Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

“No!” Alex shouted over the roar of the ship. “Captain Ash and her henchman Jordan are lying. She’s probably planning to break down that door and kill all of us.”

“Will you shut your yap for once, Alex,” Travis snapped. “You’ve done enough harm. She’s not lying. The Hive ’s in deep shit.”

Brad emerged from the clean room, his face a shade paler than before. “Travis, that team outside is moving.”

“Shit!” Alex said. “I told you!” He climbed down a ladder and dropped to the dirt. He unsheathed his blade and rushed over to Brad.

Travis punched the comm again and got only static. The connection had been severed.

Tin worked his hands back and forth, trying not to make a sound as the plastic dug into his wrists. It hurt, but at last he felt the left thumb knuckle slip through. With that hand free, he soon had both restraints off and tucked in his hip pocket. He kept his eyes on the men.

“Don’t, kid,” Angelo whispered.

“I have to do this,” Tin replied. With his hands still behind his back, he squirmed away from the farmers. X and the other divers were on the surface of Hades, risking their lives to save the ship. But if someone didn’t fix the gas bladder, the ship was going to crash. He couldn’t let that happen. He wasn’t just going to sit by when he knew he could fix it.

“Ren, follow me,” Travis said. “And, Alex, don’t touch the hostages.” He grabbed Alex’s vest. “You do hear me, right?”

Alex nodded, smirking.

“Let’s go!” Ren said.

Travis loosened his grip but held Alex’s gaze for a tense moment. The ship groaned again, and an emergency siren blared in the corner of the room. Travis shoved Alex aside and followed Ren into the clean room.

Now was Tin’s chance. He took off running toward the cornfield, ignoring Angelo’s pleas.

By the time his captors realized he had slipped away, he was already batting his way through cornstalks that rose above his head. Silver and Lilly went wild, their guttural barks echoing through the vaulted room.

Tin spotted the ladder on the starboard wall. That was his target—how he would get to the gas bladder. He took a look back over his shoulder, tripped, and tumbled.

“Hey, where’d the kid go?” Alex shouted.

Tin jumped to his feet and raced through the field to the ladder, hoping the corn would conceal him.

“Get back here, you little shit!” Alex yelled.

Tin leaped onto the bottom rung of the ladder. Hearing noise at the other end of the catwalk, he looked across. Alex was climbing, too, trying to cut him off before he got to the hatch.

Tin climbed faster and pulled himself onto the mezzanine. He searched the hatches. There, halfway between him and Alex, he found the one marked “Gas Bladder twenty-one.”

Sprinting to the hatch, he grabbed the wheel handle, twisted it, and pulled. The cover groaned open, revealing a dark tunnel.

“Don’t go in there!” Alex yelled.

The clank of footsteps grew closer, and Tin climbed inside. An emergency supply cabinet was mounted on the bulkhead, and next to it a speaker system. For a fleeting moment, he thought about calling for help over the intercom. But no, there wasn’t enough time. He had to do this himself.

When he turned to close the hatch, Alex was almost there. The scarf had fallen away from his mouth, and blood trickled from the bandage on his chin where Travis had smacked him. His eyes were wild and determined—the look of a killer.

Tin slammed the hatch shut in the scarred, enraged face. The world went dark, and he threw the lock bar down just as he heard Alex grab the wheel on the other side. He paused to catch his breath and get his bearings. Each gasp burned his lungs. It had to be over a hundred degrees in here. He fumbled for the supply cabinet as Alex pounded on the hatch.

“Open up, kid! Open the damn hatch!

Tin’s fingertips slid across the warm metal and the speakers as he searched for the box. He punched the comm link first but heard only the crackle of static. The radio probably hadn’t been serviced in years. He was on his own.

He found the cabinet on his second pass and popped the lid while, outside, Alex pounded on the hatch. The man couldn’t hurt him anymore. Tin sucked in a warm breath of relief and rummaged through the supplies.

His fingers brushed a long metal cylinder, which proved to be a flashlight. He felt for the off-on switch, not wanting to rejoice until he was sure the thing worked.

Please work, Tin thought. He pushed the soft rubber button with his thumb, and a white beam shot out of the flashlight—weak, but a beam nonetheless.

“Yes!” he said, though he knew that his luck could be short-lived. Even if the light worked now, it wouldn’t likely last very long.

He shined the ray at the box and pulled out two patch kits, sealed in envelopes. Then he grabbed a breathing mask with a tiny oxygen tube and slipped it on. That left the tube of sealant. There. He grabbed it and stuffed it in his pocket.

Tin shined the light over the tunnel. A second hatch separated him from the gas bladder. He crawled toward it, away from the sound of Alex’s pounding.

He spun the wheel left, and the hatch creaked open. He played the beam over the curved bulkheads and then climbed inside, astonished at the bladder’s sheer size.

His heart fluttered as he stood in the dark, hot emptiness. He had escaped from Alex, found a flashlight, and made his way into the gas bladder. But the space didn’t look much like they had in the books, and Tin suddenly wasn’t so sure he could find the leak, let alone patch it.

The wind whistled through the remains of Ares . Somewhere above, a lone Siren soared through the clouds, its alien cries drawing X’s attention upward.

Weaver had stopped at the edge of the debris field and knelt beside a row of sooty aluminum ribs protruding from the snow.

“We need to keep…” X stopped talking when he saw that the metal wasn’t just random debris. It was too neat for that, too organized. Weaver must have placed them there.

Grave markers, X thought. It was an Old World tradition that he had read about in history books. Modern humans, living on airships, didn’t have the luxury of burying their dead, but Weaver had clearly been busy over the past few days, using his time to bury them down here. Snow gusted across the graves, covering them with fresh powder.

“Let’s go,” Weaver said, motioning them toward the skeleton of Ares. X and the other divers followed him under the aluminum struts. There wasn’t much left in the hulking wreckage.

Rumbling thunder echoed overhead, and X looked up, half expecting to see the Hive come crashing down through the clouds. They were running out of time to save her.

“Help me,” Weaver said. He stopped at a warped hatch and grabbed the side.

X resisted the urge to ask questions. The guy obviously had some screws loose, but they had to trust that he was taking them somewhere safer than out here in the open. And after Tony’s death, the divers needed a chance to regroup and make a plan to get to the industrial zone. X could only hope that Weaver wasn’t too crazy to help.

Weaver gripped the edge of the hatch, and X helped him pull it away.

The makeshift hideout wasn’t much—just a burned-out hull of what had been an apartment. A few boxes of salvaged supplies sat in one corner.

“Hurry up,” Weaver said. He crawled inside and crouched beside the boxes.

X exchanged a look with Katrina. “What do you think?” he asked over the private comm channel.

“I think the guy’s wacked,” she replied. “What about you?”

“We have no choice but to trust him,” X replied.