Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

The divers from all three teams were working into a wedge formation. He counted the glowing battery units cutting through the clouds, and the flares that left streaking, tumbling red tracers behind them. He had never seen anything like it on a dive, but the flares would give the others something visual to key on in a sea of darkness.

His HUD suddenly winked back on. Before the data vanished again, he caught the altitude reading: five thousand feet down, fifteen thousand to go.

A thunderclap reminded him of the gunfire he had heard. Was Tin okay? Was the Hive in trouble? He blinked away the thought and focused on the clouds. A web of lightning arced across his field of view. The dark floor gave way to a roiling purple maelstrom, and their entire flight path lit up as if floodlights had turned on. They were about to pass into the heart of the storm.

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.