Hell Divers

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  Lightning flashed across the bow as the ship pushed into the edges of the storm. The hull rattled and groaned, and Ash eyed the flickering banks of LEDs on the ceiling.

  “Steady,” she whispered. “Steady as she goes …”

  A second tremor, this one deeper, shook the ship, and from the bridge they could hear the sound of a distant crack. The vibration rippled through the walls.

  “Almost there, Captain,” Jordan replied.

  An emergency siren wailed, the red light splashing over the deck. The Hive shook fiercely, the bulkheads creaking and groaning. Ash realized she was holding her breath, and let it out just as Jordan confirmed they were in position.

  She cleared her throat before speaking into her headset. “Raptor, Angel, and Apollo, you have a green light for launch. Good luck and Godspeed.”

  As the words left her mouth, the ship lurched forward, through the outer wall of the surging storm. Lightning streaked in all directions across the main display. The storm engulfed the Hive like a whale swallowing a shrimp. The ship quaked under the onslaught of electrical strikes.

  Ash pulled the wheel a few degrees left, doing her best to keep a steady course despite the violent rocking. Two decks beneath her, under the guts of the ship, humanity’s last hope was about to dive into the abyss, and there was nothing she could do to help them.

  * * * * *

  X fidgeted in his metal cocoon and waited for the glass doors of his launch tube to split open. An emergency light bathed his pod in red. He braced himself against the metal walls as a tremor shook the Hive. His earpiece crackled, but he couldn’t make out the transmission. The storm had already knocked out the comm and the minimap in his HUD subscreen.

  The launch tube rattled as if they had suddenly entered a pocket of extreme turbulence. He watched the flashes of lightning beneath the glass floor. A few minutes ago, he hadn’t felt any of the messy, addictive fear that the sight normally prompted, but now the rush had his heart thumping at almost double time.

  “Come on, God damn it, let’s go!” he said, knowing that no one could hear him. Flexing his hands and chewing on his mouth guard, he buried the rising fear in his gut.

  The walls of his tube rattled again, knocking him against the side. He crossed his arms over his chest and cursed.

  “Come on!”

  The sirens clicked off, their whine still lingering in his ears. X blinked just as the panels split beneath his boots. In the same fraction of a second, he heard the unmistakable crack of gunfire above. And the next moment, he was falling into darkness.

  * * * * *

  “Hold on, kid,” Eli said. The silver-bearded engineer looked over at Tin and narrowed his eyes beneath the bill of his baseball cap.

  Tin stood with his back to the wall in the small shelter, gripping the belts that secured his body to the wall. They were alone in here. X had already jumped, and Tin felt like a bean being shaken in a can. But that was not the reason his heart was thumping out of control.

  “Wha … what’s that popping sound?” Tin stammered, although he thought knew the answer. He had never heard gunshots before, but the sharp Pop! Pop! reminded him of a video that Professor Lana had shown their class a few months ago.

  Eli looked just as unsure. They both stared at the small window over the hatch. Red light filled the hallway outside, but Tin didn’t see anything in the glow.

  He tightened his grip on the belts crossing his chest, when the popping sounded again. This time it was closer, and he could hear it clearly over the emergency alarms and groaning metal bulkheads around him.

  “Stay put, kid,” Eli said. “I need to check this out.” He unbuckled his harness and went to check the window. “What in the hell … ?”

  Tin wanted to tell him not to leave, but Eli opened the hatch and stepped into the hallway.

  “Hey! What are you doing!” Eli shouted at someone Tin couldn’t see.

  The ship rumbled, knocking Eli to his knees. Before he could move, something exploded out of his back and punched the bulkhead behind Tin.

  Screaming, Tin unbuckled the belts and dropped onto all fours. He crawled across the floor, keeping as low as possible. He could feel his fingers sliding through warm liquid. He glanced up, straining to see in the dim red light.

  At the end of the hallway, a single emergency light churned. The rotating light crossed the paths of four approaching men.

  “Mister … mister, are you okay?” Tin whispered, nudging the limp body. The man’s throat made an awful gurgling sound. A few feet away, a Militia soldier lay in a widening pool of blood.

  Tin’s eyes flitted back to the four men as they stepped into the red glow. The leader wore a trench coat and had hair that hung like thick vines over his shoulders. Tin recognized him instantly. It was the same guy he had seen lurking outside the farm before the tour, and the same man who had bashed into him at the trading post. When he saw Tin, he pointed and yelled, “Don’t let that kid get away!”

  The ship hit a pocket of turbulence and tilted to starboard, sending the four men sliding across the floor. Tin scrambled over the dead guard and bolted into the open stairwell that led to the farm. Grunting, he struggled to close the heavy steel hatch behind him. Pushing with all his strength, he slammed it shut just as a volley of bullets pelted the other side.

  * * * * *

  X’s mind spun as he fell. One second, his thoughts had been focused and clear; the next, they were agonizingly slow and confused, unable to process what had happened. Someone had done the unthinkable: fired a gun aboard the Hive. Whether it was sabotage or a horrible accident, it didn’t matter. All that mattered now was the mission. He had to trust that Captain Ash would keep Tin safe and deal with the situation. Letting himself get distracted now would doom everyone on the ship, including Tin.

  Focus, X.

  He got one last glimpse of the Hive and half expected to see it come blazing through the clouds. But the smooth beetlelike hull looked still intact. The ship appeared suspended in motion in the dead center of the storm as lightning danced around the ship. An eyeblink later, his home was gone, swallowed by the clouds.

  After relaxing into stable position, he pulled his left hand in as if saluting, while his right fished a flare from his vest. Then, bringing both hands in front of him to maintain equilibrium, he twisted off the plastic striker cap, taking great care not to lose it in the blasting wind. He struck the flare’s tip against the striker surface once … twice … The moment he saw bright red flame spurt from the struck end, he tossed the flare away into the black. He did this twice more, then looked at his HUD.

  The data flickered in and out, and X realized that it was going to be mostly useless the entire dive. They had to be at around eighteen thousand feet. He put his velocity at a hundred miles per hour, give or take. Intermittent strikes of electricity curved across his flight path. The storm wasn’t as bad as it looked from above, but it would only get worse.

  The divers from all three teams were working into a wedge formation. He counted the glowing battery units cutting through the clouds, and the flares that left streaking, tumbling red tracers behind them. He had never seen anything like it on a dive, but the flares would give the others something visual to key on in a sea of darkness.

  His HUD suddenly winked back on. Before the data vanished again, he caught the altitude reading: five thousand feet down, fifteen thousand to go.

  A thunderclap reminded him of the gunfire he had heard. Was Tin okay? Was the Hive in trouble? He blinked away the thought and focused on the clouds. A web of lightning arced across his field of view. The dark floor gave way to a roiling purple maelstrom, and their entire flight path lit up as if floodlights had turned on. They were about to pass into the heart of the storm.

  Teams Angel and Apollo broke from their positions, and X watched as their blue battery units fanned out, flickering like stars across the da
rkness. He scanned for Magnolia and Murph. They were spreading out, too, but he couldn’t spot Magnolia’s battery.

  At thirteen thousand feet, the sky transformed into a colossal static generator. Arcs slashed through the clouds all around the teams. How could anyone survive that?

  X brought his arms back to pull himself into a nosedive. Tucking his chin against his chest, he pulled his arms all the way into his sides, palms forward at his thighs. The other divers would be doing the same thing: streamlining themselves so they would fall as fast as possible.

  Thunder cracked as X tried to calculate his speed and altitude. His body shook from the wind shears pulling at him. Somewhere in the distance, he thought he heard a scream, but that was impossible, of course, when in free fall.

  He punched through the clouds like a bullet, his armor whistling in the wind. His eyes roved back to his HUD. Ice crystals were already forming around the edges of his visor, narrowing his view by half. The internal display was a mess of numbers flickering out of control.

  The minimap flashed, revealing that two of the beacons had already disappeared. He blinked and checked again, but the map had already cut out. Only a few moments had passed since they entered the storm. That couldn’t be right.

  His eyes confirmed what he already knew. Two divers, both from Team Angel, were gone—the first casualties of the colossal storm.

  He waited several tense seconds before the map flickered back to life. Tony’s and Katrina’s beacons were still there.

  X breathed out just as three separate strikes flashed across his path. He torpedoed through the light-blue visual residue with his eyes wide open, fully expecting to feel his insides cooking. But seconds later, he felt nothing but the force and push of the wind.

  He did a slow 360-degree turn to check on the other divers. The glow of their battery units glimmered on the eastern horizon. Then, without warning, one tumbled away, whisked off by a freak crosswind—directly into a lightning strike. The arc shot through one of the flares trailing the diver, exploding it in a dazzling splash of red.

  “No … !” X howled. He had shifted his gaze back to the clouds below when a flash of blue cut through a second diver in his peripheral vision. His eyes flitted to his HUD. Cruise’s beacon went offline a beat later.

  “Fu-u-u-uck you, Hades!” X shouted into the void.

  Ten thousand feet, and a third of them were already gone, including the lead for Apollo—the most experienced diver besides Katrina and X.

  The hair on his neck prickled, and he braced for a shock. The ice crystals continued to spread across his visor. Jerked to his left by a crosswind, he watched a strike angle through the trajectory he had been on only moments before. Saved by the selfsame phenomenon that had killed Cruise’s teammate.

  The howling wind and periodic thunderclaps drowned all other sounds. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and the sting suddenly enraged him.

  “God damn it!” he roared into the mute comm.

  Another beacon vanished from his flickering HUD. Then, not three seconds later, another.

  Apollo was gone—the entire team killed while still in free fall.

  X bit down on his mouth guard and glanced skyward. The red streaks from the flares of the dead continued to fall. Six thousand feet to go and only six divers left. He scanned the data on his display. His velocity now, falling head down, was around 180 miles per hour.

  He risked another sidelong glance. Lightning, inexorable and immense, rippled across the sky in all directions. There was no pattern to the strikes, no way to predict where—or who—the next flash would hit. Avoiding the earlier strike had been sheer luck. It occurred to him that one reason no one had ever returned from Hades could be that very few divers had even made it to the surface alive.

  His hair stood up again as he watched a bolt bend through his trajectory. He closed his eyes, then snapped them back open, heart pounding. Was he hit?

  A wave of gray and white exploded into view.

  He wasn’t dead, but he was about to enter hell all the same.

  Gutted skyscrapers lined the horizon as far as he could see, their frosted tips leaning this way and that. Hades was buried in snow and ice.

  X fought his way into stable position, punched his minicomputer, activated his night vision, and whipped out his pilot chute.

  The opening shock yanked him upward. He tilted his helmet toward the sky to see a single diver burst through the clouds.

  Surely, that couldn’t be it … could it? Just one survivor?

  A beat later, three more divers emerged from the storm.

  “Pull!” X shouted over the comm. He scanned his HUD. The storm had thrown them over a mile off course. Descending under canopy now, he searched the frozen landscape. Right below him, a sinkhole the size of the Hive had swallowed most of a city block. Rubble surrounded the lip of the crater, and skeletal strips of metal bristled over the side. The north side looked clear—all the buildings there had toppled into the hole. Brick and concrete foundations still remained, making for a risky drop zone, but it was the only potential DZ in sight.

  “On me,” X said into the comm.

  The other divers acknowledged with shaky replies, the fear in their monosyllabic responses evident even on the staticky comm channel.

  X glided past a windowless building. Snow had filled the rooms, burying the frozen artifacts from the Old World. Pulling his left toggle, he steered his canopy to the left and passed over the sinkhole.

  The ground rose closer and closer. He shifted once more to avoid a foundation, flared, and stepped out of the sky. A halo of powder poofed up into the air. He popped one capewell to deflate his chute, shucked his harness, and checked his HUD for the nav marker. They were a mile south of the first supply crate. The second crate was somewhere in the industrial zone.

  A blur shot past his peripheral vision. It was Magnolia. She flared too early, swung forward and then rocked back, and rolled in the snow.

  Tony landed across the snowy field. Next came Katrina and Murph.

  X hurried over to Magnolia, who was getting dragged by the breeze. He pawed his way through her flapping chute and popped a capewell, and the billowing mass deflated. “You okay, kid?”

  A moan sounded in his helmet’s speakers. She lay on her back, her visor angled at the sky. A reflected lightning bolt streaked across the mirrored surface.

  “Did we make it?” she choked.

  X reached down to help her up. “Yeah. We made it.”

  “Where are the others?”

  X shook his head. He looked at Tony, Katrina, and Murph. “We’re it.”

  “Cruise?” Magnolia asked, her voice wobbly.

  He shook his head.

  Magnolia dropped to a half crouch, her breathing labored, raspy. “He’s … gone?” She clutched her stomach.

  Katrina rushed over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t puke in your helmet.

  Magnolia nodded and waved Katrina away. “It’s okay. It’s back down.”

  “We’d better move, X,” Tony said.

  He noted the mission clock. Three minutes into the mission, and over half of them were dead.

  “Get it together, kid,” X said. “We got to start moving, okay? We have twenty-four hours to save the Hive.”

  She managed a weak nod. X stared up into the swirling clouds, hoping another live diver would emerge from the darkness, but knowing it wouldn’t happen. The other divers were dead, and if anyone came falling from the sky, there would be no graceful landing under a chute. They would frap in the snow, breaking every bone in their lifeless bodies and turning the rest to mush.

  X pulled his binos and swept them across the landscape, stopping on the towers to the northwest. The tops of three buildings had been stripped away. Odd, since the rest were still standing. He moved the scope to a flattened area to the west and saw the stern of a
n airship jutting up from the snow. There wasn’t much left: just aluminum struts and debris strewn across half a square mile of the dead city.

  He didn’t need to zoom in to see that it was Ares.

  EIGHTEEN

  Captain Ash swung the wheel right, steering them toward the western edge of the storm, where the lightning flashes were less intense. All she had to do was keep them away from a fatal strike for a few more minutes.

  “We’ve lost the divers’ signals,” Jordan yelled.

  “We have a rupture in gas bladder twenty-one,” Ryan said.

  Jordan rushed to the ops station. “Divert helium from bladder twenty-one.”

  Ash heard each voice, but she was busy trying to steer the ship out of the raging sea of static electricity.

  A jolt hit the stern, setting off a chorus of sensors and alarms. She blinked away a drop of sweat and continued staring at the main display. The Hive’s bow pushed ahead toward the wall of glowing blue.

  “That’s the edge of the storm,” Hunt shouted from navigation. “We’re almost out.”

  Ash kept the wheel steady as they glided through the final stretch of lightning. She couldn’t see the invisible barrier between the storm and clear skies, but she felt it the moment the bow split through to the other side. Every wall and beam seemed to groan and creak, as if in relief.

  Warning sensors continued to chirp, but she ignored them all. They were safely out of the storm now, but they had other problems. Someone had fired a gun at the very moment the Hell Diver teams had dropped from their tubes. Her throat ached, and she reached up to massage it. Her mind was trying to grasp everything that had happened during the past fifteen minutes.

  Before she could make much sense of it, she heard Jordan’s voice in her ear. “Captain, we have a strike team on standby and ready to go.”

  “Do we know how many assailants there are, or who they are?”

  “Negative, but Eli and Cecil are dead, and Tin is missing.”

  Ash rubbed at her throat. “No,” she choked. “I promised X …”