plain filled with more of the alien’s kind. They were all on their hands and knees in front of a large floating obsidian stone, a Herald Stone.
“It came from the sky, as it did for so many others.”
Ben looked in the grey alien’s eyes. In them he saw the rapid destruction of countless alien species. He saw them at the height of their civilization; then a Herald Stone arrived, and they got consumed by the Shapeless. Time lost all meaning as he witnessed genocides.
“What is it?” Ben snapped out of it and focused again at the Herald Stone on his new friend’s planet. It was much larger than the one Director Engano had found on Vassar-1, or the one on the Shapeless flagship.
“Their strength,” said the monotone voice in Ben’s head. “Their vessel.” In the blink of an eye, he was floating above the crowd of aliens. “Their weakness.”
A living black oily substance began to ooze out of the Herald Stone. It grew and washed over the masses of aliens like a wave. They cried and screamed as the insidious liquid killed them and created something new in their place. Finally there were shrieks, hundreds of them. Ben looked down at thousands and thousands of Shapeless.
In the blink of an eye, Ben was inches away from the Herald Stone. He reached out for it. The second he touched it, cracks started to light up from inside. It exploded; the blast wave lay out and killed the newly formed Shapeless.
“Their weakness,” repeated the monotone voice in Ben’s head. “Find the stone. Find their weakness.”
Epilogue
Ada was uneasy.
For one thing, she still wasn’t at full strength. Her ribs burned, and breathing was difficult in the thick, humid air. Her health hadn’t been improved by hours of walking across the seemingly endless barren green and black expanse, littered with the husks of burnt-out tanks and APCs like a graveyard of wars past and present.
More recently, it was the room she’d found herself marched to at gunpoint that had
her uneasy. That, and the magnetic restraints on her wrists.
“So this doesn’t seem to have worked out exactly how we’d hoped,” she murmured.
“You think?” Clarissa snapped back.
“It could always be worse,” LeFay said.
Congo, who had taken to staying close to Ada, clearly understanding her condition was fragile even if Ada wouldn’t admit it, looked bewildered. “What is this place?”
“This is an incinerator room,” Tomas said.
Congo trembled in her restraints. “Are you certain?”
“Well, if the piles of trash and the smell of gas weren’t enough to tell you, I promise you that I used to clean these out at Fort Inov on Earth.”
“Are you sure it’s a UEF base?” Congo asked. “Those didn’t look like UEF soldiers that led us here.”
“They looked like what I’d expect on this hellhole,” Ada said.
They’d been intercepted about an hour ago by a group of soldiers on hoverbikes. Their uniforms had been filthy, and their armor scuffed. It was clear to Ada that they were UEF forces, even if pieces of their protective spider-weave gear were mismatched and looked like they were stitched together—not just from different units in their own army, but some from the enemy as well.
After a tense display of weapons and intent by the two dozen soldiers, Ada had managed to convince LeFay and Clarissa not to start shooting. Would she and Tomas have reacted the same if they were AIC soldiers? She couldn’t say. She only hoped that she hadn’t made a terrible mistake.
The soldiers had put them all in restraints and led them through the entrance gate of a shit-colored and pockmarked forward operating base. Despite the fortifications around it, the tattered walls looked like they’d fall to a stiff breeze, let alone a strong offensive force.
Ada had assumed that they’d all be led to a holding cell, where they’d have to explain themselves. That would have been standard UEF treatment. She’d been mentally preparing an explanation when they’d been led right past a large central structure and instead into a smaller building in an altogether different part of the base.
Tomas was right, of course. This was the incinerator room. The walls were charred and blackened, caked with the decay of decades of use.
“It smells like shit,” Clarissa said. Her eyes swept over the bags of refuse and metal chunks of debris. “Maybe they should actually fire this thing up from time to time.”
“Careful what you wish for,” a staticky voice boomed from a pair of speakers someone had half-heartedly hung next to a thick window of reinforced duraglass.
Through the stained and cracked glass, Ada watched as what she assumed was the leader of the hoverbike group that had led them here took off his goggles and pulled down his scarf. He looked unremarkable, except for an eyepatch with gauze underneath it.
Ada heard LeFay audibly gasp next to her.
“I have a few questions,” he said. “And then I’ll happily take care of the trash.” His gaze seemed to settle on LeFay.
“Things just got worse,” LeFay said to Clarissa out of the side of her mouth.
“We’re in an incinerator,” Clarissa hissed. “Surrounded by UEF soldiers.” She gave Ada a withering stare with that last point. “How much worse can it get?”
“Hello, Sarah,” the man said.
LeFay cleared her throat awkwardly. “Hey, Darren,” she choked out at last. “You’re looking good.”
A smile slowly crept across the man’s face. A wicked, terrifying smile that seemed to grow and grow.
Ada felt a chill. Things had just gotten much worse.
Book 7: Enter Abyss
One
Undead Rebellion
“Do you have any idea?” asked the Oblivion devotionist to Gregor’s right.
“Idea about what, Wilfson?” Gregor replied.
“You know, what’s next,” Wilfson said. “I mean, I get that we had to cull the population, but what’s next for us? Will the saviors give us the peace of the Abyss?”
Gregor considered his friend. He stood at casual attention, rifle in hand, looking around the desolate ruins of the capital, Vassar-1. His bald head glistened with sweat. Wilfson was the reason that unbelievers saw the Oblivion as a cult of the weak.
Gregor knew better, though. Wilfson might be soft, but the Oblivion was strong.
Gregor’s mom had died two years prior. His father, unable to live without his wife of sixty-plus years, had followed her to the grave soon after. That left Gregor alone with a pile of medical bills, no family, no friends, and no kids. All he had was a job as a pleasure ship docking attendant. Just another of the forgotten in Vassar-1.
All that had changed when he met his first Oblivion truth-speaker.
Now, two years later, Gregor was among the first cultists to make the assault on the city he was born in, grew up in and lost everything in. The city had already fallen. The Battle of Vassar-1, as he’d heard it called, had only resulted in a failed rebellion that had done little more than hasten the arrival of the Saviors’ ship. It wasn’t the blow to morale that their enemies believed it would be.
Gregor was positioned in a square across from ruined docks that had once housed part of the Vassar-1 City Sentinels’ fleet. He and his fellow cultists were meant to guard it, to prevent any survivors from breaking in and maybe salvaging a ship or two and trying to escape the planet. They had strict orders that no one left the AIC capital, period.
“Hopefully we get chosen to transition and join them,” Gregor said plainly.
“Become a Savior?” Wilfson squeaked. “Oh, man, I’d be lying if that doesn’t scare me a bit. But it would be an honor, wouldn’t it? Hand-picked by our Saviors to join their ranks.”
“Do we deserve it, though?” Gregor asked. “What have we done so far? Sent some civilians to the Abyss? They didn’t even fight back.”
“Are you saying we’re gonna have to earn it?”
“Probably. Right? I mean, you want a promotion, you gotta work hard to earn it. Right?”
Wilfson looked a little disappointed. “I guess so. But how are we supposed to do that? Earn it?”
“I dunno. Maybe we gotta find and kill some survivors.”
“That’s a good idea! But we can’t right now. Can we?”
“Not right now. Right now we stand guard, like Ducar ordered us to.”
Wilfson looked down at his feet, then back up at his friend, Gregor. “That guy, I don’t like him.”
“No one does. He sucks. He’s in charge, though, so…”
“Yeah. I wonder what we’re supposed to be gu—” Wilfson’s attention was torn away by a rumbling sound. Pebbles and dirt on the ground of the square started to vibrate. “What is that?”
Gregor looked out in the direction of the rumbling noises. Shapeless, in the form of UEF fighters, screamed by overhead in that same direction, eager to engage someone. He held his rifle at the ready, transitioning from holding it with one hand to two.
There was the sound of fighting and explosions, just out of view. Gregor’s pulse started to race. A fight was coming, but against who? They’d crushed the rebellion, who was left to fight?
“Gregor? What’s happening?” asked Wilfson, scared.
“They’re coming.” Gregor checked his gun to make sure it was armed and ready to rock. The other devotionists were starting to line up at the wall, also sensing the fight to come.
Those same men who lined up, ready to defend, got knocked back on their asses by the force of the exhausts of dozens and dozens of AIC ships that appeared over the horizon and sped over and upwards towards the Shapeless flagship high above, in orbit. Gregor couldn’t believe his eyes. There were so many of them. Where were all these ships coming from? Not the city; they’d made a point of destroying every ship they found in Vassar-1.
As Gregor and the others sat there in awe, watching the seemingly never-ending cavalcade of ships speeding up towards their Saviors, accompanying fighters made short work of the Shapeles
s’ lesser versions below. So naturally, more were sent. The Second Battle of Vassar-1 had begun.
Where the hell am I?
Ben Saito’s eyes opened. He was in a haze, not unlike the one he’d woken up to after his surgeries, but he didn’t see a hospital room ceiling above him. He saw an undulating liquid ceiling of hundreds of different colors. It would’ve been beautiful if it wasn’t so alien.
“We have humans incoming,” Ben heard his mother say. But it couldn’t be her; she was long since dead.
Ben felt something strange on his forehead, a sucking sensation. With one hand he reached up and felt something soft and greasy. It was an unpleasant texture. Then he realized that there was nothing underneath him. He wasn’t lying on a bed or table; he was floating in mid-air.
“Impossible!” Ben heard the slimy voice of the Pale Man.
Something about his voice made everything suddenly snap back into place.
The Shapeless! They tried to mine my memories. Is that what they were up t….the weapon! They were trying to find the weapon!
Ben struggled to look around him. His head was locked in place, but his eyes could investigate the edges of his vision.
Where was he? He had no idea. The Shapeless must’ve kidnapped him to try and pry the location of the UEF’s weapon out of him. He knew—and more importantly his father must’ve known—that it was destroyed along with the real Atlas. Not only would they get the location of something that didn’t exist anymore, but the fact that they thought they could meant that his dad had to still be in there somewhere, fighting back, deceiving them.
He didn’t tell them.
“They’re coming from two sides. Below and above,” said the voice of his father.
So he was here, too. Ben wasn’t sure what to think of the voice of his mother, but he was beginning to think there was something in his father that could be saved.
“Two sides? How? We cut off all communication, fried their HUDs,” said the Pale Man.