“Good luck, X,” one of the guards said.
X sucked in a long breath, fastened a red bandana with the White Arrow insignia of the Hell Divers over his head, then pushed the double doors open. The rusted metal screeched across the floor, drawing the gazes of the three other members of Team Raptor. Aaron, Rodney, and Will were already suiting up near the lockers.
At the far end of the room, past the dozen plastic domes of the launch tubes, stood a few divers from Team Angel. They were easy to spot in the crowd of technicians and support staff gathered along the wall. Engineers, soldiers, and thieves: divers had a wide variety of skills and stood out in their red jumpsuits like a flame in the dark.
A quick scan revealed Team Apollo hadn’t shown up this time. That was fine with X, he didn’t like being watched anyway.
“Nice of you to make it, X!” Will shouted. The newest member of Raptor threw on his dented chest armor and looked X up and down as he walked over to his locker.
“You look like hell, sir,” Will said, chuckling.
“Nothing a few stims can’t handle,” X replied. He didn’t need to look in a mirror to see Will was right. For a thirty-eight-year-old man, X looked much older. Crow’s feet had formed around his eyes from too much squinting, and habitual frowning had given him deep wrinkles on his cheeks and forehead. At least he still had most of his teeth. If it weren’t for his unusually white smile, he would have looked considerably worse.
X stopped at his locker for another ritual, tracing a finger over his nametag and taking a moment to remember all the divers that had come before him. Then he opened the door and searched the top shelf for a bottle of the stimulants he’d discovered on a dive a few months back. The precious tablets were worth their weight in gold.
X felt the burn of eyes on him as he swallowed the tablets. The tall, lean figure of his best friend Aaron filled his peripheral vision.
“Just say it,” X said.
“I thought you said you were cutting back on the ‘shine.”
X forced himself to look at Aaron. There was no point in lying, Aaron could always see right through a lie.
“Haven’t gotten around to it yet,” X said.
Aaron held his gaze and frowned. “You sure, you’re up—”
X held up a hand like he was about to scold a rookie diver. “I’m fine, man.”
After a tense moment, X went to check on Rodney. The dark skinned man was pushing a foot through his black bodysuit. He glanced up, his blank, emotionless gaze seeming to look through X rather than at him. He was the third most experienced diver on the ship. Diving had hardened him over the years, and sometimes X wondered if the man wanted to die. Ironically, one of the doctors asked X the same question after his last health exam. Deep down X thought all Hell Divers must have a death wish.
“Listen up, everyone,” X said. “I just came from command. Captain Ash said the skies look good. There’s no sign of electrical storms over the landing zone.”
“What’s on the list this time?” Rodney asked.
“Nuclear fuel cells,” X said. “That’s it. Captain Ash was very clear.”
“Man, what happened to searching for other shit?” Will said. “I miss the days of scavenging for real treasure.”
X glared at him. “You should be happy that today’s dive is over a green zone. Less chance of radiation on the surface.”
“I guess I could get used to these green zone dives,” Will said. “Maybe I’ll live to become a legend like you someday.” He flashed a grin, but X scowled.
Will was young and naïve—about as young as X had been when he joined the Hell Divers, and just about as naïve, too.
Hard to believe that was twenty years ago, X thought. He wasn’t a legend by any stretch of the imagination, but he did have more successful jumps under his belt than any other diver in history; the only one who came close was a man named Rick Weaver on their sister ship, Ares. Last X heard, Weaver was still diving.
Throwing back his head, X swallowed two more stims. He washed them down with a swig from his water bottle, grimaced, and faced Aaron.
“How’s the little man doing? I haven’t seen Tin for a few weeks.”
“Kid’s growing up way too fast,” Aaron said. “He just got accepted into engineering school a couple of weeks ago. They took him two years early.” There was a trace of sadness in Aaron’s sharp blue eyes, but X wasn’t sure if it was because he hadn’t made an effort to see Tin lately, or if it was from Tin’s decision to become an engineer.
“You didn’t think he would want to follow in your footsteps, did you?” X asked.
“Hell, no!” Aaron said. He crunched his blonde eyebrows together. “Would never want this life for my boy.”
“I don’t blame you.”
Aaron hesitated, his lips forming a thin line. “Wasn’t going to tell you, but you missed his birthday.”
“Shit,” X muttered. “When did he turn nine?”
Aaron stared incredulously at him. After a pause he said, “He’s ten.”
X looked at the floor, ashamed of missing Tin’s birthday and especially of not remembering how old he was. “I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to him after we get back.”
Aaron shut his locker. “I won’t hold my breath.”
X nodded. There was nothing else to say. He needed to prove himself, not make another hollow promise. He buried his emotions, grabbed his well-worn bodysuit from his locker and slipped his legs through. The internal padding conformed to his muscles as he zipped up the front. Aaron handed him the black matte armor that shielded his vital organs. The piece felt light in his hands, but the titanium outer shell could stop a blast from a shotgun. His chest plate had saved him from broken bones or worse on countless dives.
Sliding the armor over his head, he sucked in his stomach and fastened the clasps on both sides. It was snug, molded to fit his body when he was a much younger man. Long before his metabolism slowed and his bad habits caught up with him.
The titanium leg and arm guards didn’t fit much better. He clipped them over old muscle covered in a layer of fat he couldn’t seem to lose no matter how many push-ups or jogs around the ship he did. After applying the guards, he slid on his helmet. He completed the routine by inserting his battery unit into the socket on his chest plate. It flickered to life, spreading a cool blue glow over his dull black armor. The equipment was old, like virtually everything else on the ship, but the pieces fit together perfectly and protected him from the hostile conditions of a dive.
“Tubes are ready!” Ty yelled. The team’s technician climbed out of X’s launch tube. He wiped grease on his yellow jumpsuit and chomped nervously on a calorie-infused herb stick. No matter how many of the damn things Ty ate, his frame stayed rail thin.
X grabbed a vest stuffed with flares and shotgun shells and led his team to the drop tubes, scanning the porthole windows as he walked. The impenetrable darkness of the clouds swirled outside like a black hole. The divers from Team Angel made room when X and his men reached their tubes. Rodney and Will hurried over, but Aaron paused like he always did and offered a nod to X. It was more powerful than any words. Despite the tension from earlier, they trusted each other with their lives.
One by one, the divers climbed into their metal cocoons.
Even after all these years, X still felt the stab of fear as Ty closed the plastic dome over the top. It took a few moments of squirming before he settled into a comfortable position. His mind slowly cleared and the fog from his hangover diminished, the tablets finally kicking in.
X exhaled and tapped the minicomputer attached to his right forearm. The control panel flickered to life behind the cracked glass surface. He activated his heads-up display with a punch of a button. A green translucent sub-screen emerged in the upper right corner of his visor and digital telemetry scrolled across the screen.
He flicked the monitor on his forearm a second time. Another translucent sub-screen emerged above the data on his HUD and solidified into a rectan
gular map. Four bleeps emerged, one for each member of Team Raptor.
X chinned the comm pad in his helmet to open a line to his team. “Raptor, systems check.”
“Ready, sir,” Rodney replied.
“Everything’s looking good,” Will said, pausing for a second and adding in a shaky voice, “Ready to dive.”
The man’s apprehension didn’t surprise X. This was Will’s fifteenth jump, and according to the numbers it would be his last.
Fuck statistics, X thought. If the numbers told the truth, he’d have been dead eighty jumps ago.
“Systems look good, X. See you on the surface,” Aaron said.
“Dive safe,” X replied, putting emphasis on the second word.
A new voice crackled in his helmet. “You’re mission clear, X.” That was Captain Ash, her voice clinical and characteristically smooth.
“Roger that,” X replied. “We dive so humanity survives.” It was the Hell Diver motto and his typical response, a reply that told the captain she could count on him.
As the Hive slowed to a halt, X flipped up his mirrored visor and shoved in his thin mouth guard. He could tell the ship was now at hovering altitude, but he waited for Ty to confirm what he already knew.
“We’re in position,” the man said a moment later. “I’ll launch the supply crate to the surface in a few seconds.”
X flashed a thumbs up, and Ty locked the plastic dome over the top of the cylinder. He patted the translucent ceiling, removed the herb stick, and mouthed the words good luck.
A siren wailed in the launch bay. The first warning.
X felt the familiar rush of anticipation building. It was a messy, addictive combination of fear and exhilaration, the feeling that pushed him to jump, again and again, even if it hadn’t been his duty. Although he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, X lived for this rush.
Every drop was risky in its own way. You couldn’t jump twenty thousand feet from an airship through electrical storms and land on a hostile surface without risk. And this wasn’t a normal salvage mission. The fuel cells Ash had ordered them to recover weren’t easy to come by; only a few known locations in the continent remained where they could find the nuclear gold. Without the cells, the Hive wouldn’t be able to stay in the air. If they failed….
X bit down on his mouth guard at the thought. He wouldn’t fail. He never failed.
The seconds ticked down on his mission clock. His senses were on full alert now. He could smell the worn plastic of the helmet—could feel his hammering heart and the rush of blood pulsating in his ears.
A second siren screamed right on time. An emergency light flickered on and bathed his pod in a red glow. The sound of creaking metal and then a pop followed as Ty launched the supply crate from another tube.
One minute to drop.
X skimmed the data on his HUD a final time. All systems were clear. Rodney, Will, and Aaron’s dots were all blinking, their beacons active. They were ready to go. The final seconds ticked down in X’s mind. He squeezed his knuckles together until they cracked.
Thirty seconds to drop.
The sirens faded to a faint echo, and the red glow shifted into a cool blue—the calm before the storm. The clouds seemed lighter beneath his feet, but that had to be an illusion. Command had reported no electrical storms in the drop zone.
The voice of Captain Ash crackled in his helmet. “Good luck, Raptor.”
Five seconds to drop.
A chill ran up X’s spine when he saw the unmistakable flash of lightning streak across the clouds below. The distant strike waned and died, leaving only traces of a fuzzy light.
Bumping his comm, X screamed, “Delay launch! I repeat….”
He reached up to pound on the dome just as the glass floor whispered open. His fingertips scratched the metal surface of the tube as he fell, his voice lost in the screeching of the wind. He couldn’t hear anything but the vacuum of air, and for a moment he felt nothing. Pure weightlessness.
Then the wind took him, sucking him into the black void. Anger boiled through his veins. How could ops have missed the storm? A faulty sensor? The negligence of the officers? He didn’t know. None of that mattered right now. He had to focus on the dive and guiding his team to the surface alive.
X embraced the forces lashing his suit, exhaling his fear through his nostrils. He tilted his head upward and stretched his arms and legs out as he broke into a back fall. The smooth, beetle-like shell of the Hive hovered overhead, the turbofans flickering like insect wings. Far above the ship, deep in the meat of the clouds, he glimpsed something he hadn’t seen in a long time: a single ray of light. The sun was struggling to peek through.
Then it was gone in the blink of an eye.
He shifted his gaze back to his HUD. They were already at nineteen thousand feet. In his peripheral vision, he saw the cool blue glow of Aaron’s battery unit. For a millisecond he wondered what was going through his best friend’s mind, but X thought he probably already knew. Aaron dived with the weight of more than his chute and armor. He carried the burden of a father with a son waiting for him above.
No one waited for X. And that’s what made him one of the best.
X fought the intense force of the wind pushing up on him and took a sidelong glance to check on the other divers. They were closing in, working their way into a wedge formation at three hundred foot intervals.
He angled his helmet downward, searching the clouds again for the storm. A web of lightening flashed across his flight path at fifteen thousand feet.
Static crackled from a speaker in his helmet as one of the other divers attempted to speak. The garbled words were impossible to make out.
X trained his eyes on the swirling clouds. The darkness disguised the size of the storm, but he wasn’t deceived. If it was already screwing with their electronics then it had to be huge.
The sporadic lightning intensified as he cut through the sky. A pocket of turbulence suddenly jerked him to the side at twelve thousand feet. The wind whistled over his armor and rippled across his bodysuit. He focused on centering his mass and holding his position.
Ten thousand feet. Halfway there.
He shot through a shelf of clouds and watched in shock as the entire sky lit up with flashes of electric blue. Experience immediately took over. With no small amount of effort, he fought the wind and angled his body into a nosedive.
His team had vanished in the clouds, but he knew they would be doing the exact same thing. When they hit the eye of the storm, they would be rendered deaf and blind, their electronics knocked out completely. That’s exactly why X had trained his men to factor their altitude and velocity without the aid of a computer program.
Focusing on numbers in the midst of the storm, however, was nearly impossible. The wind beat every inch of his body, and the darkness seemed to bend from the whirlwind of lightning strikes. He hadn’t seen a storm this massive in a long time. It spread across his entire field of vision. There was no escaping it. No way around. They had to go straight through as fast as possible.
He split through the clouds like a missile, his body whistling as his velocity increased. A scrambled HUD reading of eight thousand feet flickered on his visor right before he slipped into the heart of the abyss. He was falling at one hundred and sixty miles per hour and counting. Every fiber of muscle in his body seemed to tighten. The screaming wind gave way to the sound of cracking lightning and the rumble of thunder. The impacts rattled his body, threatening to throw off his dive.
An arc of lightning streaked in front of him. He didn’t have time to move, or even flinch—there was only time to blink before the electrical surge spiked every hair on his body.
He knew right away it wasn’t critical. He could still see and his heart was still hammering. The strike hadn’t penetrated the layer of synthetic materials in his suit that was designed to offer a level of protection against the electricity. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t feel the burn in a few seconds.
Six
thousand feet.
Tucking his arms against his sides, he worked his way back into a stable position and finally felt the heat. His skin was on fire. He bit down harder on his mouth guard, tasting the plastic.
Five thousand feet.
The digital map on his HUD had solidified again. One of the blips had vanished, a heartbeat gone. It was Rodney, lost to the darkness.
“Goddamn,” X whispered. He clenched his jaw, fighting to fend off the anger swirling under his burning flesh.
Four thousand feet.
Lightning suddenly curved through his flight path. This time he didn’t even blink. He was almost to the surface and was focused completely on calculating his speed. There was no auto-deploy system on the suits. The engineers had removed them years ago at X’s request. He didn’t want a shitty computer system that only worked half the time to determine when his chute fired. He had to be sure before he pulled his ripcord.
A blinking dot in the mess of data on his HUD commanded his attention back to his visor. Will’s beacon had dramatically veered off course. X tilted his helmet and searched the darkness for the glow from the man’s battery unit and glimpsed it spinning away.
Will’s beacon blinked off a moment later, his heart stopping from a fatal strike of electricity. The kid had ended up being another statistic after all, dead on his fifteenth jump.
X’s hands trembled with anger at his sides. The two divers had been so close, almost out of the storm, almost to safety. And now they were dead. A waste of precious human life that could have been avoided if the officers in ops had done their fucking jobs. How could they have missed a storm of this size?
Screaming, X burst through the final clouds at terminal velocity. He bumped a pad in his helmet to activate his night vision goggles. A decaying city exploded into view below. The rusted tombstones of skyscrapers protruded out of the metal graveyard. Those that hadn’t crumbled were leaning against one another like a forest of trees hit by a high wind. The buildings were vivid green, their slanted frames filling his visor. They seemed to grow in size with every thump of his heart.
Extinction End (Extinction Cycle Book 5) Page 40
