Nicholas Smith - Hell Divers

“Captain,” Jordan said.

Ash turned and saw the look on her XO’s face. They were out of time. They needed to move the ship. She nodded, feeling her heart break, and Jordan hurried away.

“No!” Tin said. “We can’t leave without X!”

“We have to, Tin,” Ash said. “I’m sorry, but X would want this. He gave his life so you and everyone else could be safe.” She grabbed Tin and pulled him close as Samson and his men entered the room. The engineer nodded at Ash and motioned his team of blue suits to the crate. They rummaged through the contents for the power cells and valves that so many Hell Divers had died for.

“X said he would come back,” Tin sobbed. “He promised he would do everything to return.”

“He sacrificed himself so that you and everyone else could live,” Ash said. Her voice was low and soothing. “He wanted you to grow up. He wanted you to become an engineer.”

Tin tilted his head back and wiped a string of snot from his nose. “He promised he would take care of me.”

Ash hesitated, considering her next words carefully. Thoughts of Mark, her cancer, her duty to the Hive, and her dream of finding them all a new home surfaced in her thoughts. It was overwhelming, but she was Captain Maria Ash. She was a fighter and always would be. She could still fight her cancer, pursue her dream of finding a home, and look after Tin with what time she had left.

“I’ll take care of you, Tin,” she said. “You can stay with Mark and me. How would you like that?”

The boy glanced up and met her eyes but didn’t say a word. Nothing she could say would make Tin understand why X had given his life—at least, not right now. All she could do was console him. She pulled his head to her chest and patted his back. “You can even sit in my captain’s chair if you want.”

Tin snorted—a cross between a grim laugh and a sob. He nodded, and hugged her. A tense silence followed the heartbreaking moment, and everyone in the launch bay worked quietly. Medics attended to Weaver, Katrina, and Magnolia while Samson’s engineers unloaded crates and whisked the precious cells and valves away.

Ash considered making a statement—something that would honor the sacrifices that X and the other Hell Divers had made on this day. But there was still work to do, and she knew that any words she said would ring hollow. Everyone in this room—everyone aboard the Hive —would know the names of the divers who had saved them. But first, Ash had to save their ship.

X opened his eyes to red-hued darkness. That was the first surprise. He wasn’t dead, but his entire body hurt—every muscle and bone and nerve. And he was cold—colder even than he had been without his heat pads. He knew that the chill came from loss of blood.

Even now, when facing certain death, he fought. He struggled to sit up, and when he couldn’t do that, he squirmed from side to side. The snow had hardened around him.

First things first. You have to get free.

X inhaled a raspy breath, trying to focus. He blinked heavy eyelids until his vision had cleared enough to see that it was a Siren’s wings, not snow, that had him trapped. The leathery shrouds covered him from neck to feet. Now he knew how he had survived the fall back to Hades: the creature that had tried to kill him had ended up padding his fall.

If he had survived, then maybe the Siren had, too. The realization filled him with energy that he didn’t know he had left. He wiggled and used his arms to push the tangled wings off him. When he was free, he scrambled across the snow, right into another dead Siren. He climbed over it and saw another. There were three—all limp and unmoving, riddled with bullet holes. These were the creatures the divers had killed before they deployed their boosters.

The smoke from the burning ITC building filled the horizon to the west. He smacked his helmet on one side until the flickering HUD solidified. The nav marker for the crate was gone, but he still remembered where it had been. If he could get to the supplies he had dumped, maybe he could use one of the extra boosters to get back to the Hive— if it was even still there.

The harnesses attached to his balloon pulled him back when he crawled away from the bodies. He reached for his knife, which wasn’t there. Then he remembered plunging it into the Siren.

Pushing himself to his feet, he gritted his teeth in anticipation of the wave of dizziness he knew was coming. Darkness washed over him, and he collapsed back onto the snow. The worst of the pain seemed to be coming from his stomach. He pulled a slimy hand away from his gut, warm blood steaming off his fingers. The wound was bad, but the threat of radiation poisoning was worse.

He had to get moving. The Hive wouldn’t wait forever. He doubted it was still up there even now, but he clung to the spark of hope. The spark grew as he pushed himself to his feet and worked his way carefully back to the first Siren. It lay on its back, wings outstretched. A halo of frozen blood surrounded the knife hilt protruding from its rib cage. He watched its chest for any hint of breath, but the bloody flesh was still.

X took a guarded step toward the monster. Certain it was dead, he bent down and plucked his knife from its chest. He staggered backward as a coarse tongue plopped out of its open mouth.

With one eye on the creature, he reached over his shoulder and cut the harnesses away. Then he yanked the useless booster from the slot in his armor and dropped it in the snow.

Ignoring every stab of pain tormenting his body, he struggled to a trot. He stumbled after a few strides, nearly toppling over in the snow. The crackle from his raspy breathing echoed in his helmet.

In an out, X. Focus. You can do this.

The eerie call of a Siren broke his concentration. Two others immediately answered its call. These screeches weren’t coming from the sky. They were coming from the ground. He didn’t need to turn to see the monsters advancing across the snowy landscape.

He reached for his weapons, but his hand came up empty. He had lost both the rifle and the blaster in the fall. There was only one thing to do: run—and pray that he reached the supplies in time. Pain shot up his legs and burned through his gut as he fell into a jog.

The sight of Sirens loping across the snow energized him. All at once, their screeches seemed to collide in a wavering, electronic-sounding whine that shocked him into motion. He could see still more of them behind the first wave, fighting through gusts of snow in the distance. They rushed toward him, closing in from all directions. He pushed harder through the deep drifts, gasping for air, running on adrenaline and little else.

The supplies weren’t far now. He could see them just a few yards away—boosters, weapons, boxes of extra ammunition—lying in the snow, where he had tossed them to make room in the crate.

X launched himself in a headlong dive for the gear. The uncontrolled slide ripped at the wound and packed it with dirty, radioactive snow so cold it ached. Swallowing the pain, he searched frantically for a weapon beneath the light coat of powder that had fallen.

He gripped the stock of a blaster and brought it up to meet the four Sirens galloping in from the north.

Without thinking, he fired a flare at the cluster. A split second later, he realized his mistake. As the flare exploded in the snow between the creatures, he chinned the pad to shut off his night-vision optics. The Sirens squawked away, darting off into the gusting snow.

X scooped up a new booster, slid it into the slot on the back of his armor, and secured it with a click. Then he grabbed one of the assault rifles and turned to see two dozen Sirens stalking him.