Hell Divers (2 page)

X had no one waiting for him or weighing on him. And that was what made him one of the best divers.

Feeling the cool mattress of wind pushing up on him, X reached outward a few inches with his left arm—just enough to make a slow rightward turn and 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, peering into the clouds again. A dazzling web of lightning forked across below them at fifteen thousand feet.

Static crackled from the speaker in his helmet as one of the other divers tried to speak, but the garbled words were impossible to make out. X trained his eyes on the swirling clouds. The darkness masked the size of the storm, but he wasn't deceived. If it was already screwing with their electronics, it had to be huge.

As he cut through the sky, the sporadic lightning intensified. A pocket of turbulence jerked him suddenly to the left at twelve thousand feet. The wind whistled over his armor and rippled across his bodysuit. He focused on centering his mass and holding his stable free-fall position.

Ten thousand feet. Halfway there.

He shot through a shelf of cloud as black and flat as an anvil and watched in shock as the entire sky lit up with flashes of electric blue. Experience immediately took over. Bringing his arms back into a V, he tilted his nose down, and narrowed the V into an arrow point.

His team had vanished in the clouds, but they would be doing the same thing. The wind shears and electrical disturbances would render them deaf and blind, their electronics useless. That was why X had trained his team to calculate their altitude and velocity by time in free fall, aided by whatever they could glimpse of ground or horizon, without the assistance of a computer program.

But running numbers while falling through a lightning storm was next to impossible. The wind beat every inch of his body, and the lightning strikes seemed to bend the darkness and warp the space around them. He hadn't seen a storm this massive and deep in a long time. It spread across his entire field of vision. There was no getting around it. They just had to punch through as fast as possible.

He split through the clouds like a missile, his body whistling as his velocity increased. A scrambled HUD reading, “
8,000',
”
flickered on his visor right before he slipped into the dark heart of the abyss. He was falling at one hundred sixty miles per hour and counting. Every fiber of muscle in his body seemed to quiver in readiness. The screaming wind gave way to the rifle crack of nearby strikes, and the bowling rumble of those more distant. The constant shears threw him this way and that, forcing him to stiffen his legs and adjust constantly with his hands as rudders to maintain the nosedive and avoid spinning or tumbling.

An arc of lightning streaked in front of him. With no time to move or even flinch, he felt every hair on his body rise as one.

The mere fact that he was having this thought meant the strike wasn't critical. He could still see, and his heart was still hammering away. The strike hadn't penetrated the layer of synthetic materials in his suit that was designed to offer a degree of protection against the electrical jolt. Still, he was bound to feel some of the burn before long.

Six thousand feet.

Bringing his arms out to his sides and bending his knees, 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.

“
God damn,
” X whispered. He clenched his jaw, fighting to compartmentalize the anger swirling under his burning flesh. Someone would pay for this stupidity, but it would have to wait.

Four thousand feet.

Lightning flitted through his fall line. This time, he didn't even blink. He was almost down and was focused completely on gauging the time between himself and the surface. The suits had no autodeploy system—the engineers had removed them years ago at X's request. He didn't want a buggy computer system as old as he was determining when his chute fired.

A blinking dot in the welter of data on his HUD pulled his attention back to his visor. Will's beacon had veered dramatically off course.

X tilted his helmet, searching the darkness for the blue glow of the battery unit, and glimpsed it spinning away into the whirling black mass.

Will's beacon blinked off a moment later, his heart stopped by a fatal jolt of static electricity. The kid had ended up precisely on the statistical mean after all: dead on his fifteenth jump.

X felt a tremble of anger. The two divers had been so close, almost out of the storm, almost through to the relative safety of a toxic earth. 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 miss a storm a hundred miles wide?

Screaming in rage, X burst through the cloud floor at terminal velocity and bumped the pad in his helmet to activate his night-vision goggles (NVGs). Below, a decaying city exploded into view. The rusted tombstones of skyscrapers rose out of the metal-and-concrete graveyard. Those buildings that hadn't crumbled stood leaning against one another like a forest of dead snags. Their tilted girders, showing vivid green, filled his visor, growing larger with every thump of his heart.

Three thousand feet.

Clear of the storm at last, X tucked one arm and made half a barrel roll, then lay on his back, legs and arms spread. The glow of a battery unit came into view, and two seconds later a diver shot through the clouds above. Having confirmed that it was Aaron, he rolled back into stable position and pulled his rip cord. The suspension lines came taut, yanking him upward, or so it felt. Reaching up, he grabbed the toggles and steered toward a field of dirt to the north of two crumbled buildings.

With the drop zone (DZ) identified, he pulled the left toggle, turning the canopy to scan the sky. Aaron came back into view a heartbeat later, but something was wrong. He was still in a nosedive and screaming toward the pyramid of ruins.

“Aaron, pull your fucking chute!” X shouted into the comm.

Static crackled, and a second passed. Another two hundred fifty feet closer to the ground.

Aaron's panicked voice boomed over the channel. “I can't see! My night vision isn't working!”

X squandered a half second checking his DZ. He was still on course for a clear landing. He returned his gaze to the sky, locking on the blue meteor that was Aaron.

“Pull your chute! I'll guide you.”

“I can't see nothin' but rooftops!” The flurry of static couldn't hide the fear in Aaron's voice.

“Pull your chute, God damn it, unless you want to
eat
one of those rooftops!”

X breathed again as Aaron's canopy finally inflated. He still had a chance to slow down, a chance to live. X would guide him. His eyes would be Aaron's eyes.

“Steer left!”

Aaron pulled away from the towers, but there were so many.
Too
many. He plunged toward the jutting bones of what had once been a magnificent high-rise office building.

X rotated for a better view, his ears popping from the change in pressure. Dizziness washed over him. He blinked it away, keeping his eyes on Aaron. He was slowly gliding away from the stalks of broken buildings.

“I can't see, X!”

“Keep pulling left. You're almost clear!”

There was a pause.

“Remember what I told you about Tin?” Aaron's voice was softer now.

X's heart caught for half a beat. “Yes.”

“You have to take care of him. Promise me!”

“Aaron, you're going to make it! Keep to your fucking left! You're almost clear.”

The canopy pulled Aaron away from the jungle of steel and glass, but X couldn't see a clear landing zone. He squirmed in his harness, eyes roving frantically across the desolate landscape for a way down.

“Promise me, damn it,” Aaron repeated.

X sucked in a measured breath. “I promise. But you're going to—”

Before he could finish his sentence, the blue silhouette swung around and smashed into the side of a building. X watched helplessly as the chute caught on jagged metal. The force tore it free, and the blue glow plummeted into darkness.

The lonely crackle of static washed over the comm. An eyeblink later, he lost sight of Aaron, but he heard the crunching thud over the comm as his friend's body smacked into the pavement.

X stared at the ruined buildings, the air seized from his chest, unable to process that Aaron was really gone. He had only seconds before he had to flare his chute and hit the ground himself, but he couldn't pull his gaze away from the towers or bear the thought of finding Aaron's mangled corpse. Not now, not after surviving this many dives.

At some point, he snapped out of his dazed state, jolted alert by his promise and his duty. Humankind was counting on him. Aaron had died, and Will and Rodney before him. But X
couldn't
die. He still had two things to do: find the power cells and see Tin through to adulthood.

The square of dirt was rising up to meet him. Bending his knees slightly, he pulled on the toggles to slow his descent and performed a two-stage flare. A halo of dust billowed up around him as his boots connected with the poisoned ground. He tried to run out the momentum, but with no grass or leaves to flutter in the breeze, he had misgauged and approached crosswind. His knees folded, and he lost his balance.

X hit the ground hard, his body tumbling and then skidding across the bare dirt. When he finally fetched up, he was on his back. He lay there for a few seconds. That horrible crunching sound still echoed in his ears. He couldn't see or breathe. He had lost his entire team in a single jump, in what was supposed to be a
green-zone
dive.

Furious, he thrashed at the risers and cascade lines wrapped around his midsection and legs. The loose low-porosity nylon rippled in the toxic breeze. He squirmed and pulled it away from his armor, tripping and falling again in the process. Pulling his knife, he sliced through the harnesses, finally freeing himself. He swore again and kicked at the dirt from a sitting position.

The wind had calmed, and the roll and clatter of thunder was far away. He sheathed his knife and lingered on the ground before finally pushing himself to his feet.

Wobbling as the blood rushed from his head, he looked through the bees swarming in his field of vision at his HUD. The beacon of the supply crate Ty had dropped was a half mile away.

Reaching down, he activated his wrist computer. A map rolled out across the screen. He flicked the surface with a fingertip and dragged a navigation marker to the crate's location.

At least he wouldn't have to trek across the wasteland for hours to secure his gear. He checked the map for a second time to search for the main target. The
Hive
's records put the nuclear fuel cells in an old warehouse two miles from the supply crate. He set a second nav flag to mark the location.

When he had finished plotting his route, he checked the radiation readings. His heart skipped when he saw the digital telemetry on his HUD. Something had to be wrong. The numbers were astronomical.

Green dive, my ass!

He hadn't the time right now to curse Captain Ash's team. He had to get moving. His layered suit wouldn't keep out all the radiation, so the clock was ticking. He pulled his blaster from the holster on his right hip and cracked the triple-barreled break-action open to expose two shotgun shells in the breech. It was good he checked; he had forgotten the flare. He plucked one from his vest, inserted it in the top barrel, and snapped the action shut with a click.

The training and experience he had acquired over ninety-six dives kicked in. He scanned the devastation all around him, framed on either side by hundreds of skeletal buildings, and at the top by the swirling storm. It was a sight other Hell Divers had seen countless times, but this time X was the only man left standing to see it.

“Please Maria, there's still time,” Mark Ash said. “Jordan can take over. You've done your duty to the
Hive
. It's time you looked after yourself.”

Captain Maria Ash hunched over the sink and spat blood into the bowl. She shivered and gripped the cold metal to steady herself.

“Jordan's not ready,” she said. “He has a lot to learn before he takes the helm.” She closed her eyes and waited for the dizziness to pass. She opened them to her husband's reflection in the mirror. What little brown hair he had left formed a crown around his skull, like a monk's tonsure. He positioned his glasses farther down, against the bulb of his nose, then smiled when he saw she was looking at him.

Even though she should be accustomed by now, she still gasped at the sight of the woman next to him. Her pale skin accentuated the bags under her green eyes, and her tailored white uniform couldn't hide the weight she had lost. Her face was haggard, and for a moment she wished she could buy makeup off the black market. But she had to set an example, even if it meant looking like a walking cadaver.

She ran a hand through her bright-red hair. At least
that
had come back. Her hair had always been a defining feature, and losing it had been like losing part of her identity. Two days ago, when one of the
Hive
's doctors told her the throat cancer had returned, the first thing she had done was touch her hair. It was her one luxury, the one bit of femininity she could still show to the world. She deftly twisted it into a bun and secured it with a handful of pins.

Mark put a hand on the back of her shoulder. “I love you, Maria, since the day we met nearly twenty-five years ago. I don't want to lose you.”

She turned away from the mirror to face him. “And I love you, but you know how important my dream is to me. I have to find us a new home. I know there's a place out there for us—a surface area that's habitable. I will find it.”

He gave a little sigh. “You want to believe it's out there, but even your own staff doesn't think such a place exists. Please, I'm begging you. Let Jordan take over. Accept treatment again. I almost lost you once already.”

Maria shook her head and turned back to the mirror. She was a fighter. Always had been. Before she was captain, she had been a lieutenant in the Militia. She always wore her uniforms with pride.

“The ship needs me, now more than ever. We just dropped Team Raptor into an electrical storm, for God's sake!”

Mark crinkled his nose—something he did when he wasn't sure what to say.

“There are only two airships left in the
entire
world
,” she said. “I will not abandon my duty now.”

“Okay, I understand.” With a defeated nod, he opened the bathroom door and left her staring into the mirror.

Maria picked her wedding ring up off the sink and twisted it back into place. It was loose on her bony finger, and she had to curl her hand into a fist to keep it on. Mark was right. Most of her staff didn't believe there was anywhere on the poisoned surface where humanity could start over, but she had to believe. Most days, that small ray of hope was the only thing that kept her going.

An undecipherable voice broke across the PA speakers outside, recalling her to the bridge. After losing contact with Team Raptor, she feared the worst. They needed those nuclear fuel cells to keep their home in the air, and to stiffen her resolve to keep looking for a new home. It wasn't often that they came across potential locations for nuclear cells—which made today's mission even more vital.

Maria flicked off the light and walked back onto the bridge. Mark had returned to his shift at the water treatment plant, but her stone-faced executive officer, Leon Jordan, was waiting for her at the entrance of the room. She studied him from afar, trying to get a read before he broke whatever news he had. He was a stoic young man with stern features that she might expect from someone twice his age. His strong jaw and dark brown eyes revealed no hint of anxiety, only strength. It was partly why she had selected him as her XO. He was smart, loyal, and ambitious, and like her, he cared about the
Hive
and its passengers. He would make a fine captain someday—maybe someday soon—but she wasn't ready to hand over the reins just yet.

Maria stepped out of the shadows and gripped the railing, looking out over the room below her. “Any news on Raptor?”

“Afraid not, Captain,” Jordan said. “But engineering did fix the faulty sensor.”

“Doesn't help X and his men, now, does it?” Her tone was harsh, but she wasn't mad at Jordan or engineering—only at herself. The damage was already done. She had likely sent an entire team to their deaths. Hell Divers were a precious resource. Of every five recruits, only one made it through the training alive. And the life expectancy of those who did was only a few years. X and Aaron were the exceptions. To think she had lost them because of a faulty sensor made her throat hurt even worse.

Maria made herself breathe deeply. The faint scent of bleach lingered in the air. The entire bridge was spotless and bathed in clean white light. The tile floor, walls, and even the pod stations matched the white uniforms of those who worked here. Keeping the room immaculate and bright was a tradition handed down through the generations. The bridge was a beacon of hope, and Maria wanted her staff to embody that hope at all times.

With Jordan in tow, she walked down the center ramp that bisected the room. Passing operations and navigation, she asked him, “You got a sitrep from engineering?” She stopped beside the oak steering wheel in the center of the platform and rested her hand lightly on it.

Nodding, Jordan continued to the main display at the front of the room and activated it with a flick of a finger. A close-up of Chief Engineer Roger Samson's bald head filled the screen. The cam pulled back to a short, burly man, scratching his scalp and staring at another monitor offscreen.

“Samson,” she said, “Jordan says you have a sitrep.”

Startled, the engineer looked up. “Yes, Captain. We have a major fucking problem. The electrical storm caused severe damage to the pressure relief valves on two of the reactors. Both are stuck, and I had to shut them down. Luckily, we didn't have any radiation leaks.”

Maria breathed a sigh of relief. “Radiation” and “leak” were the last two words a captain wanted to hear, since even a small leak could kill everyone aboard.

“I have to keep them offline until we can get a crew to fix them. Probably be a couple days. We're running at half power now, with two others already offline. I need those fuel cells from Team Raptor, and I need 'em yesterday.”

“Can't you take cells out of the damaged reactors and put them in the two that are offline?” Jordan asked.

Samson snorted, then caught himself and said, “Doesn't work like that, sir.”

“So what do we do?” Jordan folded his arms across his chest.

“We pray X comes back with cells,” Maria said. She knew her ship inside and out. Without the reactors, they were dead in the water—
air
, actually. The thermal energy they produced converted into electrical energy that fed through a network below decks. Some of that energy was stored in a backup battery the size of an entire room. When it was gone, the helium gas bladders would keep them in the air, but without power, the ship's systems would fail. Everything, from the water reclamation plant where her husband worked to the massive farms where they grew their food, would shut down. The rudders and turbofans would be useless, and the
Hive
would drift helplessly through the sky, dark and dead, until an electrical storm or a mountain peak dealt the final blow.

“How are the gas bladders holding up?” Maria asked.

“We lost another two,” said Samson. “Down to sixteen of twenty-four. I was able to revert the helium back through the network, and we've diverted energy from all nonessential sources, but I'm running out of options. Pretty soon, we're going to have to start shutting off lights.”

Jordan shook his head. “If you do that, we're going to have to worry about more than just riots. We'll be dealing with pure chaos and anarchy from the lower-deckers.”

“Would you rather crash?” Samson glared at them from the screen. “I don't know if you realize this, Lieutenant, but the
Hive
is dying. If we go down, there's only
Ares
left—and frankly, that bucket of rust is in worse shape than we are.”

Maria held up a hand. “I'm painfully aware of this, Samson.”

The fat engineer wiped his forehead and said, “Sorry, Captain. It's just …” He paused and locked eyes with her. “Unless you find us a magical place to put down, we're going to have to start making some very unpopular choices if we want to stay in the air.”

She exchanged a glance with Jordan. His features remained unchanged, unemotional. He would tell her his opinion in confidence, away from the ears of the other officers. Talk spread quickly through the
Hive
, and she didn't want to feed the rumor mill with a note of raw panic.

“Keep this quiet,” Maria said. “That's an order, Samson.”

“Understood.”

The feed sizzled to darkness. She had a sour burn in her throat. She could almost feel the cancer cells, chomping away at her insides. The
Hive
had a sort of cancer too: a shortage of power. Samson was right. The ship was dying, and if X didn't return with more cells, it would be a matter of when, not if, they crashed to the ruined surface like all the other airships before them.

* * * * *

Two hours of trekking through the dead city gave X ample time to think. He carried more than the assault rifle he had retrieved from the supply crate. As he trudged through the wastelands and climbed to the top of an overlook, he felt the weight of every diver's death over the past twenty years. Will, Rodney, and Aaron were just three more bodies on the pile.

He could almost make himself believe that it was an accident, but the combined gut punch of anger and grief still made his insides roil. What the hell had Command been thinking? Dropping a team through an electrical storm was a disastrous mistake—one that his team had paid for with their lives. And now, on top of that, he was trudging over radioactive dirt in what was supposed to be a green zone.

Humanity was three deaths closer to extinction, and if he didn't get those power cells, half the rest would die. Twenty thousand feet overhead, 546 men, women, and children were counting on him.

But if he made it back to the
Hive,
he would find the people who had made his best friend's son an orphan. If he needed it, that gave him one more reason to survive this.

The distant boom of thunder pulled him back to the present. He raised his binos and glassed the ruined city. Sporadic flashes of lightning backlit the husks of towers with a pulsating glow.

He clicked off his night-vision optics and saw the world for what it was: gray and brown and dead. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't imagine the thrum and bustle of this metropolis before the bombs dropped.

The boneyard of ruins stretched as far as he could see. Even in this vast openness, he suddenly felt trapped, suffocated by his suit and the narrow view through his visor. Ironic for someone who had lived most of his life in the cramped confines of the
Hive
. Usually, diving allowed him an escape from the controlled, regimented, stifling environment. But now he just felt isolated and lonely, like a fish in a small bowl.

He swept the binos over block after city block of rubble until he found a cluster of four buildings still standing amid the destruction. Checking his minimap, he confirmed his location. He was at the target.

The aboveground vaults were warehouses of Industrial Tech Corporation, the same company that had built the
Hive
and her sister ships. The engineers had designed the floating warships to last ten, perhaps twenty years. No one had ever imagined they would end up becoming humanity's home for almost two and a half centuries. The ships should have fallen to pieces long ago, and they would have if not for the Hell Divers.

X took his duty seriously. Sure, the little perks like extra rations and private quarters were nice, but those weren't why he dived. He dived to keep humanity in the sky. Every decision he made on the surface affected whether they lived or died. And right now he was wasting time.

Peering down the long incline of brick and metal, he found himself weighing another decision. He could climb down and risk a tear to his suit, or find a way around. The radiation readings made the decision simple: a tear would result in a lingering, painful death.

He stepped closer to the edge to look for a way down. The darkness hid all sorts of traps that had claimed the lives of countless divers. He had watched teammates swallowed by sinkholes, crushed inside unstable buildings, shredded in dust storms that stretched for miles. Hell, he had even seen them torn apart by mutant things that had adapted to live in the radiation zones—zones like this one.

He reactivated his night vision and searched for signs of life. No motion and no heat signature—nothing to suggest that anything had crossed through here lately.

A strong gust pushed him back, and he stumbled to the side. He planted his boots, but the slight movement changed his view. A hundred feet to the west, a path that he had missed earlier curved to the bottom.

He worked his way over to the trail and picked his way down to the cracked street. There wasn't much cover between him and the buildings. Although he didn't see any movement, that didn't mean he was alone.

After making a final sweep of the area, he took off at a dead sprint across the open stretch. A blast of wind laced with dirt hit him a few feet from the building. He fought it, head tucked to his chest, and propped his back against the wall.