Hell Divers II: Ghosts

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  “Captain Ash told me that if we ever received a legit transmission from the surface, we should look at page ninety-four of The New World Order.” He paused to see if that resonated with her, but she remained silent.

  “You know that book,” Layla said, taking over. “You checked it out a few years back.”

  “So what if I did?” Janga said. She picked at a loose thread on the hem of her colorful floral-print dress. “What does any of this matter? Go away, children. I’m tired.”

  “It matters because someone checked it out a few weeks later under Captain Maria Ash’s name,” Michael said.

  Janga shrugged. “I don’t see your point.”

  “Captain Ash was dead by then.”

  That caught Janga’s attention. She scrutinized him for a moment, then motioned him closer. She stood and peered right into his face, in the flickering glow of a single candle.

  “You’re the kid Maria used to talk about,” Janga said after a moment. “I didn’t realize it, because you aren’t wearing that dumb little tin hat.”

  “It wasn’t dumb,” Layla said. “It was sweet.”

  Janga gestured for Michael to sit on the chair and patted the side of her bed for Layla.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said. “I don’t usually get visitors from the upper decks, and when I do, they don’t stay long. After all, it was the upper-deckers who exiled me here in the first place.”

  “I’ve heard the story,” Michael said.

  “Have you?” Janga said, giving him a crooked, mostly toothless smile. “Probably not the correct one.”

  “What do you mean?” Layla asked, scooting closer.

  “Maria and I were great friends for a very long time, but I broke her trust when I started searching the restricted archives for information about the war that destroyed the world. I discovered information about the surface and brought it to her attention, but she told me to keep it quiet. She said it would start a panic. We were supposed to keep certain things from the general population, for the greater good. But the truth was, I was already sharing facts that proved her dream of landing wasn’t possible in our lifetime.”

  “What kind of facts?” Layla asked.

  “Information that could have gotten me the noose. But like I said, Maria and I were friends. She exiled me down here instead of having me executed. And then she claimed everything I said was a lie, that I was crazy. It worked. The only people who believe me are the lower-deckers—them and one of your own.”

  Michael and Layla looked at each other.

  “Weaver?” Michael said.

  Janga shrugged again.

  “What kind of information?” Layla repeated.

  “About what’s down there,” Janga said. “Evidence of what ITC did. They took my credentials away when they exiled me, but I’ve got a few other tricks up my sleeve.”

  “So you didn’t believe in Captain Ash’s dream of finding a home on the surface?” Michael asked.

  “I wanted to, kids, but I can honestly tell you that even Maria didn’t believe it by the time she died.”

  “Why?” Michael said. “What did you find? Information about the bombs, or who started the war? The Sirens?” He started to reach out for her but stopped himself when she reared back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just want to understand.”

  Janga relaxed and sighed. “So did I.”

  “So I take it your prophecy didn’t come from mystical visions,” Layla said. “It’s based on whatever you discovered in the archives.”

  Janga smirked. “You’re a smart girl.”

  A whistling came from across the corridor. The noise caught the old woman’s attention, and her smile folded into a frown.

  “No,” she whispered. “You have to leave before you’re seen here with me.”

  The whistling got louder as others joined the din.

  “What is that?” Michael asked.

  Janga stood. “A warning. The militia is coming.”

  Layla and Michael both stood. He peeked through the curtains. Little Rex and Julie were whistling now, too.

  Down the passage, at the entrance of the room, a militia guard had his club out. This wasn’t some grunt, either. The muscular old man was Sergeant Jenkins, head of the militia.

  Michael closed the drapes and said, “We’ll stay here and wait till he’s gone.”

  “That’s going to be a problem,” Janga said. “He’s probably here for me.” She grabbed a jar off the top shelf, unscrewed the lid, and pulled out a small piece of paper. “Here. Take this and go find a terminal. This will let you access the files I found. They will explain most everything. If you want to know more, come find me when they let me out of the stockade.”

  “They can’t punish you,” Layla said indignantly. “You haven’t done anything wrong!”

  Janga pressed the paper into Michael’s hand, lifted the curtain on the other side of her bed, and shooed them toward the rusted bulkhead. “Go on, get out of here before you’re caught.”

  Michael crawled over the bed after Layla, and they climbed out the other side. There was hardly enough room against the bulkhead for them to stand side by side. Janga nodded at them and said, “Good luck.”

  The whistling stopped abruptly, replaced by the heavy footfalls of Jenkins’ boots. Michael and Layla began sidling along the bulkhead, their backs against the warm metal, but they halted when the boots stopped in front of Janga’s stall.

  “Janet Gardner,” said the sergeant’s gruff voice, “I’m here to place you under arrest.”

  The old woman chuckled and then coughed. “My name is Janga. People keep forgetting that.”

  THIRTEEN

  Rodger was itching for the right moment to talk to Magnolia, but every time he tried, she raised a finger to her helmet to silence him. It was so quiet inside the tunnels that he could hear himself thinking. The echoey distant screeches were gone now, but Rodger knew that the creatures were still out there, on the prowl for fresh meat. He didn’t like the idea of being on the menu.

  He checked the mission clock as he followed Magnolia down the hallway. They had spent forty-five minutes searching the passages for a way into the main facility.

  “Are we walking in circles?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Magnolia swept her flashlight over the muddy footprints marking the floor. He followed a line of tracks onto the ceiling.

  “Are those from Sirens?”

  She nodded.

  In all his dives up to now, Rodger had never seen one of the beasts. He had seen plenty of other creatures, from the rock monsters out west to the almost cute feathered lizards in the south, but the closest he had come to a Siren during other dives was hearing their high-pitched alien wails. He longed to see creatures from the Old World, like the ones he had studied in books.

  “Hey, Mags, what do you think elephants were like?”

  “Shush, Rodger,” she hissed, whirling on him. “I told you to—”

  “What’s that?”

  She followed his finger to a door at the end of the hallway, and her scowl turned into a grin.

  “Hopefully, our way in,” she said. “Come on, we’ve already wasted enough time.”

  He hurried after her but quickly fell behind. When he caught up, she was already kneeling at the edge of the partly open steel door. A video camera was mounted on the wall.

  Magnolia shined her beam over the dented, rusted skin of the door. Long vertical scratches ran all the way to the bottom, as if someone had dragged a pitchfork across the surface. The door wasn’t open after all—it was bent off its hinges.

  “More Sirens?” he asked.

  In Magnolia’s light beam was a dent the size of a melon. It looked as if something massive had head-butted the door.

  “I … I don’t think so. I�
�ve never seen one with claws that could make scratches this deep.”

  She stood up, and Rodger’s headlamp caught her face. He tried not to stare at her profile, but even with helmet and visor covering most of her features, she was pretty. She rolled her eyes when she caught him looking, and took a step toward the door.

  “No,” Rodger said, putting his hand gently on her shoulder. “I’ll go first.”

  For once, Magnolia didn’t argue.

  He made sure he had a round chambered before shining his light into the passage. From his position, he couldn’t see much but a flight of stairs on the other side of the unhinged door.

  Flattening his body and ducking down, he slipped through the space between the door and the frame. As soon as he was through, he swept his beam down the stairway to a landing covered with metal shelves and crates. A sign hung on the wall there, but he couldn’t make out the faded text.

  As he turned and gestured for Magnolia, he saw that I beams had been welded in an X onto the other side of the door. Rodger moved his light over the broken barricade. The bolts that had secured the beams to the concrete were still there, but the metal had snapped from the force of whatever wrenched the door off its hinges. The steel was pocked with bullet holes. Raising his light, he slowly played it over walls bearing the scars of a firefight.

  Not a fight. A battle.

  Magnolia maneuvered through the opening and looked at the broken beams. “Shit, those were sheared right off!”

  “Would take a lot of force to do that,” Rodger said.

  A raucous thud echoed below them, rattling the shelves on the landing. Both divers angled their guns down the stairs.

  “What the hell was that?” he said under his breath.

  “Not a Siren.”

  Rodger raised his wrist computer and brought up a map. The archives didn’t have a complete layout of the facility, but if the fragments they had pieced together were correct, then the cryogenics lab—and whatever had made that noise—was directly beneath their feet.

  Magnolia bent down and picked up a cartridge casing. “You know what this means, right? There were survivors here.”

  “But how long ago?” he said, following her down the stairs.

  “No idea, but whatever broke through the door sure made quick work of this barricade.”

  As they crept down the stairs, Rodger paused to study the sign above the shelving. floor 99. They rounded the next corner to find another flight of stairs covered in debris. A wall-mounted video camera was angled down over beams, desks, chairs, and shelves scattered across the passage as if a tornado had blown through. Dust floated around them in the glow of their lights. It felt as if they were entering a tomb.

  Rodger kept picking his way cautiously down the steps, careful not to snag his suit. The radiation down here was minimal, but they still had the return trip to the Hive to worry about. If he tore his suit, by the time he reached the sick bay on the Hive he would have much bigger problems than abnormal bowel movements.

  He glanced at the ceiling. Four miles above, his parents were waiting for him. They seemed impossibly far away. The thought gave him a twinge of dread, but he continued onward. Captain Jordan had entrusted him with a mission, and he wasn’t going to screw it up. He patted the vest pocket containing Magnolia’s gift and the ITC card.

  There was a door on the next landing, as well as another sign.

  “Floor ninety-eight?” he said. “That can’t be right.”

  “If the signs are counting down, we’ve got a long way to go,” Magnolia said. She brought her wrist monitor up. “And we have just over two hours to search this place and get topside.”

  “Searching ninety-eight floors will take days.” He shifted his light to the door. An open space stretched as far as the beam would go. Magnolia stepped over a crate to look into the room. The warped and dented door lay on the floor, several feet in. The dust layer covering it suggested that nothing had been inside for some time. But that also meant the chance of finding any survivors was slim.

  Their beams danced across the space, falling on lockers at the far end of the room. Space suits hung from hooks, and glass partitions were built against the wall. He recognized the chambers as clean rooms—something like the one they had in the Hive’s launch bay to decontaminate divers returning from the surface.

  “Looks like some sort of staging area,” Magnolia said. “You check the lockers. I’ll see if I can get this computer online.”

  She hurried over to a hologram computer on a desk across the room. Rodger took his time crossing the space. It was about three times the size of the trading post where his parents had their stall. Carrying his rifle at port arms, he looked at the suits first. They were like those the Hell Divers wore, but with larger helmets and thicker padded layers.

  He continued to the wall of lockers and used his glove to wipe off the inside of an open door. A faded picture of a man holding a baby was taped to the metal.

  Rodger brushed off the dust and smiled. In the background of the photo was a dense green backdrop of trees. The man who had used this locker had once walked through a forest. A real forest, with real, living trees!

  Rodger’s smile evaporated as he realized what the photo meant. If this man had once seen a real forest, then this room hadn’t been used in at least two centuries.

  Magnolia waved him toward the wall-mounted monitor. Rodger put the picture back where he had found it, and trotted over to her.

  She had brushed off the keyboard and was pecking at the sticky keys. A holographic image of the facility shot up over the desk. Rodger checked the entrance to the room with his rifle before turning back to the three-dimensional image of an underground silo beneath the hilltop. The first few layers were passages tucked under dirt and concrete—the same halls Magnolia and Rodger had been combing for the past hour. One of those hallways veered away from the silo and intersected with a staircase and elevator that went to the top of the bunker they had seen from outside. Another staircase went deep underground to a water treatment plant and a generator room.

  “That’s the route Weaver took to look for Pipe,” Rodger said.

  “Yup, and we’re here.” She pointed to the silo. “ITC Communal Thirteen. What became known as the Hilltop Bastion. Looks like there are ninety-nine floors after all.”

  She typed another command, and the hologram readjusted to show only the silo.

  “Shit, the place has a swimming pool, tennis court, shooting range, luxury condos, seed bank, farm …”

  “And a cryogenics lab,” Rodger said.

  Magnolia pointed at a level a few floors below them and unslung her rifle. “Floor eighty-one. We better get moving.”

  “Wait,” Rodger said. He bit the inside of his lip as a cool flood of adrenaline rushed through him. Before the jump, he had promised himself he would take the time to give Magnolia the present he had made for her—and to tell her how he really felt. But that was before he realized they were dropping into a facility full of monsters. Andrew was missing and likely dead, and they were almost twenty floors above their goal.

  “What is it?” She looked at him quizzically. “Are you okay? You look, um, weird.”

  “Yeah, I’m good. It’s just … never mind. Let’s get moving.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, unexpectedly putting a hand on his arm.

  For what?”

  “For being such a bitch to you. I appreciate you coming down here to look for me. It means a lot.”

  “You’re worth dying for a hundred times,” Rodger said.

  Magnolia’s smile bloomed behind her visor, and Rodger thought he might have seen a hint of a blush.

  She laughed and said, “Just a hundred times?”

  “Okay, a million. But after that, you’re on your own.”

  She tilted her head toward the exit. “Let’s go before you have to
prove it.”

  * * * * *

  Jordan had been trying to reassure Katrina for the past hour that they were making the right decision, but she wasn’t saying much. Her avoidance of eye contact told him that she was beyond angry. Something inside her had broken, and he didn’t know how to fix it.

  “Katrina,” he whispered. “Please, look at me.”

  She glanced at him but then looked away.

  Jordan’s hands balled into fists. Why wouldn’t she listen to him?

  “It’s no longer a question of whether you want to bring this child into this world, Katrina. We have a duty to the human race. We must do everything we can to ensure that this baby is healthy.”

  She placed her hand on her stomach and sighed. “I know, but frankly …”

  Jordan folded his arms across his chest. “Go on.”

  “After the electrical storm knocked out the rudders and we lost Magnolia, I started thinking about just how fragile things are. Things were good for a while, but it never lasts. We haven’t heard anything from the team on the surface, either.”

  “I don’t expect we will,” he said.

  Katrina’s eyes shot up. “What do you mean by that?”

  “The electrical storm is blocking their comms,” Jordan said, catching himself.

  “The clock is ticking. For them, for us—for everyone.”

  “The clock’s been ticking for two hundred and sixty years, and we’re still up here,” he said.

  “Unless Weaver finds something to save us down there, it’s only a matter of time. Because we’re nearing the end, Leon, and I know you know it.”

  She massaged her stomach and looked down as if she could see right through to their unborn child.

  “We’re one bad storm or a failed crop away from extinction,” she said.

  Jordan shook his head. “We’ve survived this long because men and women like me were able to make the hard decisions. Even when we’re not popular—even when the people hate us and every sacrifice we are forced to make takes with it a piece of our own soul, we have a duty to these people. I thought you understood that.”

  Katrina finally looked at him for more than a few seconds. There was obvious contempt in her gaze.