Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

He shook his head.

Magnolia dropped to a half crouch, her breathing labored, raspy. “He’s… gone?” She clutched her stomach.

Katrina rushed over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t puke in your helmet.

Magnolia nodded and waved Katrina away. “It’s okay. It’s back down.”

“We’d better move, X,” Tony said.

He noted the mission clock. Three minutes into the mission, and over half of them were dead.

“Get it together, kid,” X said. “We got to start moving, okay? We have twenty-four hours to save the Hive .”

She managed a weak nod. X stared up into the swirling clouds, hoping another live diver would emerge from the darkness, but knowing it wouldn’t happen. The other divers were dead, and if anyone came falling from the sky, there would be no graceful landing under a chute. They would frap in the snow, breaking every bone in their lifeless bodies and turning the rest to mush.

X pulled his binos and swept them across the landscape, stopping on the towers to the northwest. The tops of three buildings had been stripped away. Odd, since the rest were still standing. He moved the scope to a flattened area to the west and saw the stern of an airship jutting up from the snow. There wasn’t much left: just aluminum struts and debris strewn across half a square mile of the dead city.

He didn’t need to zoom in to see that it was Ares.

Captain Ash swung the wheel right, steering them toward the western edge of the storm, where the lightning flashes were less intense. All she had to do was keep them away from a fatal strike for a few more minutes.

“We’ve lost the divers’ signals,” Jordan yelled.

“We have a rupture in gas bladder twenty-one,” Ryan said.

Jordan rushed to the ops station. “Divert helium from bladder twenty-one.”

Ash heard each voice, but she was busy trying to steer the ship out of the raging sea of static electricity.

A jolt hit the stern, setting off a chorus of sensors and alarms. She blinked away a drop of sweat and continued staring at the main display. The Hive ’s bow pushed ahead toward the wall of glowing blue.

“That’s the edge of the storm,” Hunt shouted from navigation. “We’re almost out.”

Ash kept the wheel steady as they glided through the final stretch of lightning. She couldn’t see the invisible barrier between the storm and clear skies, but she felt it the moment the bow split through to the other side. Every wall and beam seemed to groan and creak, as if in relief.

Warning sensors continued to chirp, but she ignored them all. They were safely out of the storm now, but they had other problems. Someone had fired a gun at the very moment the Hell Diver teams had dropped from their tubes. Her throat ached, and she reached up to massage it. Her mind was trying to grasp everything that had happened during the past fifteen minutes.

Before she could make much sense of it, she heard Jordan’s voice in her ear. “Captain, we have a strike team on standby and ready to go.”

“Do we know how many assailants there are, or who they are?”

“Negative, but Eli and Cecil are dead, and Tin is missing.”

Ash rubbed at her throat. “No,” she choked. “I promised X…”

“We’ll find him, Captain.”

“We’d better,” Ash said. Her eyes flitted from station to station, checking each worried face. “Do we have a damage report from the storm?”

“Samson’s working on it.”

“What about the HDs? Do we know how many made it to the surface?”

Jordan shook his head. “I’m sorry, but we lost contact with them shortly after they dropped.”

Ash wiped the sweat from her brow. “Lieutenant, is there anything you can tell me?”

“That’s all I know… Hold on. I’m getting a transmission.” He cupped a hand over his earpiece and listened for several moments.

When he looked up, his anxious gaze told Ash she was going to have to make another decision.

“The strike team is asking for orders. Should I give them the green light?”

“No!” Ash yelled. Several officers looked in her direction. “We can’t risk it, especially if Tin is in there.”

A few seconds of silence passed before Ash spoke. “How the hell did they get hold of an automatic rifle?”

“Some of the weapons were never recovered after the riots two years ago,” Jordan said. “They must have had one stashed away.”

“Tell the strike team to stand down for now. I want to know who these people are and what they want. Don’t they know we don’t have time for this shit?”

“They certainly knew when to strike,” Jordan said.

Ash had to temper her fury with the knowledge that her own leniency with the lower-deckers was partly to blame. “Whoever it is, they don’t give a shit about the Hive ’s current predicament. Do they realize they could kill us all? Do they even care ? We need some answers.”

A chirp pulled her gaze to the main display at the front of the room. Samson’s strained face emerged on the screen.

“Captain,” he said, “I just finished running a diagnostic report. I have bad news and good news.”

“Good news first.”

The engineer nodded, his pink cheeks jiggling. “The reactor is still online. We didn’t suffer any damage there.”

“That is good n—” Ash began.

Samson raised his hand. “But we did lose another internal gas bladder during the attack. That was the last straw. We’re losing altitude—slowly, but the ship is dropping. My crews still haven’t been able to fix the other six bladders we lost two days ago.”

“Can they fix this one?” Ash asked.

“Yes, if they could get there. But the access hatch down here was destroyed when the storm ate us two days ago, and the only other entry is through a passage on the farm.”

“How the hell did this even happen?”

“I’d guess a stray bullet’s to blame—not a lot of safe places on an airship to go shooting off a rifle. If that’s the case, we can patch it. The other gas bladders were ruptured by the storm. Those’ll take more time.”

Ash turned back to Jordan. “If we send in the strike team, we risk more damage to the ship, not to mention more casualties if those men decide to fire again. They’ve already proved they don’t mind killing people.”

“But if we don’t, we won’t be able to fix the bladder,” Jordan argued.

“He’s right, Captain,” Samson said. “The Hive is struggling to stay in the air. I’ve routed all the power I can to the turbofans, but we’re sinking. We need that bladder!”

“Can you keep us in the air for twenty-four hours? Long enough for the HDs to get back here?”

“You aren’t giving me any other option, are you?”

Ash took one hand off the wheel. “Jordan, take the helm. Samson, prepare an engineering team.”

Samson frowned. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to negotiate.”

Powerful gusts of wind showered the five-person team with ice and grit as they trekked through the derelict city. The intermittent lightning flashes allowed the divers to go without their night-vision optics. X stared out over the ash-colored landscape of Hades. Mother Nature was gradually finishing what the bombs hadn’t quite been able to do. Most of the buildings were gone, buried by God only knew how many feet of snow.

The remains of Ares rested in a shallow grave in the center of the city. X kept looking in amazement at the three topless buildings. The ship must have sheared them off as it came crashing down. That would have dealt the final blows. He wondered what had gone through Captain Willis’ mind in those final moments.