Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

The beams from Team Raptor’s headlights cut through the darkness, dancing across the concrete walls of the narrow stairwell. Sam was on point, with X on his six. They moved up the stairs quickly, with Magnolia’s and Murph’s footfalls close behind.

“Should be the next floor,” X said. “Check it out.”

Sam moved with a soldier’s precision, sweeping his weapon across alternating fields of fire. He continued up the stairs to the next landing and disappeared from view. X used the moment to check the radiation. It was lower here but still high. They had to move quickly.

“All clear,” Sam said a moment later.

X glanced at Magnolia and Murph, in the shadows below. He didn’t need to see their faces to know they were terrified.

“Stay here,” he said to them, and he was darting up the stairs before they had a chance to protest. Sam waited outside a heavy door on the next landing. He grabbed the handle and twisted it, but it clicked: locked.

“See if you can hack in,” X said.

Sam searched the wall and brushed off a layer of dust to reveal a rectangular security panel. Pulling a cable from his vest, he uncoiled it and plugged one end into his wrist computer, the other end into the panel.

X was impressed. Sam operated as if he had done this a hundred times before. Hacking into Old World facilities wasn’t all that hard if you had the right gear. The minicomputers the divers carried had codes to most of the ITC facilities, and enough juice to jump-start the old tech. It was just a matter of time before they cracked this one.

The wait was shorter than X expected. The panel chirped, and the door creaked open.

“On me,” X said. Rifle up, he swung the door open.

Inside was a space frozen in time. Row after row of dusty tables filled the room. The floor was littered with shattered computer monitors. In the center of it all, a single desiccated corpse stared with empty eye sockets up at the ceiling.

X worked his way down the aisle toward the body and motioned for Sam to take the adjacent row.

“Think any of these computers work?” X asked.

“Probably not, sir.”

X stopped to examine the corpse. There was little left. The clothes had mostly disintegrated, revealing a membrane of dried skin stretched over bones. It was hard to tell whether it had been a man or a woman.

“Murph, Magnolia, get up here,” X said over the comm. He flung his assault rifle over his back and continued toward a rack of file cabinets at the front of the room.

“Murph, see if you can get one of these computers working. Might be a long shot, but it’s worth a try.” X checked his mission clock. They were down to the bone: thirty minutes remained.

He pulled open a cabinet and thumbed through the contents. “Magnolia, get over here and help me,” he said. “Sam, you watch the door.”

Magnolia said, “What am I looking for?”

“A map, I don’t know. Something that tells us the location of the manufacturing buildings in Hades.”

He pulled out a piece of paper that flaked apart in his hands. The next piece was so faded, he couldn’t make out the text.

“God damn it,” X said.

They spent the next fifteen minutes digging through the contents, looking for anything that might give them a lead to the location of the ITC factory in Hades. X tried to think, but it was impossible to concentrate when they were so close to the wire. The Hive was waiting, and without anything substantial, he considered telling the team to abandon the search. With the ship running on backup power, Ash still needed time to maneuver into position over Hades and drop all three teams. On top of that, they needed time to actually find the parts and then get back to the Hive . He hated the idea of returning with nothing concrete, but they had run out of time.

“Nothing works,” Murph said ruefully.

X scanned the room. It was a dead end. They had gambled and lost, and there was nothing to do but suck it up and return to the Hive .

“Fuck it, we’re out of time,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He waved the divers toward the exit, but Magnolia hung back. X could hear her rifling through the file cabinet.

“Wait,” she said. “Maybe I got something.” She pulled a laminated paper from a drawer and held it under her beam. He brushed off the surface.

“Looks like a map,” she said, handing it to X.

X snatched it from her hands and gave it a quick glance. She was right. It was a map of someplace called Chicago, Illinois—and it showed the location of the ITC headquarters. “Chicago” must have been the original name of Hades.

Magnolia reached back inside and pulled a second map. This one gave the location for the factories around the HQ. There were dozens of the domed buildings, and each was labeled. They would tell Samson exactly which structure they were looking for.

“Jackpot,” X said. “Any more?”

Magnolia peered into the open drawer and shook her head.

X stuffed one of the maps into his vest pocket and handed the other to Sam. “Just in case one of us doesn’t make it back.”

Sam took it reluctantly.

“Let’s get back to ship,” X said. He led the team back toward the building at double time, twice nearly stumbling down the stairs.

The speaker in his helmet crackled to life when he got back to the hallway. The faint sound of an emergency alarm filled the channel, and he could hardly hear the message over the noise.

“Commander X, do you copy? Over.”

X halted and said, “Roger that.”

A flurry of white noise crackled in his ear. He clenched his jaw, waiting anxiously for it to pass.

“Commander, we’ve been trying to reach you for thirty minutes!”

It was Jordan, and his normally calm voice held an edge of panic.

“You need to get back to the ship ASAP! The storm above Hades is heading your way. You have fifteen minutes to get home. I repeat, fifteen minutes!”

“On our way,” X said. Flicking off his headlamp, he switched on his night vision and peered out the window they had entered through. He could see in green the surging clouds and the lightning that webbed across the horizon. There was something else, too—something in the air that looked like bats, moving away from the storm. It wouldn’t be the first time his eyes played tricks on him.

“Got to move!” X shouted, waving his team forward. The static in his earpiece had faded, but the electronic whine of the emergency siren aboard the Hive continued as he raced toward the window. When he got there, he slid to a stop. The noise wasn’t coming from his comm channel. It was coming from the tiny dots flapping across the skyline.

X stared at the formations of winged creatures sailing toward him. There was no doubt in his mind they were the same creatures that had torn Aaron’s body to pieces, but somehow, these had evolved to fly.

“What the hell are those things?” Magnolia shouted, pushing past him and staring at the sky. Then, speechless, she slowly backed away until she hit the wall.

“Sirens,” X said, barely comprehending what he was saying. He watched the beasts and the storm beyond in terrible slow motion. For the past few days, he had promised himself he would be strong if he encountered the monsters again, but he never imagined seeing them in the air. Even the sky wasn’t safe from the monsters.

The shouts of the team sounded faint in the background. Magnolia had cowered away from the window and was sitting on the floor with her knees to her chest. Murph had crouched right behind her, his visor roving from side to side as he scanned the horizon.

The Sirens worked their way into a solid V formation, turning slightly as the lead creature fixated on Raptor’s location. There were a dozen of the pale creatures, flapping their leathery, frayed wings like demons in some fevered nightmare.