Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  “Perhaps you underestimate them,” answered Saito. “They found a way to call for help.”

  “Gah.” The Pale Man dismissed his words. “Well, what do we do, Captain? Put some of that training to use.” The Pale Man leaned on Saito’s military acumen. Ben knew it was one of the main reasons he’d assimilated his father into the fold to begin with.

  “We fight. Give me a ship, and I’ll lead,” said Saito.

  “No, I need you here,” the Pale Man said sharply. After a pause, wherein Ben was sure the location of his voice changed, he said, “I hate to use the last of it, though.”

  Ben slowly craned his head up as hard as he could, gritting his teeth and stretching his neck muscles to the point of tearing in order to get a better look around. He saw his mother, Beverly, standing next to the Pale Man. His father was opposite them. A Herald Stone—a small one, no bigger than a baseball—floated, much like himself, right next to the Shapeless leader.

  Ben remembered what he’d seen when the Shapeless were in his mind. He remembered the strange glowing yellow-eyed beings that had hijacked their attempts. He remembered what the Herald Stone was. The being had called it their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. They needed it to survive. So that was his objective: get that stone, even if that meant he died in the process.

  The burgeoning plans in Ben’s head went on pause for a moment as he made eye contact with his father. He froze there, not knowing what to do. Then, to his surprise, his father simply looked away. And that was when Ben knew he had to move.

  Suddenly the whole Shapeless flagship shook violently.

  “What is that?” Beverly asked, surprised.

  “That’s a thousand ships zeroing in on us,” his father said. “It’s kind of hard to miss a large, liquid metal sphere floating in close orbit.”

  “Enough,” the Pale Man snapped. “We have to nip this now.”

  “It’s the AIC,” Saito said. “They were preparing to attack the UEF anyway. They won’t care that we’re releasing them to the Abyss. They’ll only attack as if we were the Earthlings.”

  “Yes,” the Pale Man said sourly, as if he didn’t need to be lectured on the obvious. “But if they plan to take us down, they’re going need tens of thousands more missiles.”

  Saito shrugged. “They might have them.”

  Satisfied that the Shapeless’ attentions were completely focused on the outside threat, not himself, Ben started making moves. He grabbed the tendril attached to his head with both hands. While pulling, he tried his best not to think about how inherently creepy and disgusting it was to have something like that attached to his forehead. It took a couple of tugs, but he managed to get it off.

  The second Ben got the tendril off his forehead, he fell to the floor of the command bridge. It was surprisingly cold. All the walls in the room turned clear, giving him a dizzying and somewhat nauseating surround view of the battle that was erupting in space around the spherical ship.

  You gotta be kidding me! Look at all of them. They must’ve gotten a message out somehow.

  For a moment, Ben stayed on the ground on his hands and knees and took in the scenery outside. He’d never seen so many AIC ships in one place. All of them were blowing their way through faux Shapeless UEF fighters, towards the Shapeless flagship, and they showed no signs of stopping—though he was determined to take it out before they could reach it.

  Ben got up off the floor. A Shapeless came rushing at him from behind, shrieking like a wild animal in its death throes. It got Ben’s attention, but unfortunately it also got everyone else’s attention, too.

  The Pale Man, Beverly, and Lee all turned in unison.

  “Shit,” Ben said when nothing better came to mind.

  Step one was not getting cut up into little pieces. Ben dodged a couple of swipes from the Shapeless as it rushed at him. One almost cut his neck open like a Pez dispenser, but he narrowly dodged it. Confident that he had just enough distance between them, he then made a run for the Herald Stone.

  Beverly moved in front of the Herald Stone, blocking it. She let out a shriek as tendrils came flying out of her mouth and tried to ensnare Ben.

  But her tendrils were grabbed in mid-flight by Lee.

  Beverly startled back in surprise and then went stumbling forward as Lee yanked on them, clearing a path.

  Ben jumped and rolled past Beverly, and ripped the Herald Stone out of the stasis field it was suspended in.

  Immediately upon touching it, Ben felt a sudden rush of energy. He also knew exactly what to do, as if the stone itself spoke to him. In fact, he was so confident all of a sudden that he didn’t even blink when he saw the Pale Man sprinting straight towards him.

  “Give that back!” snarled the normally calm Pale Man. He reached out for Ben, each finger elongated with a black talon at the end.

  Ben stretched out his hand with the Herald Stone in it. He touched it to the tip of one of the Pale Man’s talons. Glowing cracks started to appear all over the Shapeless leader’s body, just like the ones Ben had seen in the Herald Stone during his vision just minutes earlier. His oily black obsidian eyes opened wide, and then his body disintegrated into hundreds of glowing, burning embers.

  There was no time to celebrate the apparent death of the Pale Man. Ben still had to save his father, then find a way off the Shapeless’ flagship.

  Lee still held Beverly by the tendrils. She’d stood back up and now looked at Lee, confused, like she didn’t want to believe that she was being betrayed. Lee, too, looked confused, as if he was just as baffled about what had just happened.

  Ben took advantage of whatever was happening to his father and the alien crisis of confidence inside him by rushing at him, Herald Stone in hand. He had no way of knowing that if he hit Lee with it, it would free him from the Shapeless’ influence, or if it would disintegrate him like the Pale Man.

  All Ben knew was that at this point, he’d accept either outcome. It would tell him the truth either way. Anything was better than…

  Something slammed into Ben from behind, and it was only then that he realized he’d forgotten the Shapeless behind him.

  Luckily, Ben didn’t feel the bladed tendril puncture the back of his calf, because it was his artificial, mechanical one. He did, however, feel himself get pulled off his feet. He was slammed face-first on the same ground he’d just picked himself up from moments ago.

  Ben managed to turn his body around as he was being reeled in towards the Shapeless monster, who’d turned the majority of its body into a gigantic mouth full of rows of razor-sharp teeth. It was terrifying, but Ben had a nuclear weapon as far as the aliens were concerned.

  Knowing the devastating effects, Ben touched the Herald Stone to the tendril through his leg. It worked just as he hoped. The Shapeless-turned-monstrous-mouth developed glowing cracks beneath its skin and disintegrated, all in a matter of a few seconds.

  The Shapeless flagship took several more devastating hits. It was able to self-repair, but it was becoming clear that it wasn’t going to hold on forever, restorative properties aside. And without the Pale Man, Ben wondered if anything else would be able to move the sphere.

  Ben watched as a pair of shapeshifter dreadnoughts sacrificed themselves to cut off the heart of the AIC attack on the sphere. They were both, in turn, ripped to shreds by concentrated AIC missile attacks that poured out of the oncoming wave of ships.

  Ben got up and made his way towards his father, who fought Beverly. It wasn’t much of a fight, as he was easily able to grab her and throw her through the wall, out into outer space. The extreme cold did her in almost instantly. Now it was just Lee and his son on the command bridge of the Shapeless flagship.

  His father’s head snapped around to look at the far wall, his eyes unfocused, almost like he was looking through it. “Hang on,” he said calmly.

  “What?”

  “That’s a special payload,” he said. His voice was distant, and Ben wasn’t sure if he was talking to him or somethin
g else.

  Ben finally saw the massive missile his father was somehow seeing, just as it erupted in a ball of light and energy that seemed to wash over the semi-transparent walls around them. Heat poured in as if they were now standing in the middle of a furnace.

  The whole living vessel began to freak out.

  The perfect spherical shape of the Shapeless flagship became contorted. Spikes and spirals flew out of it as it tried to deal with the new foreign weapon. But it couldn’t compensate, and the ship died. Now at the mercy of its orbit around Vassar-1, it was helpless.

  Scared of death for probably the first time in their existence, and completely without direction from the Pale Man, the Shapeless on board the flagship panicked and jumped off—only to meet their demise in the vacuum of space, Ben noticed. It was as he’d theorized long ago: they worked in a hive-mind mentality, in which they needed a leader to guide them.

  Lee was also affected by the loss of the Herald Stone and the Pale Man. He stumbled around and fell to the floor. Ben ran over to see to him. Yes, he needed to find a way off the dying ship, but he wasn’t going to leave without his dad. All of this, all that he did was originally just to save him, so he wasn’t about to give up now.

  “Dad?” Ben knelt down next to Lee, whose body convulsed. He didn’t get an answer.

  An AIC ship slowly pulled up to one of the transparent walls of the Shapeless flagship’s command bridge. Ben barely noticed as a port on the ship slid open and a small army of Marines in combat suits instantly began cutting away at the side of the ship. They shoved some flexible material against it just as the wall fell away.

  But he did notice the face in the central shaft who stepped across, rifle in hand, with a trio of Marines around her.

  “Director Engano?” he gasped. “How?”

  “I expected to see a familiar face,” Engano said. “Just not yours.” She nodded past Ben at his father. “What’s his condition?”

  Ben turned around to see that his father was on the ground moaning.

  “Shit,” she said, coming up short. “What the hell is your condition?”

  Ben shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said. The places where the Shapeless had slashed him were bleeding, but nothing felt too deep. And his father was his big concern now.

  “We’ll figure it onboard,” Engano said. She snapped her fingers, and the Marines stormed past Ben and headed for his father.

  “No,” Ben shouted. “Let me.”

  The Marines stopped and glanced back at Engano. She nodded and they stepped back.

  Ben knelt down over his father. He took a deep breath and pressed the Herald Stone against Lee’s stomach, where the black tendrils originated from. For a moment his body seized up, and Ben feared he might’ve killed him. But then the black oil-like substance dripped off his body, revealing a problem that Ben hadn’t anticipated. There were still open wounds underneath that Lee had suffered back on Sanctuary Station. Somehow the alien infestation had simply suspended the injuries, as if time had frozen, and now they were all coming unstuck at once.

  Using his own upper body strength and that borrowed from his artificial arm, Ben picked the unconscious Lee up. The Marines took a cue and joined in helping to carry Lee to the makeshift loading ramp of Engano’s ship, and then carried him inside while Ben stopped at the edge.

  Ben felt Engano studying his face, but she wisely chose not to speak in that moment. Ben felt a cascade of emotions wash over him.

  He’d come here to find his father. To save his father. He’d never expected he could do it.

  But he had.

  He nodded and stepped down into the ship, with Engano bringing up the rear. She said something to the Marines at the barrier and, a few moments later, Ben sat down numbly on a jumpseat that one of the Marines guided him to.

  As the ship pulled away, Ben watched the Shapeless flagship literally fall apart and turn into a big blob of black oil, aimless in the zero gravity around Vassar-1’s orbit.

  The AIC capital had been freed from alien control. But the victory felt bitter, and none of the Marines around him seemed to draw much cheer from the scene as it played out.

  They all knew the fight was far from over.

  Two

  The Admiral

  Stamina had never been an issue for LeFay. At least, not for a very long time. Not since before her...well, she considered it a mishap, but really, it was her near death. In fact she had died, for exactly one minute. But for those in the group that weren’t running on battery power, fatigue was becoming an issue.

  Though not a planet, Europa was big. Once upon a time it had been covered with ice, but that was long ago, before the reclamation projects had made it fertile. Trekking across it on foot wasn’t a small undertaking. It was even harder when the entire group was walking blind. Add to that the fact that the only one who knew the way had barely just escaped her own death. Lest they wanted to add their blood to the already-soaked black soil of Jupiter’s moon, the group had to work together.

  Working together shouldn’t have been hard. With LeFay was Ada, who was still in recovery from grave wounds. There was also Clarissa, who might or might not be mentally compromised. And Tomas, who wasn’t one hundred percent, but he was still the best fighter of the lot of them. All four of them were used to operating as a team at this point. The only wild cards came from the pirate crew.

  LeFay didn’t know Doc Congo very well. She knew her reputation, of course, especially among biohackers. The young doctor wasn’t just a healer of bodies, but she knew how to augment them, too. That made her invaluable to LeFay. In case something went wrong and she got hurt, the doc could service her wounds better than most. That was assuming her reputation was justified, of course.

  “Poor oblivious cannon fodder,” commented LeFay as she stared at the backs of the heads of the two random pirates whose names she hadn’t bothered learning.

  “What’s that?” one said, turning around.

  “Nothing. Keep going; it shouldn’t be far,” LeFay said.

  The pirate gave her a long, dirty look before he turned back around. LeFay looked back, innocent as an angel. The pirates had to know they were bullet sponges if something went down. Then she caught Clarissa’s glance and rolled her eyes.

  “Stop being terrible,” Clarissa said. She walked alongside LeFay. Ada, Tomas, and Doc Congo brought up the rear.

  “What? It’s true.”

  “They’re still people.”

  “They’re criminals.”

  “So are we,” Clarissa said.

  LeFay offered a sardonic smile. “We’re criminals on a mission for good. Surely that makes us better.”

  “You tell yourself that, LeFay,” Clarrisa said.

  LeFay ignored her. She was busy monitoring her HUD. Specifically, she monitored the radar. Surely they would be spotted soon, if they hadn’t been already. It was only a matter of when they were apprehended.

  And then she saw the blip on the radar.

  “How much further, Ada?” asked Tomas. He was hanging back close to his UEF friend, LeFay noticed. She liked the two of them, but she hadn’t forgotten where they all came from. She didn’t have much use for the squabbles of the AIC and the UEF, but she didn’t know if that extended to everyone in the group. She was sure that Clarissa harbored plenty of ill will toward the UEF.

  “If I’m right,” Ada answered through labored breaths, “and that’s a big ‘if,’ then there should be a scout outpost about a mile or two away. They have them peppered all over this part of the moon.”

  “UEF or AIC?” asked Doc Congo, who was behind Ada, serving the same capacity as Tomas.

  “UEF. But who knows, things change on this damn moon almost every day.”

  LeFay noted the labored breathing. Ada was trying her best to sound like she was okay, but she clearly wasn’t. Her voice cracked a couple of times in those sentences alone.

  Ada, Doc, and Tomas were quiet for a moment. Then Congo spoke up again, breaking the silenc
e. “Guess it doesn’t matter much which one, right? I mean, we’re just gonna be pirates to both sides.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Tomas.

  “Hate to break it to you, soldier boy,” LeFay said, “but you’re not going to be embraced with open arms. None of us will.”

  “I never went AWOL,” Tomas stubbornly said. “Neither did she. I just haven’t been able to…”

  “Starting to see it, huh? It doesn’t matter why you’re here. You’re not supposed to be here. You broke the rules. That’s all both sides see. Surprised it took you so long to see it.”

  “Relax, Tomas,” Ada said. She chuckled, or at least she tried to. Mostly she just winced. “We’ll have a chance to explain all of this.”

  “Oh?” LeFay raised an eyebrow. Ada was being optimistic, but in her state, maybe a little optimism was what she needed.

  “Absolutely,” Ada said, smiling. “I’m sure we can explain to them about the shapeshifting alien monsters after they court-martial our asses and throw away the keys,” she huffed.

  LeFay snorted.

  But Ada’s own laugh had morphed into coughing that wasn’t stopping. Congo came up beside her and started to massage her back. Tomas put an arm around her shoulder.

  LeFay stopped walking while they did so.

  “What are we stopping for?” Ada said, her voice still scratchy. “Don’t slow down for me. We need to—”

  “We got incoming,” LeFay said. “Saw them a minute ago.”

  “A minute ago?” Tomas asked, irritated. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  She shrugged. “Hoped they’d pass. Guess they didn’t.”

  Clarissa walked up next to her, scanning the horizon. “Probably the welcoming committee.”

  LeFay opened her arm and checked on her little friend, Pete.

  “That’s not good,” Ada gasped out. Congo hit her in the arm with an injection of something.

  “Depends on how you look at it, I guess,” LeFay said. “Lay down your weapons.”

  “What?” The pirate that had first turned back to LeFay did so again. “Are you crazy, freak?”