Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  The stars smeared behind the window and the Boomerang took off, chewing up the parsecs like they were nothing. For a few minutes, Eli waited to see if the hull would hold its integrity. After a while, he forgot to listen for any tearing sound and focused his attention on the course ahead. On the mission ahead. On his daughter’s dying words.

  Five hours passed like five minutes.

  “We’re coming up on a few stragglers,” River said. “It looks like they’re trying to catch up with the main swarm.”

  “How far are the frontrunners from Earth?”

  “At their current rate of travel, they will enter Earth’s orbit in approximately two hours,” Jood said.

  A scorch of adrenaline hit Eli in the ribs. “Do we have time to get in front of them?”

  “Very little time for that,” Jood said. “At full throttle, we will intercept the main swarm in one hour. At our top speed, we will break the atmosphere with less than thirty minutes to spare. We will have no time to alert the Squadrons.”

  “Their early warning systems should pick up the horde,” River said.

  “Even so,” Jood argued, “it leaves minimal time for the Squadrons to mount a defense. If your plan includes detonating an EMP to deactivate the swarm, that would mean thousands of projectiles plummeting through the atmosphere at terminal velocity. This could cause massive loss of life even without the spheres targeting the human population.”

  Before today, Eli would have replied to this information by asking Jood for his recommendations. He didn’t do that now. He faced straight ahead. Nothing turned him aside and nothing ever would. This mission was all his. The others were just along for the ride. “Are we still traveling at full throttle?”

  “We’re full throttle now,” River said, “but we’ll slow down when we enter the swarm. We’ll need to evade them, which is asking a lot, considering how many of them there are.”

  “Don’t cut throttle,” Eli said.

  She swung her chair around and her eyes widened. “Sarge?”

  “I said don’t cut throttle. Don’t slow down. Hit the swarm at full throttle and don’t break speed or course until we get in front of them. Jood, arm our guns with everything we have and get Waylon suited up for external cannon.”

  Jood looked up. “That would be extremely ill-advised, considering their numbers.”

  “This whole mission is ill-advised. Get him up there on the double.”

  Jood turned back to his controls. River dared to peek over her shoulder. “What do you have in mind, Sarge?”

  “We’re going to break through the swarm, firing everything we have. This is gonna take some fancy flying, River. You won’t have Quinn to bail you out, so I’m counting on you to put as many of them behind you as possible. The commotion should trigger the early warning systems long before we get within range.”

  “And when we do get within range?” Jood asked.

  “Then we have to find a way to get into the center of the swarm so we can set off the EMP.”

  They didn’t ask any more questions. Eli heard how flimsy the whole thing sounded, but none of that mattered. He’d made a promise, and hang the consequences.

  The first job was to trigger the early warning system. If the Boomerang could at least rob the horde of the element of surprise, he would fulfill his promise. Everything else would be icing on the cake.

  Twenty-Four

  1 Hour Until Annihilation

  Eli left the cockpit to find Yasha and Waylon in the aft compartment. Yasha helped lock the armor plating for external cannon around Waylon’s limbs. Eli measured the progress. “You ready to do some damage?”

  Waylon grinned. “Always. How long do we have?”

  “Not long, and I want you out there and ready to fire as soon as we get within range. We’re already overtaking stragglers. When I give the signal, start picking off every last mother’s son of ‘em and don’t spare the lead. Understand?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Waylon lifted one of his arms. A monstrous cannon was locked onto his armor by bulging rivets. The gauntlet completely obliterated his hand grasping the controls inside his suit. When he raised it, the weapon clicked by itself when a round slotted into the chamber.

  Yasha stepped forward, holding an enormous domed helmet. She slotted it over Waylon’s head and latched it down tight to the body plate. Fog wafted over the transparent visor, but when she hooked up a length of tubing to his suit, it cleared and he started breathing normally.

  Eli clapped him on the back. “Get out there. Here’s your tether.”

  He attached a jointed cable to Waylon’s back, and Waylon started to shuffle toward the hatch. He could barely move with the weight of a couple of tons of metal hanging from his limbs, but he wouldn’t need to move fast where he was going.

  He halted at the edge of the ramp and twisted around to give Eli a thumbs up. Eli and Yasha retreated past the bulkhead. Eli hit the control and the bulkhead boomed into place. A hiss of air sounded beyond the barrier, followed by thumps against the hull of heavy footsteps marching up the Boomerang’s side.

  Eli strode back to the cockpit and took his place in the command chair. On his console, he pulled up an exterior display of the Boomerang’s roof. Waylon clomped across the steel curve to a port in the ship’s very crown. He took little hopping steps in the weightless void. With a tiny jump, he dropped into the port, and the locks clamped him into position.

  A series of readouts raced across Eli’s console. Waylon was all buckled in, with the ship attached to his life-support system. On the screen, Waylon swung his cannon around. Eli touched a release mechanism, and another gargantuan weapon rose out of the hull in front of Waylon.

  The screen displayed Waylon going through some triggering tests on the external cannon port. Ammunition slotted into the magazine, and the weapon started to draw power from the propulsion system to operate its laser. A similar display would be feeding this information to Waylon’s control display out on the Boomerang’s hull.

  “Here they come!” River called.

  Eli barely had time to look up when hundreds of those thing rocketed past the Boomerang. They streaked behind the ship so fast Eli didn’t get a good look at them. The Boomerang plunged into the swarm, dipping and weaving. At that instant, a sizzling laser erupted from the external cannon. Waylon swiveled in a complete circle and came swinging back the other way, laying into the spheres with both guns.

  Eli yanked around. “Transfer main weapons systems to me.”

  Jood looked up for a fraction of a second, but said nothing. Eli wasn’t leaving control of this battle to anyone else. He’d come here to fight, and that was what he would do.

  The next second, the weapons display on his console flickered to life without a word of protest from Jood. He might have reflexes that would leave any human in the dust, but if he thought using external cannon against this horde was ill-advised, then he wasn’t the right person for the job.

  Eli didn’t hesitate. He plunged his hands into the weapons control ports on either side of his chair. The instant he experienced that familiar close grip, he fired.

  His gaze darted every which way, settling on one orb after another only long enough to measure his firing trajectory. His fingers danced over the buttons and triggers inside the ports. He followed River’s flight through the cloud of spheres, blasting as fast as he could think.

  Far ahead, a tiny ball of blue, green, and white whizzed into view. Before Eli could react, the Boomerang veered up and down and sideways to slither around another cluster of the spheres. River jolted upright at the helm. “Hold onto your panties! We’re screwed!”

  Eli cast a single fleeting glimpse toward the planet. A solid flank of the spheres separated the Boomerang from Earth, growing larger all the time. As Eli watched, all those enemy craft pivoted around to train their weapons on the Boomerang.

  River howled, slamming the controls all the way to one side and then the other. Eli was firing too fast to get distracted by her erratic
flight pattern. He blasted his cannon in an incessant pounding rhythm. He hammered individual spheres and sliced them to mincemeat with his lasers. His shots hit groups of them packed so close that dozens exploded.

  River bellowed again, steering the Boomerang around those things. Eli and Waylon kept up their bombardment so fast she didn’t bump into any of them, but now they faced a different problem. The strange army thought they would surprise Earth, only to get surprised by the Boomerang attacking from behind.

  Now that surprise was blown, and Eli looked down the barrels of thousands of rocket tubes all pointed in his direction. The orbs broke off their inevitable advance toward Earth to train their guns on the Boomerang. They all unleashed their fire at once.

  “Hard to port!” Eli roared. “Now, River!”

  She screeched something inaudible, but she obeyed instantaneously. She tilted out of her chair, hauling the controls to her left. The Boomerang listed all the way over and somersaulted in a twirl before the attitude controls kicked in. She slammed the throttle, and the Boomerang zoomed in a wide arc through the cloud. All the spheres whizzed after the ship, blasting their rockets in her wake.

  All too soon, Eli spotted the far perimeter of the swarm. The horde thinned out and empty space revealed stars against the inky sky. Eli paused his fire only long enough to formulate a plan. “Circle, River! Circle around inside the swarm.”

  She whipped around in her chair. “What? Why? Don’t you want to...?”

  Before she finished speaking, the Boomerang zipped through the thickest mass of spheres, and enemy craft flanked the ship by the thousands. The vessel streaked in a wide arc to face Earth again. Sure enough, hundreds of Squadron ships lifted through the atmosphere on an intercept course for the horde.

  Eli’s heart leaped into his throat, but only for a second. The next minute, rockets exploded against the hull. The Boomerang punched through the last of the swarm, with all those attackers burning up behind her.

  “Turn back, River!” Eli roared. “Turn back now! Cut through the swarm and circle on the inside. Now!”

  She hesitated, and he saw his worst nightmare coming true. The Boomerang plunged out of the cloud, heading straight for the Squadron ships and presenting themselves as an easy target.

  Twenty-Five

  Eli clamped his teeth and rounded on River, ready to rip her a new one, but she descended on the helm, working to her limit. She yanked the controls all the way back and shot up at a stomach-turning pace. She started to climb and the Boomerang leaned over on her back. River burned in a tight ring and dove straight back down into the very heart of the swarm.

  More than half the spheres tailing her unloaded their rockets on the craft, but River evaded them so skillfully that they didn’t hit her. Eli gripped his firing mechanisms, ready to blast these things to doomsday, but before he got a chance, their pursuers’ fire smashed into their own craft. Lasers and cannon fire and rockets whizzed past the Boomerang and exploded in the horde itself. Dozens erupted in sparks and flying debris.

  River muscled the helm around one more time, but she didn’t steer in a ring. She traced a random course of loops and dives and spins and dodges. She wheeled everywhere at full throttle, eluding attack.

  Eli swung from one side to the other, spraying his fire into the horde. Now he spotted Squadron ships streaming their glowing afterburn across his view. In a second, they filled the whole window. They fired on the spheres, blowing them up by the score, but they didn’t scratch the surface of the thousands streaking toward Earth.

  The planet loomed huge and blue when River rotated the Boomerang that way. Eli caught fleeting snatches of space when the ship tumbled away from the planet. He felt the nauseating tow of gravity trying to pull the Boomerang into its field.

  “They’re targeting us!” Waylon’s voice cracked through the intercom and woke Eli from his trance. “Those bastards are targeting us—us! Hey, shitheads! How ‘bout a little respect, huh? No good deed goes unpunished, I’m telling you.”

  The Boomerang somersaulted to starboard. She sneaked between two Squadron craft, and Eli saw confirmation of what he’d feared. The Squadron ships trained their fire on Waylon and the Boomerang’s tenders. They didn’t understand. They thought the Boomerang belonged to the enemy fleet.

  He pushed that thought out of his mind. River seemed to be handling the Squadron fighters along with the horde. Eli, on the other hand, had his hands full not to hit them with random fire. He couldn’t just mow down everything in sight anymore. He had to hesitate a fraction of a second before he fired, just to make sure he was destroying one of the spheres instead of...

  These were not his people. The Squadrons weren’t his allies or his friends. He had to remember that. The Boomerang might be saving their sorry asses from the swarm, but when this was all over with, Eli would go back to hating the Squadrons and Earth as much as ever—maybe more.

  He poured that resentment and outrage into his hands. He dumped it on the enemy in the form of lasers and lead. He fired without compunction. River hit a rhythm. She didn’t seem to bother anymore to find a coordinated trajectory through the cloud. She rotated this way and that with only two concerns: staying inside the swarm and avoiding collision with ships on both sides.

  Eli found his flow, too. His body danced to its own music, picking out enemy ships and firing before he flicked away to find his next victim. He allowed the energy to move him of its own will while he turned his attention to the planet.

  Just then, a loud squawk jolted him awake. He glanced down at his console to see a flashing red light. Those fateful words winked up at him: Laser core at critical level.

  At the same instant, Waylon shrieked in his ear, “I’m running out of lead! We’re sunk!”

  Eli didn’t have time to do anything about that now. He still fired as fast as he could squeeze the mechanism. River’s big body dove right and left, and she snarled under her breath every time she yanked the helm. The Boomerang followed her movements, and her hair stuck to sweat on the back of her neck.

  The Boomerang traced another wide loop around the swarm, and the warning signal switched to solid red.

  Almost simultaneously, Waylon shrieked like a little girl. “I’m out! I got nothing! Both cannons are empty and the laser is out of power.”

  River made another pass. Eli fired a few more times, and then it happened. He compressed the trigger and the cannon failed to respond. The console blinked up at him, Laser core depleted.

  A rocket glanced off the hull, and Waylon screamed. “They’re shooting at me! They’re trying to kill me!”

  Eli had never heard him so scared. A wicked angel on Eli’s shoulder chuckled to itself when he imagined getting a recording of that scream for future reference, but he didn’t have time.

  He stabbed the intercom. “Get inside and get Yasha up here. Hurry!”

  Jood spoke up from the engineering station. “You cannot think to detonate the EMP up here. You would disable the Squadrons at the same time.”

  “Screw it!” River fired back. “Disable ‘em. What the hell do we care?”

  “You would leave the whole planet undefended. This swarm might be a diversion, or an advanced force designed to leave the planet exposed to a second attack. You cannot know. Whatever you do, Eli, you cannot detonate the EMP where it would put the Squadron in danger.”

  River bellowed over her shoulder. “What are we supposed to do? If we don’t detonate it, they’ll attack the planet.”

  “At least the Squadrons would be active to defend Earth,” Jood replied. “We came here to warn the Squadrons. That was our objective. We have accomplished that objective. We cannot reverse that by completely neutralizing the only force protecting the planet.”

  “Holy hell!” River whipped around and seized the helm. “Hold on!”

  The Boomerang went into a tailspin. River braced her sturdy legs against the floor, fighting the controls with all her enormous strength, but the Boomerang refused to stabilize.
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br />   “What’s going on?” Eli roared.

  “They’re...aargh!” Another barrage pounded the hull and hurled everyone forward. River pitched face-first onto the helm before she got the ship under control.

  “Talk to me, River!” Eli thundered. “What the hell is going out there?”

  He didn’t have to ask. Through the window, he watched a line of those spheres marching across the swarm. They didn’t head for Earth. They completely ignored it. They cut a vertical course from one side of the horde to the other.

  They approached the first Squadron ships, but the enemy didn’t fire. Long before they got within range, an invisible barrier touched the Squadron vessels and the Squadron craft burst into flames. One after another, huge cruisers and destroyers went up in catastrophic explosions without ever firing a shot.

  Jood and Eli gaped through the window. Eli muttered low, “What the holy hell...?”

  Jood looked straight out at the scene without blinking. “They must have some other weapon that...”

  A devastating boom resounded inches from the Boomerang. The impact rocked the ship. Jood glanced down at his instruments. “Another wave is coming from the other side. They will eat their way through the whole fleet.”

  “We have to detonate the EMP now!” River yelled. “If they get through the fleet, there won’t be anything standing between them and Earth—except us.”

  The words barely escaped her lips when the spheres launched as one. They didn’t wait until the advancing rank blasted its way through the Squadrons. They only opened a space, and they all zipped through it at lightning speed. In a matter of seconds, they funneled through the gap on a beeline for Earth.

  River wrenched the Boomerang around, but it was too late. Eli could only sit in his chair and stare at all those things diving through the atmosphere. In front of his eyes, the splinter cannons unloaded from Frasier Airbase in Melbourne and the Pacific Defense Battalion Base on Okinawa.