Nicholas Smith - Deliverance

X staggered backward. He quickly righted himself and grabbed Miles. He put the dog in a bucket seat and buckled the harness across his body, then sat beside him and clicked a belt across his chest armor.

The next impact pushed the vehicle to the very edge of the bluff. The front seemed to dip, and X held in a breath.

The beasts hit harder the next time, and he felt the vehicle teeter on its undercarriage. There was a sickening lurch, and for a second, all sense of motion vanished.

Miles let out a whimper as the vehicle accelerated down the slope. The front of the Stryker smashed into rocks, jerking X back and forth with each impact.

Through gritted teeth, he said, “Hold on, buddy.”

Captain Leon Jordan tried to shake off the recurring nightmare as he walked through the dimly lit passages of the Hive. In the dream, Xavier Rodriguez would slice Jordan’s throat from ear to ear with a rusty blade. Jordan tried to plead for mercy, but that only made X push harder on the blade until it hit bone.

Jordan always woke up bathed in sweat, breathing heavily and reaching for his throat. And now he didn’t even have Katrina to comfort him in the early morning hours. She had betrayed him, which hurt worse than the torture of the nightmares.

Holding up his wristwatch, he checked the time. 0600 hours.

Almost everyone on the ship was still asleep, but he had a feeling Katrina would be wide awake by the time he got to the brig. Deep down, he still held on to hope that she would change her mind, that she would see that he only wanted to save the human race. That everything he had done was to secure a future for her and their unborn child.

Two guards flanked him as he worked his way through the winding passages of the ship. Rusted steel hatches covered the portholes on the bulkheads, and in the faint glow of the overhead lights, he studied the bright drawings of fluffy white clouds, blue skies, and happy sun faces painted on them. Ever since he was young man, having put aside childish fantasies, he found the artwork disturbing. Why hide the truth?

He halted for a moment and then turned to the guard on his right.

“Ensign Lore, I want these hatches removed and used for scrap,” Jordan ordered. “People should see what’s really out there.”

Lore scratched at the back of his neck but didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to; reluctance was written across his face.

“Those have been here for a hundred years, sir,” said the other guard, a thickset man named Del Toro. “My grandfather helped paint—”

Jordan took a step closer to both guards, staring them down without saying another word.

“Yes, Captain,” Lore said. “I’ll… we’ll make sure of it.”

Jordan continued around the next corner, the two guards hurrying to catch up. Ahead, two women from the lower decks emerged from an open hatch. He examined the contents of their baskets as he passed. A handful of undersized tomatoes, some of them still green, which told him things were getting even more desperate below. The women avoided his gaze and walked in the opposite direction, toward the trading post, while Jordan and his escort continued to the brig.

Red helium pipes snaked across the overhead. The gray fins of sea creatures cut through the faded blue ocean scene decorating the pipes. The images reminded him of Janga’s prophecy. She had claimed that a man would lead them to a new home near an ocean filled with strange fish. The dangerous rhetoric had forced Jordan into the position he was in now, with most of the lower-deckers hating him and everything he represented. He took a moment to imagine her body smashing into the surface twenty thousand feet below. The image filled him with grim satisfaction. He no longer had to worry about Janga, at least.

“I want this artwork…” Jordan paused. “I want this shit removed.”

Lore nodded. “I’ll add that to the list, sir.”

Jordan continued walking toward an intersection. The bridge was to the right, but he turned left instead. Many of his staff lived in this wing, but he hadn’t been here for a while. Over the decades, the occupants had added little decorations to the bulkheads and hatches.

He recalled long ago, when he was just a child, scribbling his own drawings along this passage. His mother was dead by then, and his father spent most of his time in the water treatment plant where he worked, or at the Wingman, drinking his sorrows away, and hadn’t been around to teach him right from wrong.

He walked slowly toward room 789 and stopped outside the hatch. Memories flashed in his mind’s eye as he reached out to touch a faint picture of a star-filled sky. He ran a fingertip down the metal to a sketch of a stone castle. He had seen something like it in a book—a place surrounded by white walls with fields of crops, and pastures where he could ride a horse, and streams where he could skip stones or fish for food.

Everyone on the Hive had imagined an ideal home at some point, a fantasy cobbled together from pictures and old videos along with rumors and daydreams. But none of those places existed anymore. The closest thing to a castle on the surface, Jordan knew, was the Hilltop Bastion, a concrete bunker that housed only monsters, not knights and princesses.

He yanked his hand away from the hatch as if it had burned his flesh. There were no fairy-tale castles. No safe havens. No heaven.

Only hell.

Children needed to grow up knowing the truth instead of holding on to dreams of the past.

“I want the Hive purged of every single painting, sketch, drawing, and graffito,” Jordan said. “I want the bulkheads and everything else scrubbed clean. Anyone caught defacing the ship will be subject to loss of rations, or time in the brig. Repeat offenders will be dealt with harshly.”

The guards nodded, their faces expressionless, and prepared to follow Jordan, but after a few steps, he halted in the middle of the passage.

“Del Toro, I want that order carried out immediately,” Jordan said. “Lore, follow me.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Del Toro said.

Footfalls receded in opposite directions as the men parted ways. Jordan continued toward the brig, but when he got there, he didn’t stop. Lore remarked on the change of route this time, but Jordan ignored him. Three turns later, they stopped.

“Stay here,” Jordan said.

He opened the wide doors to the launch bay and stepped inside. Across the room, past the launch tubes, four silhouetted figures paused their routine of push-ups and stood. While most of the ship still slept, the new Hell Divers trained.

Sergeant Jenkins stood watching with his sleeves rolled up to midbiceps, showing off old muscle covered in militia tattoos. Jordan wasn’t sure exactly how old the man was, but he had to be nearing sixty—a venerable age aboard the Hive. In many ways, Jenkins was a legend, much as X had once been.

The soldier lowered his arms to his sides and stiffened as Jordan approached. He saluted. The divers followed his lead.

“Good morning, Captain,” said the sergeant.

“We’ll see about that,” Jordan said.

He stopped to scan the new divers. Jenkins had been tasked with vetting the three volunteers from the ceremony and scouting two more individuals for a complete dive team. So why did Jordan see only four divers?

“Form a rank,” Jenkins said gruffly.

Jordan walked through the maze of launch tubes and stopped ten feet from the new divers, who were now standing side by side. He knew their names already but decided to let them introduce themselves.