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  Oblivion Flight

  The Oblivion Saga • Book 2

  J.R. Mabry

  B.J. West

  Apocryphile Press

  1700 Shattuck Ave #81, Berkeley, CA 94709

  www.apocryphilepress.com

  Copyright © 2018 by J.R. Mabry & B.J. West

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-720871-36-1 | CS paperback, amazon sales

  ISBN 978-1-947826-84-7 | LS paperback, other sales

  ISBN 978-1-947826-85-4 | epub

  “pity this busy monster, manunkind,” copyright 1944, © 1972, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904 -1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without written permission of the author and publisher, except for brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Get the back story…

  Find out what happened at Catskill!

  Download the free prequel short story,

  OPERATION CATSKILL, today at

  BookHip.com/FZBGP

  By the same authors…

  BY J.R. MABRY & B.J. WEST

  The Oblivion Saga

  Oblivion Threshold • Oblivion Flight

  Oblivion Quest • Oblivion Gambit

  BY J.R. MABRY

  The Berkeley Blackfriars Series

  The Kingdom • The Power • The Glory

  BY B.J. WEST

  Fog City Nocturne • The Stolen Sky

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  The Adventure Continues…

  “listen:

  there's a hell of a good universe next door;

  let's go”

  —e.e. cummings

  Chapter One

  [STRING 311]

  “I’ve found some anomalies.” Martin Pho’s voice was shaking.

  Jeff felt his stomach plummet into a pit from which, he somehow knew in his bones, there would be no return. “What kind of anomalies?” he asked.

  He looked over at Dr. Emma Stewart, saw the crease on her brow. She began to run some tests of her own. As he waited, he squeezed the arms of his command chair. He was captain of the Kepler, a scientific research vessel specially fitted for…squashing space-time.

  Months before, he had crash-landed on a distant moon and been saved by an alien race that had developed the ability to teleport. When they did it, he paid attention, and when he discovered he could do it, too, he didn’t hesitate—he put the “talent” at the service of the Colonial Defense Fleet.

  They needed all the help they could get, as a deadly race called the Prox was systematically annihilating their colonies on a dread advance straight toward Earth. Jeff had just performed the first successful “jump” of a starship—a small one, granted, but a starship nevertheless.

  Mr. Pho’s voice continued to waver as he answered. “98 percent of the star field matches our records. Everything is exactly where the star charts say they should be.”

  “You mean almost everything is exactly where it should be,” Jeff clarified.

  “Er…yes sir, that’s what I mean. The other 2 percent…doesn’t match what’s on the charts.”

  “What are you saying, Mr. Pho?”

  “One percent of the stars are missing, and one percent are…well, there’s stars where there shouldn’t be.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Could there be a corruption in the stellar cartography database?” Jeff asked.

  “I checked that, sir, first thing. Backups show the same thing. What we’re seeing here,” he pointed with his chin toward the view screen, “isn’t exactly what’s in the computer.”

  Jeff stood and advanced a step toward the view screen. He couldn’t go far—it was a small bridge. “What can that mean?” he asked everyone and no one. He looked at Emma, caught her eye, decided the question was for her.

  She nodded, accepting the question. He saw her lips tighten as she thought. Is she thinking through the problem, he wondered, or is she thinking about how to say it? It didn’t matter. He knew the answer already.

  “My best guess,” she said, “is that we’ve somehow…relocated…to an adjacent string.”

  “You mean…we’re no longer in the same universe?” There. He’d said it out loud.

  She continued to hold his gaze while she gave a curt nod.

  Jeff brought one hand to his heart, and with the other, steadied himself on the headrest of Mr. Pho’s chair. He glanced at Communicator Susie Wall, saw her eyes widen, then saw her turn to run some tests of her own.

  “Jeff, there’s more,” Emma said. “We’ve got quantum seismological activity that is…well, it’s off the charts.”

  Jeff blinked. It took a moment, but he found his command voice. He cleared his throat. “On screen.”

  The stars disappeared and several seismic waveforms looped across the screen in diverse, vibrant colors.

  “Tell me what I’m seeing,” Jeff said. He wasn’t a quantum physics expert, and he wasn’t about to start playing at one. Not when he had the best damn scientist in the Fleet on his bridge. It didn’t matter that he was sleeping with her—she was still the best.

  “The small wave pattern, in blue—”

  “That’s a wave pattern?” he asked. “It looks like a horizontal line.”

  “If you blew it up to 1000x you’d notice some slight drifting.”

  Jeff nodded and waved at her to continue.

  “That’s steady-state. If we’re not adjacent to any gravitational wells or experiencing any significant quantum activity—and you wouldn’t expect much out here—this is what it should look like.”

  Jeff nodded.

  “Now see the shallow wave in yellow?” Emma continued. “That’s what happens if we initiate a major quantum event.”

  “Like what?” Jeff asked.

  “Like proximity to a black hole, or one of the Balliard experiments.”

  “You mean something dangerous,” he clarified.

  “They stopped the Balliard experiments precisely because of the seismic implications.”

  He didn’t remember any details, but he remembered the media going apeshit over the possibility that the experiments would destroy a planet or even a whole a region of space.

  “And that last wave, the green one?”

  “That’s our current reading.”

  The yellow wave was barely perceptible, extending a few centimeters above the baseline at one end and below it on the other. But the green wave filled the screen. It was not only as far off the baseline as could be contained on the grid, but the wave pattern was “busy” showing at least a hundred fluctuations where the yellow wave showed only one.

  “Okay…I’m guessing that’s bad.”

  “I don’t know if it’s bad,” Emma answered. “I just know that it’s big.”

  “But what does it mean?” Jeff asked.

  “Hold on,” Emma said. No one under his command would get away with saying that to him, but she was his equal, a civilian. She probably didn’t know better. Besides, protocol would be the last thing on her mind. She was seeing numbers that scien
tists in her field only dreamed about—or had nightmares about.

  Jeff watched as her eyes went wide. Her shoulders slumped, and she leaned back in her chair. Her face was ashen.

  “What is it?”

  She couldn’t tear her eyes away from her screen.

  “Dr. Stewart, goddam it, what the hell—” He didn’t finish the sentence. He strode over to her workstation and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Emma,” he said softly. “Tell me what you’re seeing.”

  She looked up at him, and raised her hand—as if to touch his face—but she stopped midway. She looked back at her screen.

  “Emma…” he repeated. “Tell me.”

  Her voice quavered. “I just…sent a ping to the two adjacent reality strings.”

  “Is that…a normal thing to do?”

  “No,” she admitted. “There’s no reason to do so…normally. We can’t see into them, we can just… It’s like sonar. We can tell they’re there.”

  “Go on.”

  “String 311 didn’t ping. Neither did String 309.”

  “What string is our universe?”

  “String 310.”

  Why didn’t I know that? He wondered. It seems like something I should know. “So?” he asked, feeling stupid.

  “So I pinged 308.”

  “And?”

  “You can’t ping 308. You can only ping adjacent strings.”

  Jeff’s head hurt. He’d never been able to twist his brain around quantum mechanics’ pretzel logic. He assumed it would only get weirder from here. “But you did. Ping 308.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. As expected.”

  Jeff shook his head, not comprehending. Before he could protest, she continued. “So I pinged 312.”

  “But you can’t ping 312, because it’s not adjacent,” Jeff said, his voice taking on an edge of exasperation.

  “Right. But…we got a response.”

  “What?” Jeff asked, his eyebrows bunched in confusion. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means that we’re no longer on String 310. We could be on String 311.”

  “Are you saying that we…jumped from our universe to an adjacent universe?”

  Emma’s lips were a grave, thin line. “Yes,” she managed. Then she held her hand up. “There’s more.”

  Jeff blinked again. “Should I be sitting down for this?” he asked.

  “It would be best,” she answered.

  He backed up the few steps to his command chair and sat. “Give it to me,” he said.

  “I pinged 310.”

  “You pinged our universe?” Of course she would do that. If they got an affirmative answer it would confirm that they were indeed resident on String 311.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “And did you get a response?”

  “No.”

  “What…what does that mean?”

  “It could mean that we actually jumped several strings, to String 313. So I pinged 314.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Emma, what the fuck are you saying? Plain English, please.”

  “I can’t say this for sure, and I need to do more tests, but…given everything I’m seeing…I don’t think String 310 is there anymore.”

  “What do you mean, it isn’t there?” Jeff snapped.

  “I mean, it’s gone.”

  “Still running dark, sir,” Commander Jo Taylor said.

  Captain Jacques Telouse rubbed at his chin, not looking at her. There was no chatter on the bridge, not like there usually was. The air almost crackled with electricity.

  The captain nodded. “Telemetry onscreen,” Telouse said, his words punctuated in odd places due to his French accent. He was an older man, with wiry gray hair and a scar across his nose. He was a man who had seen his share of battle.

  The screen flickered and a map of the region appeared, including the course of their cruiser, the Talon.

  “Sir, these coordinates—” the weaponer, Lieutenant Greg Shallit began.

  Telouse held his hand up to stop him, watching the telemetry closely. “Bring us to a stop, Lieutenant Chi.”

  Lieutenant Marcia Chi nodded, easing the starship to the precise point she had intended. “We are now in geosynchronous orbit around Avalon II’s larger moon, sir.”

  The Captain checked his report logs, then nodded, finally satisfied. “All right, Mr. Shallit. You had an objection, I believe.”

  “It’s a trap, sir,” Shallit said.

  “It could be,” Telouse agreed. “But it’s been cleared by RFC intelligence, and we’re in the business of following orders.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  The Revolutionary Freedom Coalition had considerable firepower, but shitty coordination, in Jo’s estimation. “RFC intelligence” was an oxymoronic joke among the rank and file.

  “Coordinated Intelligence is accepting applications, last time I heard,” Captain Telouse said. “In case you think you can do it better.”

  That shut him up.

  “Sir, Authority battle carrier approaching. The moon will shield us for another twenty seconds.”

  That wasn’t surprising. Avalon II was in neutral space—a largely uninhabited, disputed area between the regions claimed by the Terran Authority and the Revolutionary Freedom Coalition. The Authority didn’t control this space but there was no truce, either. If discovered, they would surely be fired on.

  “All out,” Telouse said.

  The last of the lights were extinguished, and even the computer powered down. Within three seconds, Jo was beginning to feel the vertigo of sensory deprivation. Almost imperceptibly, she could hear the captain counting. She focused on his words, her mind filling in the gaps when he was inaudible. He counted off two minutes, three, four. It seemed like an hour.

  “All right, bring us back to operating dark,” Telouse said.

  Jo blinked as the lights flickered on, seeming impossibly bright. Her computer leaped to life again, stuttered, then was once again displaying their telemetry.

  “Status?” the captain barked.

  “Carrier is beyond the horizon,” Jo said, “but…we’re not alone.”

  Shallit jerked upright, looking straight at her. “What the fu…what do you mean?”

  “We’ve got a messenger bag floating off our port side,” Jo said. “Beacon was already pinging when we powered up.”

  “Excellent, Number One,” Telouse stood and straightened the blood-red jacket of his uniform. “Download the contents of that bag and file it under captain’s seal. Once that’s done meet me in my ready room.” He began walking toward the room.

  “Aye, sir,” Jo began the handshake protocols necessary to retrieve the messenger bag’s contents.

  “Wait, did that carrier just jettison that bag?” Shallit asked.

  “I hope so,” Telouse said, nonplussed. “Otherwise, in addition to a war we’d also have a mystery on our hands.”

  “But—”

  “Mr. Chi, you have the conn.”

  “Aye sir,” Chi said, without looking up.

  “You sound like you were expecting that bag,” Shallit said, his voice accusatory and sharp.

  “We certainly were,” Telouse said as the door whisked shut behind him.

  A slight smile crossed Jo’s lips as she completed the download. It was easy to get Shallit spluttering and she’d seen the captain work him into a lather more than once. It was dangerous to egg him on like that, but that wasn’t her call, and she was sure that she enjoyed it as much as the captain did. Shallit was a bit of a dolt.

  She strode to the ready room and waited for it to read the permissions in her ID badge. A moment later it slid open with a whoosh. She stepped in.

  “Mayan hot cocoa, am I right?”

  “The spicier the better,” Jo said. It was a ritual they did every time they had a private chat. Jo was actually a little tired of cocoa, Mayan or otherwise, but she wasn’t going to tel
l the captain that. She enjoyed the ritual too much.

  The captain slid a steaming cup of deep brown cocoa toward her. She picked it up and sniffed at it. Glorious. “Care to share?” she asked.

  “It’s just what we were promised,” he said, looking up and scanning the downloaded docs in his neural.

  “Which is? I haven’t been read in on this, sir,” Jo reminded him. The fact was, Telouse was getting old and his memory was not what it used to be. She was very fond of him, however, and she respected him. He might not be able to tell you what he had for supper two days ago, but he was a monster in a firefight. There was no place she’d rather be, and no one she’d rather be serving under.

  “Oh? Damn. I thought you had. Right. Well, let’s just say we’re here to meet some contacts.”

  “Contacts?” She sipped at the cocoa. It was spicier than usual. That’s nice, she thought.

  “There’s a certain ‘philanthropist’ on Avalon II that might or might not have Union security protocols for us.”

  “Let me guess: the ‘might have’ is dependent on a sizable donation to a good cause?” Jo offered.

  “It is indeed.” Telouse sipped at his own tea.

  Probably chamomile, she thought, judging from the dirty-sock aroma. “And did our messenger bag give you the contact info of this ‘philanthropist’?”

  “It did, right down to GPS coordinates for the bar in which we’ll meet her.”

  “I’ll get an away team ready.”

  “No. The philanthropist is someone I know. An old…” He smiled sadly. “Let’s say an old flame.”

  “Ah.” Jo gave a half nod. She was dying to know more, but she never pushed Telouse. He didn’t like it and she cherished the fact that he seemed to really enjoy her company.