Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

“Afraid not, Captain,” Jordan said. “But engineering did fix the faulty sensor.”

“Doesn’t help X and his men, now, does it?” Her tone was harsh, but she wasn’t mad at Jordan or engineering—only at herself. The damage was already done. She had likely sent an entire team to their deaths. Hell Divers were a precious resource. Of every five recruits, only one made it through the training alive. And the life expectancy of those who did was only a few years. X and Aaron were the exceptions. To think she had lost them because of a faulty sensor made her throat hurt even worse.

Maria made herself breathe deeply. The faint scent of bleach lingered in the air. The entire bridge was spotless and bathed in clean white light. The tile floor, walls, and even the pod stations matched the white uniforms of those who worked here. Keeping the room immaculate and bright was a tradition handed down through the generations. The bridge was a beacon of hope, and Maria wanted her staff to embody that hope at all times.

With Jordan in tow, she walked down the center ramp that bisected the room. Passing operations and navigation, she asked him, “You got a sitrep from engineering?” She stopped beside the oak steering wheel in the center of the platform and rested her hand lightly on it.

Nodding, Jordan continued to the main display at the front of the room and activated it with a flick of a finger. A close-up of Chief Engineer Roger Samson’s bald head filled the screen. The cam pulled back to a short, burly man, scratching his scalp and staring at another monitor offscreen.

“Samson,” she said, “Jordan says you have a sitrep.”

Startled, the engineer looked up. “Yes, Captain. We have a major fucking problem. The electrical storm caused severe damage to the pressure relief valves on two of the reactors. Both are stuck, and I had to shut them down. Luckily, we didn’t have any radiation leaks.”

Maria breathed a sigh of relief. “Radiation” and “leak” were the last two words a captain wanted to hear, since even a small leak could kill everyone aboard.

“I have to keep them offline until we can get a crew to fix them. Probably be a couple days. We’re running at half power now, with two others already offline. I need those fuel cells from Team Raptor, and I need ’em yesterday.”

“Can’t you take cells out of the damaged reactors and put them in the two that are offline?” Jordan asked.

Samson snorted, then caught himself and said, “Doesn’t work like that, sir.”

“So what do we do?” Jordan folded his arms across his chest.

“We pray X comes back with cells,” Maria said. She knew her ship inside and out. Without the reactors, they were dead in the water— air , actually. The thermal energy they produced converted into electrical energy that fed through a network below decks. Some of that energy was stored in a backup battery the size of an entire room. When it was gone, the helium gas bladders would keep them in the air, but without power, the ship’s systems would fail. Everything, from the water reclamation plant where her husband worked to the massive farms where they grew their food, would shut down. The rudders and turbofans would be useless, and the Hive would drift helplessly through the sky, dark and dead, until an electrical storm or a mountain peak dealt the final blow.

“How are the gas bladders holding up?” Maria asked.

“We lost another two,” said Samson. “Down to sixteen of twenty-four. I was able to revert the helium back through the network, and we’ve diverted energy from all nonessential sources, but I’m running out of options. Pretty soon, we’re going to have to start shutting off lights.”

Jordan shook his head. “If you do that, we’re going to have to worry about more than just riots. We’ll be dealing with pure chaos and anarchy from the lower-deckers.”

“Would you rather crash?” Samson glared at them from the screen. “I don’t know if you realize this, Lieutenant, but the Hive is dying. If we go down, there’s only Ares left—and frankly, that bucket of rust is in worse shape than we are.”

Maria held up a hand. “I’m painfully aware of this, Samson.”

The fat engineer wiped his forehead and said, “Sorry, Captain. It’s just…” He paused and locked eyes with her. “Unless you find us a magical place to put down, we’re going to have to start making some very unpopular choices if we want to stay in the air.”

She exchanged a glance with Jordan. His features remained unchanged, unemotional. He would tell her his opinion in confidence, away from the ears of the other officers. Talk spread quickly through the Hive , and she didn’t want to feed the rumor mill with a note of raw panic.

“Keep this quiet,” Maria said. “That’s an order, Samson.”

“Understood.”

The feed sizzled to darkness. She had a sour burn in her throat. She could almost feel the cancer cells, chomping away at her insides. The Hive had a sort of cancer too: a shortage of power. Samson was right. The ship was dying, and if X didn’t return with more cells, it would be a matter of when, not if, they crashed to the ruined surface like all the other airships before them.

Two hours of trekking through the dead city gave X ample time to think. He carried more than the assault rifle he had retrieved from the supply crate. As he trudged through the wastelands and climbed to the top of an overlook, he felt the weight of every diver’s death over the past twenty years. Will, Rodney, and Aaron were just three more bodies on the pile.

He could almost make himself believe that it was an accident, but the combined gut punch of anger and grief still made his insides roil. What the hell had Command been thinking? Dropping a team through an electrical storm was a disastrous mistake—one that his team had paid for with their lives. And now, on top of that, he was trudging over radioactive dirt in what was supposed to be a green zone.

Humanity was three deaths closer to extinction, and if he didn’t get those power cells, half the rest would die. Twenty thousand feet overhead, 546 men, women, and children were counting on him.

But if he made it back to the Hive, he would find the people who had made his best friend’s son an orphan. If he needed it, that gave him one more reason to survive this.

The distant boom of thunder pulled him back to the present. He raised his binos and glassed the ruined city. Sporadic flashes of lightning backlit the husks of towers with a pulsating glow.

He clicked off his night-vision optics and saw the world for what it was: gray and brown and dead. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t imagine the thrum and bustle of this metropolis before the bombs dropped.

The boneyard of ruins stretched as far as he could see. Even in this vast openness, he suddenly felt trapped, suffocated by his suit and the narrow view through his visor. Ironic for someone who had lived most of his life in the cramped confines of the Hive . Usually, diving allowed him an escape from the controlled, regimented, stifling environment. But now he just felt isolated and lonely, like a fish in a small bowl.

He swept the binos over block after city block of rubble until he found a cluster of four buildings still standing amid the destruction. Checking his minimap, he confirmed his location. He was at the target.

The aboveground vaults were warehouses of Industrial Tech Corporation, the same company that had built the Hive and her sister ships. The engineers had designed the floating warships to last ten, perhaps twenty years. No one had ever imagined they would end up becoming humanity’s home for almost two and a half centuries. The ships should have fallen to pieces long ago, and they would have if not for the Hell Divers.