Hell Divers (19 page)

Teams Angel and Apollo broke from their positions, and X watched as their blue battery units fanned out, flickering like stars across the darkness. 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 an 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.

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 …”

“We'll find him, Captain.”

“We'd better,” Ash said. Her eyes flitted from station to station, checking each worried face. “Do we have a damage report from the storm?”

“Samson's working on it.”

“What about the HDs? Do we know how many made it to the surface?”

Jordan shook his head. “I'm sorry, but we lost contact with them shortly after they dropped.”

Ash wiped the sweat from her brow. “Lieutenant, is there
anything
you can tell me?”

“That's all I know … Hold on. I'm getting a transmission.” He cupped a hand over his earpiece and listened for several moments.

When he looked up, his anxious gaze told Ash she was going to have to make another decision.

“The strike team is asking for orders. Should I give them the green light?”

“No!” Ash yelled. Several officers looked in her direction. “We can't risk it, especially if Tin is in there.”

A few seconds of silence passed before Ash spoke. “How the hell did they get hold of an automatic rifle?”

“Some of the weapons were never recovered after the riots two years ago,” Jordan said. “They must have had one stashed away.”

“Tell the strike team to stand down for now. I want to know who these people are and what they want. Don't they know we don't have time for this shit?”

“They certainly knew when to strike,” Jordan said.

Ash had to temper her fury with the knowledge that her own leniency with the lower-deckers was partly to blame. “Whoever it is, they don't give a shit about the
Hive
's current predicament. Do they realize they could kill us all? Do they even
care
? We need some answers.”

A chirp pulled her gaze to the main display at the front of the room. Samson's strained face emerged on the screen.

“Captain,” he said, “I just finished running a diagnostic report. I have bad news and good news.”

“Good news first.”

The engineer nodded, his pink cheeks jiggling. “The reactor is still online. We didn't suffer any damage there.”

“That
is
good n—” Ash began.

Samson raised his hand. “But we did lose another internal gas bladder during the attack. That was the last straw. We're losing altitude—slowly, but the ship is dropping. My crews still haven't been able to fix the other six bladders we lost two days ago.”

“Can they fix this one?” Ash asked.

“Yes, if they could get there. But the access hatch down here was destroyed when the storm ate us two days ago, and the only other entry is through a passage on the farm.”

“How the hell did this even happen?”

“I'd guess a stray bullet's to blame—not a lot of safe places on an airship to go shooting off a rifle. If that's the case, we can patch it. The other gas bladders were ruptured by the storm. Those'll take more time.”

Ash turned back to Jordan. “If we send in the strike team, we risk more damage to the ship, not to mention more casualties if those men decide to fire again. They've already proved they don't mind killing people.”

“But if we don't, we won't be able to fix the bladder,” Jordan argued.

“He's right, Captain,” Samson said. “The
Hive
is struggling to stay in the air. I've routed all the power I can to the turbofans, but we're sinking. We need that bladder!”

“Can you keep us in the air for twenty-four hours? Long enough for the HDs to get back here?”

“You aren't giving me any other option, are you?”

Ash took one hand off the wheel. “Jordan, take the helm. Samson, prepare an engineering team.”

Samson frowned. “What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to negotiate.”

* * * * *

Powerful gusts of wind showered the five-person team with ice and grit as they trekked through the derelict city. The intermittent lightning flashes allowed the divers to go without their night-vision optics. X stared out over the ash-colored landscape of Hades. Mother Nature was gradually finishing what the bombs hadn't quite been able to do. Most of the buildings were gone, buried by God only knew how many feet of snow.

The remains of
Ares
rested in a shallow grave in the center of the city. X kept looking in amazement at the three topless buildings. The ship must have sheared them off as it came crashing down. That would have dealt the final blows. He wondered what had gone through Captain Willis' mind in those final moments.

“That was
Ares
?” Magnolia asked, as if reading his thoughts.

X checked his mission clock. The blue numbers were steadily ticking down. “Yep,” he said. “And if we don't hurry, the
Hive
is going to look just like that.”

Magnolia picked up her pace, her boots crunching in the snow behind him. “Think anyone else made it?”

“Everyone else is dead. If they had survived, we would see their beacons. Keep moving.”

They didn't have the luxury of time to mourn their dead. He waved the team forward, breaking into a trot toward a stretch of snow that sloped into a valley. That was where most of the buildings were—and, according to the nav flag on his HUD, also the location of the first crate.

At the edge of the downslope, he signaled to stop. Tony joined him, crouching by his side. Both pulled out their binos to scan the city.

“Looks like that bridge leads into the city and the industrial zone,” X said. “The crates should be on the other side.”

“They never can get them close, can they?” said Katrina, behind them.

“Looks like there's a way down over here,” Tony said. He trained his binos on a stretch of highway that curved down into the valley. The wind had cleared the ancient roads, exposing a strange-looking vehicle. X had never seen the like. He zoomed in on the turret that topped the boxy machine. Mounted on it was what appeared to be a cannon of some sort.

Moving his scope to the left, he saw a half-dozen of the strange machines of war.

“Let's go,” X said. He led the team along the edge of the bluff and down a slick, icy hillside to the highway. With his blaster leveled over the street, he ran toward the armored trucks, or whatever they were.

He slowed as he drew near the massive machines. Icy pieces of the armored shell were scattered around the vehicles. The one good thing about this place, he reflected, was that the freezing temperatures had preserved much of the Old World. He couldn't even begin to imagine what lay beneath the mounds of snow burying the rest of the city.

A quick scan of the road showed no immediate threats. X lowered his blaster and brushed the snow off the back of the closest vehicle.

The comm flared to life. “We should keep moving,” Tony said.

“Hold up,” X replied. “I just need a second.” Squinting, he read the lettering aloud. “M-three Abrams … built in 2029, in Lima, Ohio.”

He brushed away more snow.

“United States Army.”

X took a step back, remembering the bulkhead on the
Hive
's bridge. The same name was engraved in a plaque above the entrance to the room. Like the M3, the
Hive
had been commissioned for war. He had known it before, but seeing the armored vehicles, and the monster crater a few days before, reminded him that
people
had done this. Humans had destroyed this world.

“You good, X?” A hand shook his shoulder gently. It was Katrina, and he could tell by her soft voice she was ready to get moving.

X nodded, then froze. A new dot was blinking on his HUD—something that should be impossible in this lifeless place.

“We got a contact,” Tony said.

“I see it,” X replied. The dot was some sort of beacon, but the signal didn't match anything from the
Hive
. Whatever it was, it was moving.

“What do you make of this, Murph?” X asked.

The engineer trotted up to his location. “It's not one of ours.”

“I know that,” X said. “So what do you think it is?”

Tony stepped forward. “I could give you a theory.”

“I'm listening.”

“One of the Sirens took the beacon off a dead
Ares
diver. Hell, maybe it
swallowed
it.”

“Or maybe somebody from
Ares
survived the dive,” Magnolia said.

X furrowed his brow. “No way in hell they could last out here this long, though, right? And no way anyone survived that crash.”

“Right,” Katrina said. “Couldn't be a survivor.”

“Has to be something else,” X said. “Let's find a path around.” He flashed an advance signal, but Katrina grabbed his shoulder a second time.

“Wait,” she said. “If it's a Siren, then why does it look like it's on a direct route to one of our supply crates?”

X checked the map. She was right. The beacon was moving toward their supplies.

“I don't know,” X replied. “But we're going to find out.”

* * * * *

The animal pen stank of manure, but Tin didn't dare move. He kept his eye up against the fence, peering through an inch-wide gap at the armed men in the distance, trying meanwhile not to breathe in the awful smell.

The chickens were crowding the enclosure around him, pecking at morsels in the dirt and generally doing whatever chickens did. Gently, to avoid causing a ruckus among the hens, Tin scooted away from them and caught a glimpse of Silver, in the next pen. Watching the men outside the plastic clean room, the dog let out a low growl. Lilly went over to him, her ears perked. Heartened that the dogs were keeping watch, too, Tim squirmed back to the fence for a better look.

The two men walked away from the plastic vestibule—the same room Tin had visited two days ago. The man with the black dreadlocks turned to another guy, who wore a scarf over his face.

“I told you not to shoot anyone, Alex!”

“Sorry, Trav, but the guard aimed his gun at—”

The one named Travis snatched the rifle from Alex and backhanded him. The blow knocked away Alex's scarf, exposing tight, scarred flesh on his right cheek. A fresh bandage covered his chin. He didn't bother pulling the scarf back up.

The two men glared at each other, and the intense silent moment lingered between them until the door to the clean room unzipped. A big, thickset man shuffled out. Tin had seen him before, too. He recognized the bald head and full red beard from the trading post.

“The Militia's surrounded the first-deck entrance,” he said. “We're trapped in here.”

“How many, Brad?” Travis asked.

Brad ran a nervous hand over his shiny pate. “A dozen at least, all armed to the teeth.”

“This changes nothing,” Travis said. “Our demands are still the same.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and said, “Ren, get those farmers over here.” His deep voice carried the length of the huge enclosed field.

Tin wiggled flat against the dirt for a better view through the mesh wire fence, keeping his head low to the ground, careful not to be seen. The fourth man, Ren, had a group of six farmers herded together. He wielded a long, rusted blade that looked like a butcher's knife. Ren pushed the hostages along a path between a plot of green beans and another of tall corn.

“You need to think about what you're doing,” one of the farmers was saying. “The Militia will kill all of you, and for what?”

Ren pushed the man to the dirt and kicked him in the ribs.

“Leave him alone!” a woman cried. She dropped to the injured farmer's side.

“That's enough, Ren,” Travis said.

Together, Alex and Ren corralled the group and ordered them to sit in the dirt in front of the clean room, where Brad cuffed their hands behind them with plastic ties.

“Anyone see where that kid went?” Travis asked, scanning the room.

Tin scooted lower, pressing his face into the dirt and chicken droppings. Realizing he had lost his hat, he felt a wave of anxiety. Without the hat, he felt exposed, naked.