Marcus Alexander Hart - Oblivion Society

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OBLIVION SOCIETY
By
Marcus Alexander Hart
Contents
PROLOGUE
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
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Oblivion Society
Marcus Alexander Hart
The Oblivion Society
Copyright © 2006 Marcus Alexander Hart
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada
by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc. of Markham Ontario, Canada.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic,
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval
system, without the permission in writing from Double Dragon Publishing Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.
Double Dragon eBooks
PO Box 54016 1-5762 Highway 7 East
Markham, Ontario L3P 7Y4 Canada
http://double-dragon-ebooks.com
http://double-dragon-publishing.com
Cover Art Available at derondouglas.com
Edited by Will DeRooy
ISBN-10: 1-55404-378-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-55404-378-1
First Edition August 2, 2006
Also Available as a Large Type Paperback Now Available as paperback and hard cover
A Celebration of Cover Art: 2001 to 2006
Five Years of Cover Art
[Companion calendars also available]
www.double-dragon-ebooks.com
www.derondouglas.com
ALSO BY MARCUS ALEXANDER HART
Caster's Blog
A geek love story.
Walkin' on Sunshine
A quantum physics sex farce.
MarcusAlexanderHart.com
A website. On the Internet.
CREDITS
This book was copy edited by Will DeRooy.
www.WillDeRooy.com
All cover and interior artwork is by Michael Greenholt.
www.MichaelGreenholt.com
The official Oblivion Society typeface is "Tom's New Roman" by Tom 7.
fonts.tom7.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not exist had it not been for the encouragement of Michael
Greenholt, Timb Kuder, and Amanda Dague, or as I call them, "Audience Alpha."
Mike has inspired me with his Oblivion artwork from day one all the way through the
final book cover. I hope that someday I can repay him for everything he's done for
me and for this book. Timb always found something nice to say about the story,
even when it sucked. And the world has Amanda to thank for the fact that this novel
no longer contains a chapter based on explosive diarrhea.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Gary Fixler, Ben Jerred, Austin McKinley, Jer
Warren, and Brian Young for their insightful critique. Thanks also to Will DeRooy,
for doing such a fantastic job editing my labyrinthine prose into coherent English.
Additional shouts of appreciation and praise go out to-
Mariah Day and Gina Faustino, for promoting this book at Comic-Con 2005;
Scott O'Brien, for a Lost in Space rant from which I shamelessly plagiarized
jokes;
Irina Gelman, for teaching me to curse in Russian;
Tom Murphy VII, for his generous font licensing;
Sherrie McKinley, for a ghastly suggestion;
the bang. improv family, for treating me like one of their own;
the LiveJournal community, for answering all of my dumb questions;
Mom and Dad, for understanding;
and all of the other helpers who have been expunged from my memory due to
time, age, and cheap beer. You know who you are, and I thank you.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I would like to thank you for reading The
Oblivion Society. When you're finished, be sure to tell your friends exactly how
much ass it kicks. The power of your word-of-mouth publicity may be the only thing
that ultimately stands between Oblivion and … well, oblivion.
- Marcus Alexander Hart
February 3, 2006
DEDICATION
For Amanda,
without whom I could not survive.
PROLOGUE
The summer sun rolled around the North Pole in a lazy circle, just as it had done
through the countless summers of countless past millennia. There was no reason to
expect this, at least, to change at the end of this particular millennium. After all,
Earth's axial tilt would not be affected by the impending Y2K bug.
On the northern tip of Norway, just inside the Arctic Circle, a single rocket stood
amid the bustle of a busy launch pad. Through an agreement with NATO, the
Fimbulvetr Astronomical Institute had obtained this obsolete Wormwood-132
long-range missile from the U.S. military. Although it was originally designed to carry
an atomic warhead, in the hands of researchers it had been retrofitted with a
sophisticated array of daytime auroral imaging instruments to be launched deep into
the heart of the northern lights.
This mission was an admirable use of wartime technology repurposed to deepen
Man's understanding of his universe, and the nations of the world universally
commended the institute on its noble endeavor.
Or rather, they would have commended the institute, had they bothered to read its
launch announcement. But the world's leaders had much more important business to
attend to than some insignificant Norwegian science experiment.
The president of the United States stuck his nose into his armpit and took an
investigatory sniff. He recoiled with a pained wince and quickly re-buttoned his
navy-blue suit jacket.
"Hoo-boy, Bubba," he thought, "you smell like the McDonald's fryer at the end
of a long day."
He shrugged. "Well, the coat's not coming off tonight anyway."
He leaned against an ancient white oak and let his gaze drift through the heavy tree
cover and into the hazy yellow glow of a Maryland sunset. For a so-called
"presidential retreat," Camp Bravo afforded him precious little privacy. It had taken
him an hour to lose his Secret Service escort, but now he was finally alone.
As he had promised the American people, the president had spent the afternoon
trying to reconcile with his wife and daughter, but that wasn't really why he had come
to Camp Bravo. The real reasons were these dense woods, this forgotten corner,
and that collapsing perimeter fence.
The president smiled as his eyes scaled the twelve-foot fence that guarded the
interior of the presidential retreat from the heathens of the outside world. This
ever-vigilant sentry encircled the entire compound in an unbroken barrier of
heavy-gauge chain link and razor wire. Unbroken, that is, except for one lapse of
weathered steel that some force of nature or decay had broken through, slashing its
mesh into a pair of rusty curtains.
The Secret Service didn't know about this place.
The first lady didn't know.
The Camp Bravo groundskeepers didn't even know.
Only one other person did.
The president pulled a cigar from his breast pocket. He put it in his mouth but
didn't light it. He almost never smoked cigars, and when he did, he didn't inhale. The
sun had now completely slipped below the horizon, and the president looked at his
watch eagerly. He worried that perhaps his signal had been too subtle. No, it was
fine. Unmistakable. He twirled the cigar in his fingers and daydreamed about what he
could do with it if he wasn't going to smoke it.
Just then he heard a rustling, snapping advance through the bushes on the other
side of the fence. The president flicked his tongue over his dry lips and waited a
long, tense moment. He could hear hard-soled shoes pounding through the loose
brush, step by weighty step. Finally, when his sense of anticipation had fully filled
out his trousers, he saw a jet-black mound of hair emerge from the foliage, followed
by a round, female face.
The president's relationship with this particular White House intern had become
somewhat sticky in recent days, literally before figuratively.
The intern walked up to the fence and peered through its corroded mesh
coquettishly.
"Good evening, Mr. President," she purred. "Are you alone?"
The president grinned back at her from his side of the fence.
"It depends on how you define 'alone,'" he said flirtatiously. "I see you caught my
speech this afternoon."
The intern blushed.
"I know you were addressing the entire nation, but I felt like you were speaking
only to me," she cooed. "I especially liked the part about breaching the walls at the
darkest twilight to meet between the tall trees. "
The president's impossibly wide grin grew wider.
"Well, if you like trees, come on in and I'll show you the executive branch. "
With an excited squeal the intern put her palms against the rusted scar in the fence
and shoved her way through its ineffectual barrier. But while the ancient chain link of
the perimeter fence slept on the job, its sharp young apprentice opened up one eager
eye. Just as the intern's heaving bosom pushed through the fence, it also pushed
through the beam of an invisible laser grid, shattering the air of Camp Bravo with an
earsplitting security klaxon!
The air was calm in the People's National Strategic Control Centre just outside of
Beijing, China. Chairman Qian leafed listlessly through the evening's state-sponsored
newspaper. It was full of the same old propaganda touting China as the most
powerful nation on Earth. He sighed and took a sip of his oolong tea.
If only it were true.
He looked around the room at the thirty sharply uniformed young men and
women sitting at their computer terminals and tapping quietly at their keyboards.
Actually, just young men. The chairman couldn't remember the last time he had
actually seen a young woman. He sighed again.
One of the officers turned to him with an expression that completely failed to be
surprise.
"Mr. Chairman," he said, "we've just received an urgent military communiqué
from one of our operatives in the field. There's been an international incident, sir."
The chairman stood up and smiled hungrily. It was about time. What good was
being the leader of the largest standing army in the world if you never got to do
anything with it? Finally, this old dragon was going to get a chance to roar! He put
down his paper and teacup and issued a giddy order in his most restrained voice.
"Identify."
The young officer's short fingers clattered efficiently over his keyboard.
"It's from one of our agents in the United States, sir."
The smile dropped from the chairman's face, and he threw himself into his chair
petulantly. Of course it was the Americans. It was always the Americans. He sulked.
What good was being the leader of the largest standing army in the world if it was
only the second most powerful? Contempt dripped from his voice as he issued a
second terse command.
"Clarify."
"The personal fortress of their president has gone to a state of heightened alert,
followed by several other military installations in the area. We do not know the
reason."
"Classify," the chairman grumbled.
"There seems to be no specific threat, sir, but it would be prudent to raise our
own alert level accordingly."
The chairman nodded his head. Sure. Raise the alert level. Just like always. He
sighed heavily. He could already see that he was in for another long, dull night of
playing follow the leader.
Two technicians waited out another long, dull shift in the dreary control room of a
radar tracking station somewhere in northern Russia. A smattering of faded maps
clung to the desolate walls, each depicting the former Soviet Union pierced with
dozens of red pushpins that no longer signified anything at all. The station's gigantic
radar dish still scanned the skies twenty-four hours a day, although exactly what it
was looking for these days was something of a mystery.
Kurchatov leaned back in his chair and took a swig from a half-empty bottle of
vodka. He was bored. Bored bored bored. He took another drink and glanced dully
at his co-worker, Sakharov. In contrast to Kurchatov's own drooping countenance,
Sakharov's face was tensed in concentration as he pounded the keyboard of the
station's main computer bank. A bead of sweat welled on his forehead as he
chattered to himself anxiously.
"No more of the stupid Zs!" he snarled. "Come on, you piece of junk! Give me
the long one! The long one!"
Kurchatov stood and glanced over his comrade's shoulder just in time to see him
lose his ten-thousandth game of Tetris. Sakharov smashed his fists into the
splintering desk in frustration.
"Govno na palochkee!" he cried. "I hate this stupid game!"
He rammed two fingers into the keyboard, closing the game window and revealing
a monochrome screen of green text. In all the years that the station had been in
operation, the dish's readout had never changed:
Radar Tracking Station 99
0000 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles detected.
0000 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles detected.
Kurchatov slouched back into his chair and scowled.
"If you hate that stupid game so much, why do you sit there and play it all day?"
Sakharov tapped his finger on the desk in an impatient fury for ten full seconds
before reopening the Tetris window and starting another game.
"The high score is 200,000 points," he snarled. "I'm not quitting until I beat it!"
"Well, how close have you come?" Kurchatov asked.
"199,999.9999899."
"Well, why don't you just round off, you dolboëb? " Kurchatov snapped. "That's
not even a real score! It's just a computer error!"
" Nyet! There's nothing wrong with the computer!" Sakharov said bitterly, tapping
the sticker on the front of the computer's case. "Intel inside. American technology.
No mistakes."
The deafening wail of Camp Bravo's mistaken sirens smashed against the
American president's skull like a sledgehammer. Between the trees he could see a
distant commotion of confused soldiers rushing between the buildings, trying to
identify and neutralize a threat that did not exist.
He pulled his cellular phone from his pocket, punched a speed dial button, and
clasped it to his head. Even with his palms crushing down on his ears, he could
barely hear the voice on the other end of the line.
"Camp Bravo Command Center."
"Listen, kid! This is the president!"
"Mr. President?" the officer gasped. "There's been a breach of the outer wall,
sir! You may be in danger. What is your location?"
"It's a false alarm!" the president screamed. "Turn off the klaxons!"
"Yes, sir! Er … no, sir!" the officer stammered. "I'm sorry, sir, but a trigger of
the perimeter alarm automatically puts every base on the East Coast on
precautionary alert. I can't just turn-"
"What do you mean you can't? This is the president of the United States giving
you a direct order, soldier! Pull whatever plug you have to pull to cut off these damn
alarms!"
"B-but, there are procedures, sir," the officer stammered. "There's no way to
just cut them off without completely resetting the emergency CommNet! It would be
a huge breach of security, sir!"
"Lieutenant, I don't care if you have to shut down the whole North American
power grid!" the president screamed. "I want those alarms off now! Understood?"
"Y-yes, sir!" the officer stuttered.
Against his better judgment, but on the direct orders of the commander in chief,
the young officer hammered the appropriate security codes into his computer,
gaining access to the nation's emergency communications systems. Within a few
minutes, he had manually reset every circuit that carried some small part of the
security network's data with a blatant and mandated disregard for any other traffic
those nodes might have been carrying.
Somewhere deep beneath Cheyenne Mountain, every computer screen at
NORAD went blank. The surprised officers tapped on their terminals with curiosity
and, ultimately, confusion.
Admiral Jack Teller dropped his Big Mac and leapt to his feet.
"What in the corn hell just happened, boys?"
A husky slab of officer poked at his keyboard nervously.
"I don't know, sir. Every base on the East Coast went on alert, and before I could
make an inquiry all communications were completely cut off."
"What do you mean 'cut off'?" the admiral yelled. "What in the name of Sam Hill
is going on out there?"
The top-heavy switchboard operator tapped on her headset and looked at a panel
of dark bulbs. She snapped her gum and twisted a bronze finger through her
platinum hair.
"We've got like, nothing here, sir. No lines in or out," she reported. "Computers,
phones, even the satellite links are all totally out."
"Impossible!" the admiral roared. "That's impossible! All this Captain Kirk crap
down here is connected to the outside with redundancy out the ying-yang! The only
way we've got nothing is if the whole damn comm network is down, and the only
thing that could take down that network is a full-scale …"
A troubled look rushed over the admiral's features.
"What was the last thing we got before we lost the world, boys?"
The husky officer reviewed his logs and answered numbly.
"Satellite intelligence shows that the Chinese military just went on heightened alert,
sir."
The admiral glared into the screen for a long moment, angrily cracking his
knuckles.
"Scramble my knights of the air," he said dramatically. "I want nukes in the bellies
of all my bombers, and I want those beautiful bastards ready to fly on my order.
You got that?"
"Um, yes sir," the officer coughed, "but if you'll recall what Private Babs just
said, we don't have any outgoing communications."
The admiral wrung his massive hands into fists.
"Why, those filthy yellow bastards …"
Kurchatov picked irritably at the filthy yellow upholstery foam crumbling from the
worn arm of his desk chair. The clucking digital melody from Sakharov's
never-ending game of Tetris cut through his sanity like a bandsaw. He wrapped his
fingers around the neck of his vodka bottle and, just for a second, imagined
smashing it over the edge of the desk and letting fate take its course.
His homicidal fantasy was interrupted by a crackling voice.
"Radar Tracking Station 99, come in! Come in, Station 99! This is Moscow!"
Kurchatov's heart thumped against his ribcage as he leapt to his feet.
"What the hell was that?!"
Sakharov didn't look up from his frenzied game. "The radio. Pick it up."
Kurchatov looked at the buzzing two-way radio set and felt very stupid. Right.
The radio. It had been a while. He picked up the dusty microphone and wiped it on
his shirt.
"This is Station 99," he said. "Go ahead, Moscow."
"We're receiving reports that the Americans and Chinese are rattling their
sabers. Are you picking up anything unusual up there?"
Kurchatov glanced at his comrade, and Sakharov reluctantly minimized his game
window to take a glance at the dish output. The screen flickered its usual, burned-in
announcement.
Radar Tracking Station 99
0000 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles detected.
0000.899 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles detected.
Sakharov drew a sharp breath.
"What is it, Station 99? What are you reading?"
Kurchatov shook his head dismissively.
"Nothing," he said. "It's just another computer error."
"It's not a computer error!" Sakharov gasped, grabbing the microphone. "It's a
nuclear attack!"
The radio crackled tensely.
"An attack?! Are you sure?! How many missiles?!"
摘要：

 Color---1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9-TextSize--10--11--12--13--14--15--16--17--18--19--20--21--22--23--24OBLIVIONSOCIETYByMarcusAlexanderHartContentsPROLOGUECHAPTERONECHAPTERTWOCHAPTERTHREECHAPTERFOURCHAPTERFIVECHAPTERSIXCHAPTERSEVENCHAPTEREIGHTCHAPTERNINECHAPTERTENCHAPTERELEVENCHAPTERTWELVECHAPTERTHI...

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