Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  “Go on,” urged Sydal. He tried to ignore his revulsion and rage as the thing pretending to be Rebecca hugged his leg.

  “This world that your kind has built. It’s nothing but greed, labor, and violence. How can you want to go on? How is this a reality worth living in? I’ll tell you, it’s not. But your animal instincts, something inside you, it tells you to soldier on, to survive. What if I told you that there was another option? What if I told you that by simply surrendering, I can deliver you to a place without struggle, without strife, without suffering?”

  “I’d call bullshit. If this magical place exists, why aren’t you there? Why are you wasting your time with us, with me?”

  “Because my job is to deliver people to heaven’s door, not live there. It’s a sacrifice I happily make every day.”

  “Look, you bald asshole—can I call you ‘bald asshole’? I’ve seen what your kind do, what your followers do. You’re murderers, monsters. How can the road to heaven be paved with dead bodies?”

  The Pale Man’s ever-present smile was unperturbed. “We do what is necessary to facilitate the transition. What is it you humans say? ‘Nothing good in life is free’? The price for paradise is death. Yes, it’s a nasty business, nothing that any of us enjoy. But I assure you it is a necessary evil, a little suffering to never suffer again. Even one as cynical as yourself, Detective, cannot deny that is a fair deal.”

  Sydal nodded, careful not to show any emotion on his face. “So why me? Why did you single me out over all the other much more important people on the moon?”

  “We didn’t,” replied the Pale Man.

  “It sure as hell feels like you did.”

  The Pale Man held out one hand. Maria separated from Sydal and took said hand. She wrapped her arms around the alien creep’s waist from the side.

  “We were after her. Your wife. Or more accurately, we were after the information in her head. As you know, your wife was UEF military. What you may not have known was the responsibility put upon her by her superiors.”

  “What are you talking about?” As far as Sydal knew, his wife had been in the Navy as a former pilot who’d stuck around to help instruct and coordinate—an enlisted woman turned officer.

  “She didn’t tell you? I’m not surprised. You humans and your secrets. It’s a wonder you ever actually get anything done.”

  “I worked for military intelligence,” said the Shapeless version of Maria Sydal. “There weren’t many of us with access to the codes to arm the fission bombs on every ship based on this moon. Very, very few, in fact. My new friends here, our new friends, want those codes.”

  “So we took the liberty of liberating your daughter first. Don’t worry, we aren’t the monsters you think we are. Her transition into the Abyss was quick, painless. I made sure of it.”

  Sydal felt something break loose inside. He shook with anger at his core. But somehow, he managed to contain himself.

  “Painless,” he repeated, his lips pressed in a line, no emotion in his voice. One way or another, he was going to come out on top when this was all over.

  “Then we placed a better version of your daughter back in your apartment. Unfortunately, that little rascal had a bit of a temper.”

  Ben looked down at the fake version of his daughter still clutching his leg. She looked up at him and smiled a missing-tooth toddler smile.

  “She hastened your wife’s transition. Against orders, I may add. Very naughty. So now we need you to get access to her information. Pretty simple, really. Right?”

  “I didn’t even know she was military intelligence. That is, if that’s even true. So what makes you think I know the codes to fission bombs? What, do you think she just told me them one day? Over breakfast?”

  “No, of course not. Don’t be silly, Detective. But I’m willing to bet you know the passwords to her HUD, her mail, and any of her computer systems.”

  “Maybe I do, maybe not. Either way, why would I help you? So you can kill me and replace me with…whatever the hell you things are? You gonna give me fake copies of my wife and daughter?”

  “If you give us her passwords, we won’t kill your son.” The smile on the Pale Man’s face stayed, but his tone got much sterner.

  Matthew!

  Sydal was having real trouble keeping his cool. His voice shook as he asked: “Where’s my son?”

  “Close by. I promise.”

  “I want to see him. Now!”

  “I’m afraid not, Detective. Give us the passwords, and you can not only see him, but we’ll give him to you. It really is as simple as that.”

  “What are you going to do with them? The fission bombs?”

  “We’re going to wipe the Earth clean of suffering and give humanity the rebirth they so desperately need.”

  “Hmmm.” Sydal was smart enough to know the score. He was a detective, after all, and part of the skills that came along with that was being able to read people. He was able to tell if someone was telling him the truth or not. The Pale Man may not have been human, but part of taking the form of one was inheriting those facial tells.

  “So what do you say, Detective? Your son for some measly passwords?”

  “No.”

  “Come again?” The Pale Man’s smile was replaced with a look of shock.

  “No, I’m not going to help you. Because…” Sydal tried not cry. “Because you already killed my son.”

  “I assure you we haven’t done anything to—”

  “You’re a bad liar. You plaster that dumb smile on your face to hide it, but your eyes, your body language, all of them tell me that you aren’t telling the truth. And if Matthew was still alive, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t just show him to me. That’d be the best way to get what you wanted. But you didn’t, because you can’t.” Sydal reached for the flamethrower still strapped to his back.

  Before Sydal could aim his flamethrower at the Pale Man, he felt intense pain in the leg that the false Rebecca clung to. He looked down and saw that her arms had turned to something akin to barbed wire, digging into and cutting his skin. Without hesitation, he shoved the business end of the weapon against the creature and pulled the trigger.

  Sydal was about to turn the flamethrower on the Pale Man when he felt an even more intense pain in his head. It was too much to take. It felt like something was in his head, trying to burst out from under his skull. He dropped the weapon and fell down to the floor.

  “Another problem with you humans is how frail you are. Did you know this is the only place I’ve run into this ‘cancer’? We’ve been to hundreds of occupied worlds over hundreds of lifetimes, and you alone have this weakness.” The Pale Man slowly approached Sydal. He knelt down next to him as the detective writhed around in pain, holding his head.

  Sydal’s head hurt so badly he could only grunt in reply.

  “That tumor in your head was going to kill you,” the Pale Man said. “I’m just speeding up the process. But first, let’s see if we can dig around in your brain and find those passwords.”

  One of his hands transformed into a saw. There was a sinister smile on his face as it neared the detective’s forehead.

  The indescribable pain made thinking difficult, but Sydal managed to control his thoughts long enough to kick the Pale Man’s knee as hard as he could.

  The alien fell backward in surprise.

  Sydal scrambled on all fours towards the flamethrower. Once he picked it up, he swung around in the alien’s direction, spewing flames as he did. But the Pale Man was gone.

  The alien thing shaped like Rebecca burnt to a crisp on the floor as the Maria creature rushed towards Sydal, tendrils flailing, shrieking as loudly as she could. He set her alight too, ignoring her screams of pain and pleas of mercy in a stolen voice.

  Head throbbing, with blood running down his leg, Sydal stared at the two alien dog monsters, who snarled and growled at him. The first one made its move, charging straight towards him. The other ran off to the side.

  Syd
al easily dealt with the first one, setting it ablaze, causing it to run away panicked and on fire. It ran into one of the wall-sized windows, bounced off, and fell down dead.

  But too late, he noticed the other one had sneaked up on him from behind.

  When Sydal swung around, the alien dog grabbed his flamethrower by the middle of the barrel with its massive metal-lined mouth. It easily chomped it in half, making the flamethrower almost useless. Then it lunged on top of the detective.

  Sydal somehow managed to use the alien’s own momentum against it, and tossed it up and over himself. Then he took out his pistol and backed up, waiting for the second attack. That was when he noticed that the broken flamethrower, now on the floor, was leaking the highly flammable liquid it spewed.

  “C’mon, you big ugly son of a bitch! Come get me!” Sydal walked backwards, stepped over the broken flamethrower, and continued backing up.

  The monster let out an ear-piercing shriek and ran straight at Sydal. Despite his nerves, or the pain that had radiated from his head to his whole body, the detective held fast. He waited until the creature was right next to the broken flamethrower, then fired.

  Sparks from the bullet hitting the floor ignited the fuel from the broken flamethrower. The creature was instantly engulfed in fire, and within twenty seconds was reduced to a pile of crispy, smoldering remains.

  As Sydal watched the flames licking at the creature, the Pale Man reappeared out of nowhere and grabbed him by his throat, lifting him up off the floor with one arm. For once, the Pale Man’s smile was gone.

  “Just when I think I’d seen the depths of your kind’s stubbornness and stupidity, then someone like you comes along, Detective.” The Pale Man talked as he walked across the room, still holding Sydal up by his throat. “I offer you the world, I offer you paradise. And what do you do?” He slammed Sydal against one of the wall-sized windows. “You spit in my face.”

  Sydal struggled to break loose, but between the agony in his head and leg and the Pale Man’s brute strength, he couldn’t do a damn thing. The Pale Man threw him across the room.

  Sydal gasped for air as fresh pain blossomed in his leg.

  “The funny and frustrating part of all this, Detective, is that your refusal to play along isn’t going to amount to anything.” The Pale Man pointed out the window towards the fighting going on in space just above the moon. “They are all still going to die. We are still going to invade the Earth and free all you primitive, barbaric monkeys from the life you deserve. So why continue to resist? Because you’re fools. That’s why.”

  The Pale Man walked across the room towards Sydal, who was now mumbling under his breath.

  “What are you doing? Praying to your god?” laughed the Pale Man.

  Sydal’s head felt like it was splitting open. The pain blinded him. Blood trickled out of his nose. In an attempt to stop the Pale Man from torturing him, or at least getting a brief respite, he unloaded his pistol in the alien’s face, not stopping until her heard it click.

  The Pale Man’s face immediately began to reform from a bullet-riddled mess of skull and brain matter to whole again. As it did, the mouth below his grotesquely mangled mug kept talking.

  “I’m your only god. The Abyss is all you need to pray to. Remember when I told you that your son is nearby, Detective?” His face still reforming, the Pale Man reached into his own chest and pulled out Matthew’s pale-blue, lifeless corpse. “Well, here he is. Finally! You’re reunited.”

  Sydal stared at his dead son. This was no illusion, no alien shapeshifter. This was his Matthew.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, both to himself and his boy. “I’m so sorry.” His rage was replaced with sorrow and guilt. His heart had come to terms with what he had to do. His body was more than ready to throw in the towel.

  “You made one mistake,” said Sydal, just loud enough for the Pale Man to hear him.

  “A mistake?” He laughed. “And what would that be?”

  “You underestimated just how far a stubborn, stupid barbaric monkey would go to kill alien bastards like you.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I wasn’t praying to anyone. I was instructing my HUD to connect to this moon’s exotic matter generator and overload it.”

  The Pale Man furrowed his brow.

  “Oh yeah,” Sydal spat. “I was in there earlier. I have the access now. And I locked everyone out, so nobody can stop it. So I really hope you enjoy the Abyss, because we’re all about to ride a first-class ticket to Oblivion.”

  Sydal smiled through bloodstained teeth as the Pale Man’s smile finally disappeared for good.

  “You piece of scum,” the alien spat. “You waste of organic material.”

  He turned one of his hands into a scythe and aimed to decapitate the detective. Sydal kicked backward, and the blow skimmed over his head. He rolled over as the Pale Man leapt at him.

  This time the alien didn’t miss. The blade slid into Sydal’s chest with a sickly wet thud. Flickers of pain ran through Sydal’s torso.

  Then he felt the floor below him tremble. Realization seemed to dawn in the Pale Man’s features as his eyes grew wide.

  “Scum,” he said again, but the anger seemed to ebb out of him.

  In his mind’s eye, Sydal watched as the bright explosion pushed its way out of the ground where the exotic matter generator was housed. Then everything got sucked back into the mini black hole that it created.

  The world around Sydal went dark. The last thing he heard was the Pale Man unleashing a howl of unintelligible alien sounds before his body, like Sydal’s, was ripped apart.

  Nine

  Desperation

  “How long do you think we can keep this up?” asked Rhule from the Veruvian’s command deck. He was speaking to one of his crew in charge of keeping an eye on the shields and the dreadnought’s structural integrity.

  “At this rate, I’d guess thirty minutes,” answered the crew member. “At most.”

  The whole of the Veruvian shook as they took a couple more hits from the Shapeless fighters. They crashed into the dreadnought’s superior shields, but did massive damage each and every time.

  “Do what you have to do to extend that. We have to hold on long enough for backup to arrive. Otherwise we’re going to lose this fight.” Rhule then turned his attention to another crew member, one of three in charge of the ship’s weapons. “I don’t want our cannons to stop firing until all this is over. Understood?”

  “Yes sir!” answered one of the three.

  Rhule got up out of his commander’s chair and walked up to one of the viewing screens. He looked on as all hell was breaking loose outside. The other Shapeless flagships, witnessing one of their own going down, had joined the fight. They, along with hundreds and hundreds of their fighters, were devastating the combined AIC fleet, including the fighter squadrons under Ben’s command.

  “Sorry, Ben,” Rhule said under his breath. “I think we’re out of miracles for you.”

  “They’re beating the shit out of us!” yelled Wan.

  “We’ve all got eyes,” Ada snapped. “We see.”

  Ben grunted but said nothing. He was doing everything he could to stay out of panic mode, but it was getting difficult. Shapeless fighters were zipping and zooming all over the place, plowing through any ship in their way. They were so reckless that they’d even run into and destroy each other.

  Clarissa was the one under the most pressure. Ben left her alone to work her magic. But even with a Supramax Hawk and its superior speed and maneuverability, surviving this mayhem was getting harder and harder. She jumped reflexively as a tumbling fighter whizzed past, forcing her to execute a hard turn. Ben could tell her nerves were starting to fray with every near-collision. Her hands were sweaty, and her artificial eyes darted all over the place, looking for the next threat to come.

  “How many of these things are there?” asked Ada as she struggled to shoot down as many of the knife-like Shapeless fighters that she cou
ld. The sheer amount of them passing through the Fallen’s sights meant she almost didn’t have to aim. All she needed to do was spray, and she was bound to hit a couple.

  “Too damn many,” Ben said. “We need to get out of this.”

  They had to do something, as the fighter squadrons under his command were losing men and women at an alarming rate. If drastic actions weren’t taken, they’d all be wiped out within minutes.

  “How about getting closer?” suggested Congo, her first words in several minutes.

  “What?” Wan asked. “Are you losing it?”

  Ben frowned over at her. Congo was clearly the odd one out in this little party. Wan seemed to be self-assured to a fault—getting him to shut up was the trick. But the young doctor had largely kept her own council, until now. “What do you mean, Congo?”

  “I mean we get in close to their big ships. Maybe these things will be less reckless if they might hit their own”—she waved her hand—“mother ships?”

  Ada shook her head. “Maybe. It could be worth a try.”

  “Then we can get picked off by those big boys,” Clarissa pointed out. “It’s not like they aren’t powerful. They already blew up a damn moon!”

  “Have we seen anything to suggest they have the kind of point-defense systems our own big ships have?” Ben asked, warming to the idea. He glanced around. “I haven’t seen anything like that.”

  “They might not be equipped for shooting at small fighters like us,” Ada said. “They might be damn good at mimicking things, but I’ve never been too impressed with their strategic thinking.”

  “Close it is, Clarissa,” Ben said. “Bring us too close for comfort.” He slapped the comm button on his chair. “Reb-2, Reb-4, on me. We’re going in for a run. All other squadrons stay here, protect the fleet. Stay alive.”

  The Shapeless flagships were on the other side of the moon, safely hurling huge, spiked comet-like projectiles towards the battle and at the AIC fleet from a distance. Though slow enough to be seen and shot before they did any damage, their barrages didn’t stop. Eventually two made it through. One completely destroyed a battleship upon impact. Another scraped off the side of Thorne’s dreadnought, dealing a massive blow to its shields.