Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  “I see it now,” Congo said, starting off again.

  Ada didn’t glance back for the others, assuming they were following. At this point, they were completely at the mercy of Congo’s memory—and Wan’s hunch about the hoverbikes.

  The doctor led the way over the wall’s top and towards the wooden boards that connected them to the innermost wall, which would give them access to what was left of the only building.

  The nearest of the ships in the descending fleet fired a lone missile. To Ada, it was almost like an old range-finding shell.

  The missile struck the outermost wall. The wall was already decimated, but the blast wave was potent enough to propel Ada’s group off the inner wall and right into the black dirt outside the central structure.

  Ada’s ears rang as, for the second time, she survived a fall from the walls. For the second time, it hurt like hell; only now, there was no time to recover. Clarissa was already on her feet. Congo and Wan slowly found their feet, too.

  Ada watched as another missile was fired. It took out the secondary wall and shook the ground beneath them. She didn’t look back at the ball of flames and flying debris after the missile hit. There was no time. They just needed to keep running.

  “We have to go through to get to the garage!” Congo shouted.

  “And the bikes are there?”

  “I think so,” she said. “If Wan is right about what we’re looking for.”

  If Wan is right. There were words not to live by.

  The insides of the scout base were in shambles. Dead bodies were trapped, buried under pieces of concrete rubble and metal piping. Half of it was caved in, so navigating was tricky.

  Congo led the way through tight corridors. At one point they had to crawl through the smallest of spaces. All the while they had to avoid frayed live wires and climb over the dead. In the back of her mind, Ada could sense the advancing fleet overhead. The random missile strikes were curious, but the full-on assault couldn’t be long now. “We almost there, Doc?” she asked.

  The ground shook from another impact. It wasn’t a direct hit, or what was left of the roof probably would’ve caved in. If it was a missile, it must’ve hit close, probably right behind the innermost wall.

  “Yeah, we just got to make it through another room. The garage is right—”

  Something exploded incredibly close by. Immediately a thick wave of dust and debris rushed through the corridors, enveloping the group.

  Ada couldn’t see a thing. She figured the others were in the same boat, so she did all that she could think of as she heard cracking and breaking noises all around her. She reached out and grabbed who she assumed was Clarissa in front of her.

  “Ada, is that you?” yelled Clarissa as Ada tugged on the back of her jacket.

  “Yeah!”

  Wan slammed into Clarissa’s back and cursed as he toppled over. “Can’t see a damn thing!” he shouted helpfully before he fell into a coughing fit. Ada was reminded that Wan wasn’t the healthiest specimen in the world when the air wasn’t full of shit.

  “No kidding!”

  “You guys okay?” Congo asked from the front of their little line. “I think we’re here.”

  Ada and the others pushed in tight around Congo, who felt around for a door panel.

  She found it. Then she grunted. “No power.” She turned. “The door panel. It doesn’t have any power.”

  “Is there a manual lever?” Ada felt all around the doorway. The air wasn’t as thick with dirt, but it was still hard to see anything. She coughed as she strained to see. “Clarissa, can you use your eyes to find it?” she asked, knowing that Clarissa didn’t have the same eyes her parents had gifted her.

  Clarissa scanned up the door for a moment, then pointed. “Found it. Hold on, I’m gonna get it open.” Clarissa grabbed onto the lever. She pulled down. It barely budged.

  Ada could just make out her struggling. “Stuck?”

  Clarissa just grunted in reply.

  Congo was already on her feet and throwing her weight into it. Ada added hers. Wan was fighting off an increasingly sickly-sounding coughing fit.

  Over the coughing, a sound caught Ada’s attention. It was an odd sound, one she couldn’t figure out. At least, not until it started to get closer.

  “We’re out of time!” yelled Ada the second she realized what that oncoming noise was. It was the sound of the base collapsing. Fast.

  Ada was yanking furiously hard on the lever now. She put her feet up on the door. As hard as she could, she pulled, using her legs to brace herself. It was just enough to get the job done, and not a moment too soon.

  Right as they stumbled their way into the garage, the room they were just in collapsed along with the rest of the scout base. The force of the impact took them off their feet, but didn’t send them flying like the missiles had.

  Ada was on the ground again. She was tired of falling or being knocked off her feet. She was sick of being dominated by technology, forces beyond her control, or luck itself. It was time to take hold of her fate, and those of what friends remained, but first they had to get out of there.

  “Eureka,” Wan said as he fought off another coughing fit. “Told you.”

  The garage they were in was detached from the base, which probably saved them. It had certainly saved the hoverbikes. The gust of the last blast had thrown the tarp half off them and had tangled a handful of them together, but they only needed four.

  “Go,” Ada said, as if anyone needed the incentive.

  She danced through a series of mechanics’ tool benches until she was next to the nearest bike. It looked like shit, just the way they’d all looked, but when she glanced at the charge she was heartened to see it was topped off.

  Ada looked at the doorway they’d just escaped from, surprised that they’d escaped at all. When she looked at the rubble that piled up, blocking that doorway, she thought about how she’d somehow managed to survive another surely fatal scenario. Why was she being kept alive? What did God or the universe want from her?

  Wan hopped on the hoverbike next to her, not nearly as philosophical. “We ain’t dead yet.” He kicked over the power on his bike.

  Nothing happened. “What the hell?”

  Ada glanced over and saw Doc and Clarissa now airborne on their bikes. She reached over and flipped the safety lock on Wan’s bike. It instantly started to rise.

  “How the hell have you lived this long?” Ada said as she powered up her own bike and rose as well.

  “Keeping smart company, obviously,” Wan said. “And knowing when to fight and when to run.”

  “Safe to say this is the latter,” Ada said.

  “It usually is,” Wan answered.

  Ada shook her head and rotated around on her hoverbike. The garage was little more than a tent, she realized from her higher vantage point a dozen feet off the ground.

  “Do we know where we’re going?” asked Wan.

  “No idea,” Clarissa said.

  “Anywhere but here,” Ada said.

  “Wonderful plan,” Wan said. “You pick.”

  “How gracious of you,” Ada said sarcastically. She pushed her hoverbike forward. She was comfortable on it, even if it had a wicked shimmy that didn’t bode well for a long trip. Her boyfriend had had a similar hoverbike back in Sweden. He used to take her on rides all the time. When they broke up, she’d gotten one of her own. Partly out of spite, but partly because it was just so damn fun.

  “Let’s go.” Ada shot out of the garage and into the wide fields of Europa, and pushed the bike to top speed as soon as she could.

  The others followed close behind, though Wan started to lag, and Ada began to suspect that their erstwhile captain had no idea how to fly without a spaceship under his feet and a pilot behind the controls. Typical.

  Even though they were out of the scout base and away from the threat of being crushed to death, Ada knew they were far from safe. She risked a glance over her shoulder, expecting that they’d been
spotted. The missile strikes on the base were continuing, though she was sure now that the battleships were simply preserving their missiles and waiting to come in closer to pulverize the base with kinetic rounds. That would be a much cheaper way to level it.

  Then she spotted a pair of specks breaking free of the lead battleship and starting in their direction, hugging close to the ground.

  “What are those?” she shouted back at Clarissa, hoping the former agent knew whatever tricks the AIC were up to out here better than her.

  Clarissa looked back. “Those are crabs!” she shouted over the wind noise.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Wan said.

  “It’s not,” Clarissa said. “It’s very much not.”

  Of course, Clarissa thought. Nothing can be easy. “Crabs” were low-altitude fighters designed to fight on a planetside battlefield, not in space. They got their name from the frontal design. Two sharpened, sickle-like half-moon blades protruded out from both sides of the sharp-tipped cockpit. On the field they could literally fly through troops like a smart projectile, cutting down anyone unfortunate enough not to hear them coming—which was made worse by the fact that they were designed to be as quiet as possible.

  “How far?” asked Clarissa as she and Congo noticed their pursuers.

  “Hard to say.” Ada in fact didn’t know. She’d been to the base on Europa, the UEF HQ, for training, but that seemed like a lifetime ago now. It didn’t help that everything on Europa kind of looked the same. There weren’t landmarks or anything like that to use as a guide.

  “Give it a try,” Wan yelled from the rear. “And I hope it’s real close!” He turned on his hoverbike, armed with his old pistol. He fired at the two crabs quickly closing in on them. The bullets bounced off the forward armor. He’d need a perfect shot to do much damage to the bastards.

  He kept firing lamely anyway. If you couldn’t be clever, be relentless. Hadn’t some famous general said that at some point? Probably not. But Wan wasn’t going to let facts slow him down.

  The bladed sickles glinting menacingly on the AIC vehicles as they closed the distance. “Who designs these things?” he growled impotently as ships were getting dangerously close. It was bad enough to be killed by these things. But cut in half? That was just rude.

  He wasn’t half the pilot that the rest of them were. Even Congo seemed to be able to handle herself well enough.

  But he was twice as crazy.

  “I’m going to have to take extreme measures!” he yelled forward to the others. His hoverbike had been slowly falling back as he kept up his firing. He told himself it was to continue to distract the pilots but it was mostly so he didn’t think about what he was doing.

  “What?” Ada shouted hoarsely, looking behind her just as Wan pulled on the hoverbike’s handlebar-mounted brake levers. “What are you doing?”

  “Hell if I know,” Wan said, barely loud enough to be heard over the wind and the sudden distance between them. Then he leaned his body weight all the way to the left, pulling with his arms at the same time.

  He got his weight all wrong and by all rights he should have tumbled off the bike. But the complex computer systems built into the gyroscopes on the hoverbike must have been designed for unsure riders because it somehow teased out what Wan meant to do, even if he wasn’t sure himself.

  The bike dove in a barely-controlled half corkscrew and Wan felt his ass floating up off the seat then smashing back down at an angle that left him hanging onto the handlebars for dear life.

  In retrospect, even a seasoned rider might not have been as successful as Wan was in fooling the onrushing crabs. Both pilots made half-hearted attempts to run him down but overshot, flying just overhead of him.

  The trailing one managed to just scrape the protruding right side of the pirate’s ride, but missed taking Wan’s head off with it forward sickles. Sparks rained down on Wan as he gritted his teeth and hung on for dear life, which was exactly what he was doing before the crab bumped him.

  Wan finally got control of his bike a dozen feet from the ground and opened the thrusters up wide as he roared after the pair of crabs who were not bearing down on the others.

  Ada, meanwhile, didn’t know what Wan was doing and she didn’t care. She knew that the crab ships needed to be dealt with or they’d be dead within the next couple of minutes. Wan was the only one armed and if his early efforts were any indication, his gun wasn’t going to do much good. Still it was better than nothing, which is what the rest of them had—that was, unless they got creative. She had an idea, but needed some help from one of the others.

  “Clarissa!” Ada pulled up next to Clarissa as they both pushed their hoverbikes as fast as they could go. “Let’s get low!” she yelled over the sound of the bikes’ engines and the whoosh of air through and around their ears.

  Clarissa looked at her quizzically.

  “Trust me,” Ada said.

  She waved at Congo and after a nod at Clarissa, the three hoverbike riders dropped down and shifted their weight towards the back of their bikes in unison.

  Their vehicles’ rears scraped against the black soil, kicking up dust and dirt clouds. Then they wove in and out of each other, creating a shield of dust.

  If Ada had hoped to force the crabs to fall back, she was disappointed. If anything, they came even faster, firing into the large dust and dirt cloud as they did so.

  Ada, Clarissa, and Congo managed to dodge the shots, which hit the ground harmlessly. But eventually one would hit them, even if just a lucky shot. They had to go on the offensive.

  Wan watched the choreographed dust storm as he urged his own hoverbike forward. “What the hell are they doing?” Wan said aloud to himself as he watched the three women do everything they could to avoid getting clipped by the crabs.

  The crabs had slowed to take aim at the others and that had allowed Wan to catch up from behind.

  “All they got to do”—he aimed his pistol at the exhaust on the rear of the crab that had bumped him seconds earlier—“is be patient.” He smiled at the irony of him saying those words.

  Wan fired at the crab’s engine exhaust. This time his bullets didn’t bounce off. On the third shot, smoke began to billow out of the back of the rear crab. It peeled off, undoubtedly to try and figure out what happened, and stabilize.

  Wan watched it, expecting it to return to the fleet to make repairs. But it just maintained level flight. Then Wan saw why.

  The fleet was coming to them. Wan saw the growing cluster of battleships in the sky. After leveling the base, the ships had clearly kept coming. Either the fleet was following the hoverbikes or, more likely, it was heading toward the same destination they were. Wan wasn’t a fan of that, either.

  Wan saw that the other crab had veered off to one side and turned back to head straight towards him. “Oh damn, he didn’t like that,” he said, guessing the pilot wasn’t thrilled that his buddy had gotten his wings clipped.

  Wan had to think fast. In a matter of a dozen seconds he was going to be a bloody smear on the wastes of Europa. But for all his laziness and interpreted cowardice, he’d been nicknamed “Golden Lion” for a reason. Sure, it was mostly self-promotion, but the man could fight. Even more important, the man knew how to use his brain and whatever limited resources he had to survive.

  Before leaving the scout base, Wan had made a point to pocket some goodies. It was a little party bag, if you will. Among them were a couple of high-explosive grenades. At the time he didn’t know why he’d need them, but he was happy he had taken them.

  Wan aimed his hoverbike directly at the oncoming crab. He armed the grenades, and wedged them between the seats and the bike proper. He waited until he saw the shine of the crab’s blades.

  “I’m way too old for this!” Wan jumped off his hoverbike. It continued forward without him and exploded just as it passed under the back half of the crab.

  After he stopped rolling on the ground and came to a stop, Wan watched with glee as the crab spun
in circles above the ground, losing altitude and control as it went. Then it hit the dirt, tumbling end over end, sending the pilot flying to a certain sudden death.

  Ada watched Wan’s heroics with something like shock. She sighed to herself. She couldn’t leave him behind. She’d promised herself that she wasn’t losing anyone else. No one got left behind, not even a bastard like him.

  “What a sweetheart,” Wan said as Ada emerged from the cloud of dust and dirt and sped towards him.

  “Get on!” Ada barked as she sharply pulled up next to Wan, sending dirt into his face. She didn’t have to say it twice. He hopped on the back of the hoverbike, arms around the Swedish Marine’s waist.

  As Ada sped forward to rejoin the group, she saw that the first crab, the one whose engine Wan had shot, had managed to stabilize on limited thrust and was coming back around for them. She’d warn the others as soon as she reentered the protective cloud.

  Not wanting to crash into Clarissa or Congo, Ada carefully reentered the dust cloud. She rejoined their little serpentine formation and movements to make sure that the cloud didn’t dissipate. All the while, they looked forward for any sign of the main UEF headquarters.

  The crab burst through the cloud of dust. Its blades missed Congo’s head by less than a foot. She didn’t see them until they were past her and then ducked comically late, screaming obscenities.

  It flew ahead a little, then turned around for another go.

  “These sons of bitches sure are persistent!” Wan aimed his pistol over one of Ada’s shoulders and fired.

  Ada shouted as the bullet fired right next to her ear, temporarily making her deaf. Wan didn’t care. He kept firing until he heard a click and was out of ammo. His bullets did nothing to deter the crab, which sped straight towards Clarissa.

  Clarissa didn’t know what to do, so all that was left was to improvise. She knew that she couldn’t out-maneuver the crab on a hoverbike, nor could she outrun it. The pilot angled his ship down so that she couldn’t duck below it. If she couldn’t go below, there was only one more option.