Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

Travis glared at him. “That wasn’t ten minutes!”

Raphael shied away from the guard, scooting to the edge of his chair. He glanced back at Travis with sunken eyes bereft of hope, and Travis knew in that moment that he had lost his brother.

“You hang in there,” Travis said. “You’re gonna be fine. I’ll see you in a few months.”

Raphael mouthed something that Travis couldn’t make out. At first, he thought it was “Help,” but no, that was wrong. Before he could say anything else, the guard hoisted Raphael to his feet.

“Time to go,” the guard said.

Raphael looked back at Travis once more and said, “Goodbye, Trav.”

“Goodbye, Raphael,” he whispered. He put a hand on the glass and watched through a blur of tears as the guard whisked his brother away. It would have taken three guards to haul away the Raphael he remembered, but that man was gone now. It was up to Travis to fight and to prove that their mother had been wrong about humanity.

A Hell Diver hovered in the upward blast of air in one of the wind tunnels. X shut the door to the training facility and watched from the entrance. He could tell by the diver’s graceful movements that it was Katrina DaVita. Arms and legs spread and head tilted upward, she rode the column of wind effortlessly. Ripples rolled across the slack in her suit as she moved precisely backward, forward, and sideways.

“Perfect,” X whispered.

Katrina’s moves prompted a few whistles and cheers from the other divers. X put a stop to that with a clap of his hands.

“Listen up!” he said, crossing the room in a hurry.

Tony gave a thumbs-up to Katrina. She flipped into a cross-legged sitting position, and he deactivated the wind tunnel with the flip of a switch. Settling gently to the floor, she flipped her visor and smiled at X. The joy in her grin told him Cruise and Tony hadn’t disobeyed the order to keep quiet. The other teams still didn’t know about Ares .

The divers circled around X, Tony, and Cruise. Katrina shucked off her helmet and brushed her cropped brown hair from her face. Her lips slowly relaxed into a thin line.

X waited till he had everyone’s attention. When all eyes were on him, he said, “A few minutes ago, I was informed that we have arrived over the eastern outskirts of Hades.”

At the news, all trace of civility disappeared in an instant, and the room erupted into chaos. Magnolia shouted the loudest.

“What the hell are we doing there?”

This got X a smirk from Cruise.

“Calm down,” X said. “Everyone just calm the fuck down.” The shouts dwindled into chatter and, eventually, silence.

“Captain Ash received an SOS from Ares . Details are still sketchy, but what we do know is, their ship was damaged in an electrical storm. Captain Willis came here to attempt a salvage op. He deployed a team to the surface—”

“They sent a team down there ?” Murph gasped.

Several other divers shouted more questions while Katrina just bowed her head at the news. Murph scratched at his cheek, and even Sam couldn’t hide the fear behind his stoic silence. Magnolia gaped, but when she saw X looking at her, she closed her mouth and started picking at a black-lacquered fingernail.

X unfolded his arms and rubbed his eyelids as the divers continued their rapid-fire shouting. He was tired and would rather be doing just about anything than field questions he didn’t know the answers to.

“So what’s this mean for us?” a diver from Team Angel said.

“Are we diving, too?” someone else asked.

“Let Commander Rodriguez finish,” Tony said.

“There is no reason to believe we are going to dive,” X added. “Captain Ash has only ordered us to prepare for a possible rescue operation. That’s all.”

“Wow, what a relief,” Magnolia muttered. “Can’t tell you how much better that makes me feel.”

“A rescue op?” Sam asked.

“Yeah,” X replied. “If we can locate their ship, then a team of divers will link up with Ares and provide whatever support they need. Could be parts, could be cells, or it could be something else. I simply don’t know at this point.”

Cruise shook his head. “We haven’t done one of those for years. Half of us aren’t even trained for it.”

“All the more reason to stop talking and start prepping,” X said.

“You heard him,” Tony said. “Let’s start the rescue-op drills.”

“You’re not going to tell everyone about the Sirens?” Cruise said. “About what you saw on your last dive?”

“Sirens?” Magnolia asked.

The words hung in the air for an uncomfortable moment. He shot Cruise a glare, holding back the dressing-down he wanted so badly to give.

“Well?” Magnolia said. “You gonna talk, or what?”

X hesitated, his gaze still burning into Cruise. They needed to train, not discuss man-eating monsters, but there was no way he could let this go now. He had to address it before fearful speculation spiraled out of control.

He turned to Magnolia and said, “I saw several creatures on my last dive. Some sort of mutants. Apparently, the divers from Ares saw them, too.” He waited for the inevitable barrage of questions, but no one spoke—not even Magnolia, who stood twisting a strand of blue hair around her finger.

“I’m not sure what they are—or were—but they communicate in…” X grimaced at the memory of those paralyzing sounds. “They communicate through these high-pitched shrieks that sound exactly like an emergency siren.”

“ That’s what killed your team?” Magnolia prodded in a voice just above a whisper.

“No,” X said. “I told you. The storms killed them. But those things did try to hunt me. The Sirens, or whatever the hell you want to call them, must use some sort of sonar, because they don’t have eyes.”

His words met with silence, which only added to the tension he could feel swelling in the room. He thought of Aaron and the swarm of monsters that had torn him apart after the balloon yanked X out of their reach.

Tony clapped his hands. “Okay, people. Enough questions for now. Time to get started on the rescue drills.”

Several divers groaned and started toward the operations room. Tony stopped to pat X on the shoulder, then followed the others. Katrina was the only one to stay behind. She walked over to X and stood by his side.

He gave her a sidelong glance. She was beautiful, but it wasn’t just her looks. She was as strong as any of the men, both physically and mentally. She held her own in training and on dives, and every diver respected her.

Katrina smiled, seeing she had caught his attention.

X looked away. He had carried on an affair with Katrina behind his wife’s back for almost six months, but then Rhonda got sick, and the day she was diagnosed with cancer, he broke things off with Katrina. He had stood by his wife in those agonizing last months, but even now, over a year later, just looking at Katrina felt like an insult to Rhonda’s memory.

“You think this is a good idea?” Katrina asked.

It took a second for X to realize she was talking about Ares . “Hard to say,” he replied. “Guess we will find out soon.”

“Guess so,” Katrina said. She brushed against him as she left.

Magnolia was waiting for her halfway across the room. They spoke in whispers, but X still heard every word Magnolia said.

“Hades is cursed after all… I’ve got a feeling we’re about to find out why.”

Weaver exploded out of the open warehouse doorway with such force that he tripped and crashed to the ground. He landed helmet first in the snow and bit his tongue. Ignoring the pain, he pushed himself back up and spun around to see shadowed shapes darting like lizards across the interior walls of the building.