THREE

Captain Ash, with two Militia soldiers flanking her, rushed to the drop bay. Despite her condition, she was still outrunning them both.

“Only one diver made it back?” she asked.

Neither man responded. They were too busy keeping the shouting passengers on both sides of the hallway from getting too close. The corridors were unusually crowded at this late hour. There was only one explanation: someone on her staff had leaked information about the dive.

She would have Jordan deal with that later.

“Move it,” the soldier on her left said. He strode ahead and pushed through a knot of teenagers loitering in Ash’s path. They were pointing and staring at fresh red paint on the wall that read “Equal rights for lower-deckers.”

She didn’t slow at the increasingly familiar sight. There was no time right now to deal with the threat of civil unrest from those who lived belowdecks. Her focus was on keeping the damn ship in the air.

With the kids out of the way, Ash picked up speed. It was a five-minute walk or a two-minute run. She ran. The heavy footfalls of boots followed her as the soldiers tried their best to keep up.

The sea of passengers funneling through the hallways reminded her how the Hive got its name. Long ago, the ship had been commissioned as the Persephone, but as the years passed and the hallways and compartments grew darker, the passengers had started calling it the “Hive.” The name had stuck. Most of these people didn’t even know the ship’s original name.

The launch bay was bustling with activity when she arrived. A medic rushed through the doors just in front of her, and she followed him into the vaulted facility toward a yellow-suited mob. The plastic dome over the reentry bay was surrounded by technicians, watching as the diver inside went through the cleansing process. A grappling hook pulled the dome away a moment later, and violet mist spilled from the sides. Vents sucked it away.

“Out of the way!” came a muffled shout.

The yellow suits parted, and the black matte armor of a diver emerged. The man staggered from the crowd with a case in his hands. He set it on the ground, and his visor homed in on Ash.

“Thank, God,” one of the technicians said, bending down to scoop up the case.

God? Ash thought. God’s got fuck-all to do with what happens up here. Then again, God may have had everything to do with what was happening up here. Who could say?

“Captain!” the diver shouted.

Ash froze in her tracks. It was X.

He shoved a technician out of the way and removed his helmet. His forehead glistened with sweat. Those brown eyes that Ash knew all too well narrowed in on her.

“What the fuck happened!” X yelled.

He tossed his helmet and powered through a few outliers who had stopped to gawk. The helmet clanked on the deck and rolled to a stop a few feet from Ash.

“Why the hell didn’t you delay the launch!”

“Commander, you’re hurt,” a medic began to say. “Let me check you for—”

“I’m fine,” X growled, waving him away.

“I’m sorry,” Ash said, holding up a hand but standing her ground. She felt someone step up on her left. She didn’t have to look to know it was Jordan. “There was a faulty sensor,” she continued. “We didn’t know we were dropping you into a storm until it was too late. You know how fast the weather can blow up. It’s unpredictable.”

X stopped a few feet away from them, so close she could smell his breath. His chest heaved in and out, and his fierce eyes roved from Jordan to Ash.

“Unpredictable?” he snorted. “That’s horseshit and you know it. Your ops team should have seen it.”

“You think I would send you into a storm on purpose?” Ash said. “You think I would intentionally try to kill my best divers?” She didn’t think she sounded condescending, but X continued to glare at her.

“Well you did pretty well—killed all of ’em but one. Will. Rodney. Aaron. Dead. And you expect me to believe it’s because of a faulty sensor? How about you tell Tin that. Tell him his dad died because of cheap electronics that your people were too goddamn lazy to troubleshoot.”

Ash looked at the floor and then back at X. “I’ll tell him his dad died for those.” She pointed at the metal case at X’s feet. “He died to keep us in the air.”

X shook his head and stalked off, muttering an oath.

Ignoring Jordan’s whispered plea to let the diver go on his way, Ash followed him into the hall.

“Commander!” Ash barked.

X paused, chest still heaving, but kept his back to her.

“I’m sorry, Xavier. Truly sorry. We lost good men today. But they didn’t die in vain. Those cells will keep our reactors running for years.”

X bowed his head and shoved his hands into his pockets, his face half turned in her direction.

“Aaron told me long ago that if anything should happen to him on a dive, he wanted you to take care of Tin,” Ash said.

“I know. Those were his last words. I’m done, Captain. You got that? No more fucking jumps. After what I saw today, I’m through. Between the pointless deaths of my team, and the creatures I saw down there …” His volume lowered as his words trailed off.

Ash considered letting it go, but if there was another threat on the surface, she needed to know about it. She kept her voice cool and calm. “What did you see down there, X?”

“Done,” he said, barely above a whisper.

“Xavier, I need to know what you saw.”

“I don’t know what I saw,” he snapped. “But I never want to see it again.” He took a step down the hall and stopped. Glancing back at her, he said, “They were monsters. Something I’ve never seen before.” Then he was gone, off to find a bottle of ’shine or maybe something even stronger.

Although she would be well within her rights, Ash wasn’t going to reprimand him for insubordination or recall him to his duty, either. Her heart ached for X. Ached for Tin. Ached for everyone on the ship who had lost a loved one. But her rational, efficient mind also knew that X had spoken out of anger. He was addicted to diving as much as he was to the booze. He wasn’t going to give either of them up anytime soon.

Ash tugged on the sides of her uniform to straighten it. They had succeeded in their mission today, but the ship was running out of Hell Divers. She couldn’t afford to lose X. One way or another, he would be back in the drop tubes the next time the Hive needed him.

* * * * *

It was morning, not that you could tell by the blackness outside the portholes. The airship drifted through the clouds above the eastern edge of the continent once known as North America.

On a normal day, X would have ignored the slight rocking motion and the clank of footsteps from the sea of passengers hurrying through the dimly lit hallways, off to start their shifts at whatever job or task was theirs to do, each of them weighed down with the worries and frustrations and minor indignities that went with life aboard the stifling environment of a broken airship.

On a normal day, X would have just rolled over to sleep off his hangover. Aaron had always said he could sleep through a level-five alarm, but this morning he was awake and dressed before nine, because today wasn’t a normal day. Today they would honor the members of Team Raptor who had made the ultimate sacrifice to prolong the miserable lives of those aboard the Hive. It was purely ceremonial, of course. When they lost a diver, there was never a body to burn.

X walked to Aaron’s apartment to pick up Tin. Snaking along the corridor ceiling were the red pipes carrying helium, and next to them the narrower-gauge white pipes for water and yellow for natural gas, and the wider black sewage lines. He heard the twang of lower-deckers as they complained about tight rations, and the more refined accent of the upper-deckers moaning about the same thing.

The walls, ceiling, and bulkheads had all been covered in murals and graffiti. Some of the artists had a sense of irony, painting fluffy white clouds over the hatches that covered the ship’s windows to hide what clouds really looked like. The rusted steel curtains were centuries old. No one but Captain Ash seemed to care anymore what was on the other side.

“Hey, X,” said a familiar voice from the crowd. He nodded at Tony, the lead Hell Diver from Team Angel, who quickly vanished in the sea of passengers. Pausing, X held his ground in the surging mass of people to study the image of an ocean wave painted around one of the red helium pipes. Large gray fins protruded from the faded blue.

The picture brought to mind the creatures he had seen on the surface. He still had no idea what the hell they were, or how he would describe them to Captain Ash and the other Hell Diver teams.

As a boy, he had longed to see what was on the surface. He had heard the stories about a green world with growing things, and a blue sky, and he believed them. Then he had seen what the world was really like. Humans could never return to that poisoned desolate surface. They could never risk landing the airship. It wouldn’t last a day in the radioactive wasteland, or survive the monsters lurking there.

X walked on, studying his surroundings as if for the last time. He did the same thing before a jump. His mind, by force of habit, wanted to experience everything it could just in case he didn’t make it back. Usually, this involved booze. Today, it meant taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the Hive in all its battered glory.

Pushing through the next corridor intersection, X thought of all the Hell Divers who had been sacrificed to keep the airship in the sky. What bothered him even more than the lingering burn on his skin was his inability to remember their faces. His first diving mentor had warned him that the first thing you forgot about someone was the sound of their voice. That had certainly proved true with Rhonda. He couldn’t quite recall the lilt of his wife’s voice, but he would never forget the dying screams of his comrades over the years.

At the next junction, he saw something that stopped him again. The single LED overhead illuminated a snaking line of men, women, and children of all races and ages, mostly dressed in rumpled rags, waiting for their daily food ration.

These were the lower-deckers, who did the important but dirty jobs that kept the ship running. Frail and hollow eyed, they were easy to spot. Many of them had cancer—only one floor of shielding separated their two communal living spaces from the nuclear reactors. No matter what engineering did, the radiation seemed to get through to the lower decks.

The sight was never easy to stomach, but it was reality. And it wasn’t going to get better anytime soon.

He eyed the Christian crosses some of them wore around their necks. Their belief in God and the hope of something better after death seemed to help them come to terms with their squalid lives. Like a lot of others, X followed no religious doctrine. Pascal’s wager posited that a rational person should live as though God existed, and seek to believe in God, but then, X wasn’t an entirely rational person. He was a Hell Diver. If God did exist, he had better things to bother with than the fate of the human race. The closest he got to God was at the end of a bottle of ’shine.

The lower-deckers made up the majority of the Hive’s population. They were the citizens he had spent his life trying to save even as he watched their quality of life deteriorate every day. In moments such as this, he wondered what he was saving them from. Maybe there really was a heaven after death, and all his efforts did was prolong their suffering and delay their passage to a blissful paradise.

“Hurry up!” a woman at the end of the line yelled, pulling X back to reality. “My son hasn’t eaten in two days!” A pale, hairless boy stood next to her, his hand clasped in hers. She saw X staring and glared at him with contempt. “What you looking at, mista?”

X wanted to say something, give some bland and useless words of comfort and hope, but it seemed pointless. He shied away from her gaze as the line surged forward. Two gray-uniformed Militia soldiers stepped closer to the crowd. That small motion quieted all but one of the restless lower-deckers.

A man in a black trench coat emerged from the crowd. He swept a stringy black dreadlock from his face and pointed to the floor. “Do you assholes even know what it’s like to live down there?” He shook his head at the ringing silence that followed. A second man, with a scarf pulled up to his nose, joined him. They stood their ground, staring at the sentries, who reached for their batons.

X considered stepping in to help the soldiers, even though it wasn’t his duty, but the moment the Militia guards moved forward, the two lower-deckers melted back into the crowd—stupid enough to mouth off, but not stupid enough to get thrown in the brig.

X continued through the next hall, where another sentry stood guard outside a steel door. It led to the farms, one of the most heavily guarded areas on the ship. The crops grown beyond that door were barely enough to keep starvation at bay for the Hive, and sometimes a desperate citizen or small group would try to break in and steal food.

Taking a left, X veered off the main corridor. A short, bald man in a maroon robe brushed into him. Their eyes met, and seeing the red coveralls with the white arrow HD insignia, the man threw up his grimy hands.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and hurried away, his sandals squeaking with every step.

X fished into his pocket at once, checking his key card. Feeling it, he relaxed and brushed a grubby handprint off his shoulder. The guy was one of a few Buddhist monks on the ship. That didn’t make him a pickpocket, but thieves lurked all over the Hive. Normally, they didn’t mess with a Hell Diver. After all, without X, the crooks would have nothing to steal.

Tin was waiting. X jogged down the hallway, which curved and narrowed into a corridor lined with hatches on both sides. The apartments were cramped, but it beat the communal spaces beneath his feet, where the lower-deckers lived.

Outside an apartment door stood a short figure holding a bag and wearing a crooked metallic hat.

Seeing Tin, X felt a tug at his heart. The boy was small for his age, and skinny. His blue trousers and black sweatshirt hung loose from his gaunt frame. His tinfoil hat, the source of his nickname, arched into a spike, like some ancient gladiator’s helmet. Blond hair spilled over his ears. Tin glanced up with the same bright blue eyes that looked like his fathers, but quickly looked away.

X put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You got everything you need?”

Tin glanced down at his bag and nodded.

“You ready to go?” X asked.

Tin nodded again and pulled out of X’s grasp. He hadn’t said a word since Aaron’s death. X didn’t blame him. He hadn’t felt much like talking, either. He followed the boy down the hall to the launch bay where they would honor his dead father.

* * * * *

The dimmed overhead LEDs spread a carpet of blue light over the Hive’s launch bay. Captain Ash stood in the center of the room. She turned away from the dark portholes and took a moment to examine the twelve plastic domes covering the launch tubes in front of her. Each had sent countless Hell Divers to their deaths, and now a small crowd had gathered to mourn the loss of three more.

Ash could not help reflecting on the original purpose for the tubes: to drop not people but bombs—the very bombs that had turned the surface into a wasteland, forcing humans to take to the sky in the very ships that had doomed them.

The Hive was never designed to be a life raft. It was a weapon, one of fifty built in the late twenty-first century for the war that did, in fact, end all wars. Flying at an average altitude of twenty thousand feet and impervious to electromagnetic pulses, the Hive and her sister ships were the military’s response to electronic warfare that rendered even the most advanced drones and jets obsolete.

According to the records that Ash, as captain, was privy to, the world had ended so fast that the airships had become lifeboats for the families of military brass, who had boarded them before the bombs dropped and made the surface uninhabitable. Much of humanity’s past was lost in those chaotic days. She didn’t even know what had caused the conflict, or which side was in the right. Hell, she didn’t even know who the sides had been. She only knew that the darkness and the electrical storms outside the portholes were the result of what her ancestors had done.

The people gathered in front of her didn’t care about history. They didn’t ask why the sun was hidden behind miles of dark clouds and lightning. Unlike Captain Ash, the poor souls aboard the Hive weren’t hell-bent on making up for the sins of their great-great-great-grandparents. Most of them didn’t even know they were the descendants of the men and women who had brought humanity to the edge of extinction. And most of them, like her own staff, had long since given up on Ash’s dream of finding a new home somewhere on the surface. Every captain before her had promised the same thing, but these people no longer seemed to care. They were driven by a far more basic desire: to survive.

In the center of the group stood Aaron’s son. Tears glistened on his pale cheeks. X stood on his right, eyes downcast and three days of stubble covering his face.

Ash wished the ritual weren’t so familiar, but she had seen too many orphans and grieving families. The boy deserved to know why his father had died.

Folding her hands together, she launched into the speech she had given so often she knew it cold. “Today we gather to celebrate the lives of three men who made the ultimate sacrifice so that the rest of us might live. They dived so that humankind could survive. For these men, diving was a duty they performed time and time again without complaint, without question.”

She pointed at the plastic domes. “For two hundred and fifty years, the Hell Divers have dropped from these tubes to keep us in the air. And on this last mission, they succeeded, once again, in bringing back the fuel cells that keep us in the sky. For their service and their sacrifice, we salute them.”

The captain raised a hand into the perfect salute and held it there. She kept her gaze on Tin as the crowd whispered their thanks to the fallen men.

The room fell silent, and Ash dropped her salute. One by one, the crowd filtered out of the double doors.

Jordan squeezed into the launch bay and hurried over to Ash. The moment the last mourner had left, he cleared his throat. “Captain, we have another problem.”

She gave her XO a sharp look. “What now?”

“Please follow me,” Jordan said.

She hurried after him to the bridge, her mind racing with every step. The crowded hallways were not the place to have a conversation about another potential issue with the ship. The thought reminded her, she was supposed to visit the lower-deckers later today. It had been weeks since she last showed her face down there.

“Captain,” said a sentry posted in front of the bridge. He waved his key card over the security panel, it chirped, and the door whispered open. Ash strode inside and paused at the railing that curved around the topmost deck of the bridge. The two floors below were thrumming with activity.

She followed Jordan to the first deck, past the oak wheel, all the way to the wall-mounted main display. He reached up to flick the screen.

“We just picked up an SOS from Ares,” Jordan said.

Ash felt a tightness in the pit of her stomach. They hadn’t heard from the other airship in weeks. Last she knew, they were on a recon mission to locate a second cache of nuclear fuel cells hundreds of miles to the west, out of range of digital communication.

“We’re still trying to hail them, but there’s a ton of electrical interference. All we have to go on now is the message we intercepted.”

Ash resisted the urge to massage her achy throat. “Play it.”

Jordan turned and snapped his fingers. “Ensign Ryan, feed that message to the main screen.”

“Aye, Captain,” the ensign replied. He shifted his glasses and sat down at his station on the floor above where Ash and Jordan stood.

A moment later, an image of Captain Willis emerged on the screen. Lines crackled across the display, the feed cutting in and out. But even with the fuzzy video, Willis looked awful. His white hair had receded even further. Deep creases on his forehead overshadowed a scar that ran from his eyebrow to his hairline.

Ash took a seat in her chair.

“Maria. Captain Ash. God, I hope this message gets through. Ares was severely damaged in a freak electrical storm a week ago. We lost several generators, and we’ve been forced to shut down all reactors. We’re running on backup power. I’m deploying an HD team to the surface to search for critical parts and cells, but we need your help.”

Static crackled from the PA speakers above.

Ash clamped the headset over her ears. A few seconds passed before the audio returned.

“We are hovering above the following coordinates: forty-one degrees, fifty-two minutes, forty-one seconds north; eighty-seven degrees, thirty-seven minutes, forty-seven seconds west.”

A second wave of white noise sizzled across the room.

Ash looked up at Jordan. A hint of fear flickered in his eyes. They both knew the coordinates by heart. It was the location of an Old World metropolis, dead in the center of a red zone. The radiation was so high, and the surface temperature so low, that only three missions had ever been attempted to retrieve cells from the area. All three had failed, with all divers lost.

She couldn’t remember the city’s original name. Everyone on the ship just called the wasteland “Hades.”

“Captain, what are your orders?” Jordan asked.

The transmission replayed over and over in her mind. Damn it, how could Willis have been such a fool? Sure, every captain knew that Hades was home to Industrial Tech Corporation, the company that had designed and built their airships, and that its headquarters was a gold mine of power cells and repair parts. But as with all great treasure troves, Hades was cursed.

“Cancel my visit to the lower decks, Jordan,” she said. “I won’t be visiting today.”

“Aye, Captain.”

As Jordan turned to leave, she added, “Get me Samson and X. I need to see both of them, ASAP.”

“Understood.”

Ash sank back in her chair as Jordan loped up the stairs. She didn’t know what desperation had driven Willis to Hades. But even if Ash could fix the Hive, she wasn’t sure there was anything she could do to save Ares.