Commander Rick Weaver shifted in and out of consciousness. The closer he came to reality, the more he wanted to stay asleep. In his fragmented dreams, he was still with his family aboard Ares. He could still see his wife, Jennifer, and the freckled faces of his daughters, Kayla and Cassie, standing in the crowd of family members in the launch bay.
“Promise me you’re coming back,” Jennifer said.
He gazed into those green eyes for a moment. “I promise, baby.” He sealed the words with a kiss.
“Bye, Daddy,” Kayla said, looking up with the wide, curious eyes of a seven-year-old still innocent of the real world’s horrors. Five-year-old Cassie had even less of a clue. And that was fine with him.
“I’ll be back in no time,” Weaver said. He leaned down and hugged them both, then gave Jennifer a last lingering kiss.
A stab of pain shook him free of the memory. He opened his eyes to find his family gone, replaced by a sky the color of bruises. Lightning flashed overhead, splitting through the clouds like a network of veins.
“No,” he choked, reaching toward the storm. He closed his eyes again in a vain attempt to stay a few more minutes with his wife and daughters.
The rumble of thunder kept him from slipping away. Reality slowly closed in. His family was four miles up there, waiting for him to return with the fuel cells and pressure valves that would save his home and everyone on it.
A voice called out. “Commander, can you hear me?”
Weaver gradually became aware of being on his back, and of someone shaking his armored shoulder. He blinked away the stars floating before his eyes and saw a mirrored visor staring down at him. He recognized the small cross cresting above the visor. It was Ralph Jones, the youngest member of Team Titanium.
“Where’s Jay and Sarah?” Weaver mumbled.
Jones shook his head.
Another fragmented memory surfaced: the flash of lightning that hit both divers in free fall. They were dead before they even had a chance to open their chutes.
His eyes lingered on the little white cross. The only thing he really knew about the new guy was that he was a deeply religious man and that this was his fifth jump. Jones had done well in training, but he had almost no surface time. But no matter. He had survived, and Weaver was glad to have another diver at his side.
“Let me help you up, sir,” Jones said. He grabbed Weaver under his arm and gently hoisted him into a sitting position. The frozen landscape surrounding them came into focus, and Weaver got his first look at Hades. The skeletal remains of the Old World city stretched to the west. Mounds of snow, like castle walls, bordered the once great metropolis. But these ramparts didn’t guard a magical kingdom like those in the books he’d seen. This place was cursed.
“Help me up,” Weaver said.
Jones pulled the aluminum capewell covers and popped the capewells free, releasing Weaver from his chute. Then he grabbed him under both armpits and helped him to his feet.
“Shit,” Jones said. “Looks like your booster is toast.”
Weaver craned his neck and looked at the pack. The helium balloon hung from a crack in the metal booster.
“Great. Just fucking great.”
Weaver took another look at their surroundings.
“Sir, I’m not picking up any other beacons,” Jones said.
Putting aside the matter of the broken booster, Weaver tapped his wrist computer and waited for the digital telemetry to emerge on his HUD. The data fired and solidified in the subscreen. Besides the beacons of the two supply crates Ares had dropped, there was no sign of Jay or Sarah or of Team Gold. Captain Willis had deployed Gold twelve hours earlier. No beacons meant they were dead—whether from the dive or from something else, Weaver wasn’t sure. There had been no radio transmission after Gold jumped. The entire team, his brothers and sisters, had joined in death every diver before them who ever tried to jump into Hades.
The weight of this realization squeezed the last vestiges of grogginess from Weaver, and he snapped alert. Everything was riding on him and Jones. They had forty-eight hours to return to Ares with the nuclear cells and pressure valves and save roughly half the humans in existence. The doomsday clock was ticking along in sync with his heartbeat.
He steadied his breathing and took a moment to examine the map on his HUD. The first supply crate that Ares had dropped was less than a mile away, but their main target, the ITC headquarters, was six miles from their current location. They would have to trek through the city to reach their objective. Ares had dropped a second crate a quarter mile from the HQ.
Weaver’s eyes flitted to the radiation readings displayed under the map on his HUD. Whatever luck had saved him from dying in the storm seemed to have vanished when they reached the surface.
“We need to get moving,” he said. “Radiation’s off the graph here.”
Jones nodded his acknowledgment and jogged ahead, his boots crunching over the snow. The greenish-black of his suit’s exoskeleton looked alien against the stark white landscape, the blue glow from the circular battery unit the only sign of life in a place where there was only death.
Weaver pulled the duct-taped handle of his revolver from his holster and gripped the gun in his gloved hand. He would have preferred the blaster, but he had lost it on the dive. They would need to keep moving fast if they wanted to reach their objective without attracting the attention of whatever lived in this frozen waste.
No one had ever returned from Hades to describe what was down here, and with the loss of Team Gold, Weaver’s mind ran wild with images of mutant creatures prowling the city—monsters he didn’t want to encounter without a bigger team and heavy weapons. He imagined the beasts he had seen on other dives: lizards the size of a half-grown child, and one-eyed birds with scaly wings. There were also the massive “stone beasts” he had seen on a salvage dive in the desert city of Las Vegas. The rocky abominations moved like Turtles, but his friend Ned Rico had stumbled into a building where the monsters sat camouflaged, looking like the work of a deranged sculptor. One of them had chomped Rico in half with its massive crocodilian jaws.
The wind howled like a wild animal in the distance. This was Hades—whatever awaited them out there was going to be a lot worse than some mutated little reptile or bird.
“Think we can get across that?” Jones asked, pointing to a bridge over an ice-covered waterway. The structure had partly collapsed, but the right side was intact. Barely four feet wide, but it would have to do; they didn’t have time to backtrack or find another way across the ice.
“Follow me,” Weaver ordered. He tested the ground with one foot and cautiously made his way across. When they reached the other side, he took off at a brisk trot.
His helmet bobbed up and down as he ran, making it a little harder to scan the windowless buildings that lined both sides of the road as they entered the city’s outskirts. Countless decades of accumulating snow had buried much of the Old World, perhaps hiding pitfalls while leaving only the tallest structures visible.
An arctic blast bulldozed into him, making him stagger sideways. Planting his boots against the blustering wind, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.
Stay focused, Rick. Pay attention to what’s real.
His eyes went to his HUD again. It was hard to believe that anything could survive out here for long. The sensor readings put the temperature at negative twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, though he was warm enough inside the layered suit. Indeed, his skin felt slimy from the heat. He blinked away a drop of sweat and relaxed into a loping run, keeping Jones’ blue silhouette in his peripheral vision. Jones maneuvered around jagged obstacles with a grace that reminded Weaver that he was twice Jones’ age. He was having a hard time keeping up with the younger man.
“Stay close,” he ordered.
Towers framed his view to the west, blocking his view of the industrial zone. They were in the heart of the city now, surrounded by ruins and tilted or broken skyscrapers. He continued to scan the area for signs of life, but the shifting snow was covering their tracks almost as they made them.
“Hold up,” Weaver said. He stopped and crouched. “We gotta get off this road. We’re too exposed here.”
He spied an off-ramp that led northwest. They were getting close to the first crate. Only a quarter mile now. The thought put an extra spring in his step as they pushed their way down the street.
“Up there,” Weaver said, pointing toward a steep snowbank that rose up from the roadside.
He leaped onto the pile and pulled his way up on all fours. At the top, he dropped to his belly, pulled the binos from his tactical vest, and glassed the area, searching for the crate.
Jones dropped down beside him and pulled out his binos.
“Looks like we have to find a way around that,” Weaver said, pointing to a massive sinkhole that had swallowed an entire city block to the northwest.
Jones checked his minicomputer, then looked back over the landscape.
“You sure?” he said. “The map shows the crate’s beacon somewhere between here and that hole.”
Weaver brushed off the layer of snow that had stuck to his visor. Jones was right. They were damn close to the supply box.
“Let’s move,” Weaver said. He scrambled to his feet and took off in a rolling trot toward the sinkhole. His eyes darted from the nav marker on his HUD to the cavernous pit in front of him. He panted as he worked his way through the thick snow, every stride more exhausting than the last.
“Wait up!” Jones called after him.
“Keep up!” Weaver shouted back. He clambered over hunks of icy metal and courses of brick protruding from the ground. Reaching the edge, he dug his boots into the snow and pivoted to brace against the gusting wind. The crate’s beacon blinked on his HUD. They were right on top of it. Their supplies, weapons, and extra boosters—it all was supposed to be right there. A blast of ice and grit whistled past him, nudging him closer to the edge.
Jones arrived a second later, gasping for air, his hands on his armor-plated knees. “It’s got … It’s got to be down there.”
“Hold my armor,” Weaver said.
Jones slipped his fingers under Weaver’s back plate, and Weaver leaned closer to the side for a better look. The pit was too dark for his night-vision optics to penetrate, so he snatched a flare from his vest, tore off the end, and rubbed it against the coarse striking surface. Red flame shot out the end. He held the crackling flare over the edge, and fuzzy outlines of rubble came into view. And there in the center of it all, canted at a steep angle on a pile of concrete and rebar, was the supply crate.
Weaver cursed the technicians. They never managed to drop the crates close to the DZ, and this time, they had dropped it straight into the only sinkhole within a mile of the target zone.
“It’s here,” Weaver said. “We’ve gotta find a way down.”
He waved the flare left and then right. The red glow spread across the bottom of the hole. There was something else down there. Where there should be only snow, he could see a half-dozen lumps the size of massive pumpkins, covered in some sort of spikes or thorns. Jones held on tighter as another gust of wind slammed into them. Scrambling to keep his balance, Weaver dropped the flare and watched it tumble lazily to the bottom. It hissed, and a halo of red blossomed out to light the enclosed space.
“Shit,” Weaver said. He was reaching for his binos, when the floor of the pit came strangely alive. A tremor rippled across the snow, and the thorny bulges dotting the ground began to move.
Weaver stared, dumbfounded. It had to be some sort of illusion.
“Jones, I … I see something,” he whispered.
To his astonishment, one of the lumps shook itself and slowly rose up on what looked like two long, gangly legs.
“There’s something else down there?” Jones asked.
Weaver took a full step back and tried to say something, but a croak was all he could muster. He didn’t need his binos to see that the thing was some sort of humanoid creature. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if it was a Hell Diver who had somehow managed to survive.
He leaned back for a better look, flinching when the beast dropped to all fours and shambled toward the flare. It crouched next to it, tilting a face Weaver couldn’t see, and pawed at the fire streaking across the snow. With a shriek of agony, it snapped its hand away from the brilliant glowing heat and darted away, still yowling. In a matter of seconds, similar creatures had arisen from the other strange lumps on the sinkhole floor, and they, too, were shrieking. The wails reverberated out of the hole and morphed into a high-pitched noise that hurt his ears.
Questions, too crazy even to give voice to, bounced and tumbled in his mind.
“What in the hell is that!” Jones shouted.
Weaver felt Jones’ grip on his armor loosen. “Don’t let go!” he snapped. He looked through his binos. The creatures seemed to distort and shift in the glow, but he could see the bizarre wrinkled skin and the jagged vertebrae as they gathered around the flare. The frailest of the group crouched next to another thorny blob in the snow and clawed at it.
Weaver zoomed in and the creature’s head came into focus. A bony crest jutted up from its skull.
“What do you see?” Jones asked, his voice trembling over the comm.
The creature suddenly tilted its face in Weaver’s direction and stared directly at him. But it wasn’t looking at him; it couldn’t. The thing had no eyes.
Weaver almost dropped his binos when he saw a meaty red cord hanging from the thing’s thin lips. The beast tilted its head back and swallowed it whole. Then it bent down to pluck another piece from the crimson snow and scrambled away, the rope swinging from its mouth. That was when Weaver saw the armored body of a diver in the center of the pit. Jay or Sarah, but the corpse was so mangled, he couldn’t tell from here.
Amazement turned to raw fear. “Pull me back!” Weaver said. “Pull me the fuck back and run!”
“Why? What’d you see?”
“Do it!”
Jones yanked him back to safety and took off, his labored breath crackling over the channel as Weaver took another cautious step backward. His slight movements provoked the monsters into a frenzy of motion, and they let out a chorus of whines that intensified until Weaver couldn’t stand it anymore. He froze, as if paralyzed by the sounds.
Sirens—they sounded just like emergency sirens.
Motion in the center of the pit snapped him out of his shocked reverie. The creatures scattered in all directions and leaped onto the walls. Some clambered up the near-vertical surface; others, missing a hand- or foothold, slid back down, their claws scrabbling over the rock.
Weaver still wasn’t sure whether it was Jay or Sarah down there, but it didn’t matter—there was nothing he could do to help them. He eyed the crate one last time and then turned to run.
* * * * *
Chief Engineer Samson opened the door to Captain Ash’s office, stepped inside, and slammed it shut behind him. His cheeks were so covered with grime and sweat, Ash couldn’t tell whether he was grinning or grimacing.
She gestured to the chair in front of her desk. “Have a seat.”
“I’ll stand,” he replied, wiping a filthy sleeve across his forehead. “I need to get back to engineering as soon as possible.”
Ash grabbed the glass of water she had poured for herself, and handed it to him. He gulped it down.
“I hope you have something good to tell me.”
Samson gently placed the empty glass on her desk and said, “I’ve managed to get seven of the eight reactors back online. My crews have also patched four of the internal gas bladders. We’re operating at eighty percent power—best we’ve had in years.”
Ash smiled—an expression so unfamiliar, it made her cheeks ache. “Excellent news, and right in the nick of time. We received a distress beacon from Ares.” The smile disappeared as she remembered the message.
“An SOS?” Samson blurted.
“They lost several generators in a storm and were forced to shut down their reactors. They’re running on backup power. Captain Willis sent a team to the surface to retrieve nuclear fuel cells and parts, but they’ve requested our help.”
“And?”
“I was waiting for you to fix the Hive before I made a decision.”
“It’s not exactly fixed.” Samson ran a hand back and forth over his smooth scalp. “What kind of help did Captain Willis request?”
“He didn’t specify. The transmission cut out. All I know right now is that Ares is in trouble and they need our help.”
Samson crinkled his nostrils. “We’re in the best shape we’ve been in years. We shouldn’t risk—”
“Which is exactly why we’re in a position to help,” Ash said, cutting him off. She didn’t have time to argue with the engineer or anyone else. Besides, she had called him to her office for a report on the Hive, not for his opinion on helping Ares.
“Anything else?” she asked.
He shook his head and left her office without another word.
A moment later, Jordan entered. “X is on his way,” he said. “Should be here in fifteen minutes.”
Ash paced behind her desk as they waited. The dull, tarnished plaque on the wall caught her eye: Commissioned in 2029. US Army. Model #43.
“Hard to believe there are only two left,” Jordan said.
“Might be only one left if we don’t answer Captain Willis’ call.”
He waited for her orders. She wasn’t ready to give them—not until she talked to the most experienced Hell Diver on the ship.
A knock sounded on the other side of the door, and Jordan opened it. X stood outside, with his back turned to them.
“Come in, Commander,” Ash said.
X turned away from the bridge and walked into the room. He cracked his neck, on one side and then the other. Unlike Samson, X wasn’t covered in workplace grime, but he looked just as bad. His features were hardened into a mask of anger, and even from here she could smell the ’shine on his breath.
“How’s Michael?” Ash asked.
“Still an orphan. But with all due respect, Captain, you didn’t invite me here to discuss Tin.”
Ash sat back down and folded her hands primly on the desktop. “You’re right, I didn’t. Have a seat, Commander.”
X glanced at Jordan, then reluctantly sat.
“Ares is in trouble,” Ash said. She repeated the same thing she had told Samson a few minutes earlier, then waited, searching X’s face for a reaction.
He scratched the stubble on his chin for a few seconds. “I’m assuming there’s something else you haven’t told me yet.”
X wasn’t just a good diver. He was smart. Ash had always appreciated that about him. She told him what she had kept from Samson.
“Ares is hovering above Hades. Captain Willis has already dropped a team down there.”
X tilted his head, as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “Hades? What the fuck are they doing there?”
“Good question,” Jordan said.
Ash shot her XO a look, then brought her gaze back to X. “We’re not exactly sure how they got there, or why, but at this point it doesn’t matter. I asked you here for your counsel—to see what you would do if you were in my shoes.”
X picked with his thumbnail at something stuck between his front teeth. He had an unusually white smile—a rare feature on the ship. But during Ash’s long history with him, he was usually too hungover or angry to crack a grin.
He pulled his thumb away from his teeth and, inspecting the nail, said, “So you’re asking if I think we should attempt a rescue?”
“You’re the best diver on either ship,” Ash said. “You know the skies and the surface better than anyone.”
X scowled. “I know as much about Hades as you do. The electrical storms there are the worst on the continent. Even if Captain Willis’ divers make it to the surface, they’re going to have to deal with off-the-chart radiation, and if they survive the storms and the rads, they still have to survive whatever monsters are down there.”
Ash leaned back in her chair, and X fidgeted in his.
“Monsters like the ones you saw on your last dive?”
“Yeah … maybe something even worse.” He wrinkled his forehead and squinted as if he had a pounding headache—which, she reflected, he likely did.
“I know it’s painful, X, but think back. We need to know what you saw, so we can prepare the other divers before the next jump.”
X chuckled. “Prepare them?” Tracing phantom quotation marks in the air, he said, “Nothing’s going to ‘prepare’ them for what I saw.”
“And what, exactly, was it that you saw, Commander?” Jordan asked.
X didn’t turn to Jordan, but met Ash’s stare instead. “Some sort of creature unlike anything I’ve seen on other dives. They were humanoid, with long arms and legs—bipedal, but to move fast, they went on all fours—like the baboons on the old nature vids. And …” X looked away.
Ash waited patiently.
“And they had no face. No eyes or nose—just a big-ass mouth full of shark’s teeth. Their skulls were coated with some scabby-looking shit and bristles. And their backs were covered in spikes, kind of like a dorsal fin or something. Some of them had scrapes on their wrinkled skin. It was leathery and tough, though. Reminded me of dried cowhide. I suspect it protects them from the radiation. I don’t know. Shit, it’s not like I had time to do a detailed examination. They weren’t holding still, and I wasn’t waiting for ’em to.”
Ash ran a finger over her lips. She had heard all the stories of the creatures the divers encountered on the surface, and she had combed the ships’ archives during nights she couldn’t sleep. But this? Nothing in the ships’ logs was even remotely close to what X described. No one had encountered anything with humanoid anatomy.
“What else can you tell me?” Ash asked.
X straightened in his chair. “I left out the worst part. They make these high-pitched noises like an emergency alarm—a sort of whine so loud it was paralyzing.”
“Are you saying these things could be part organic and part technological?”
“No,” X replied. “There wasn’t anything robotic about ’em.”
“You sure the radiation wasn’t screwing with your senses?” Jordan asked. “Organic or mechanical—it all sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”
X twisted in his chair. “So which is it you’re suggesting, sir: that I’m lying, or delusional?”
Ash glared again at her XO. Sometimes, she wondered if he had something against Hell Divers. This wasn’t the first time he’d questioned their acuity or their truthfulness.
“I think Jordan meant you were down there for a while and that maybe your eyes and ears were playing tricks on you,” Ash said in her calmest tone. “High doses of radiation can do that.”
“Was supposed to be a green dive,” X said. “There wasn’t supposed to be significant radiation, remember? Just something else you guys fucked up. Not giving either Ash or Jordan a chance to respond, he turned back to her and said, “I know what I saw.”
“I believe you,” she replied. “But right now we need to talk about Ares.”
A moment of quiet fell over the room. X stood and shoved his hands into his pockets. “We’re talking about the only other ship in the world, Captain. No one else is going to help them. We’re it.”
Ash nodded and opened her mouth to speak, but X beat her to it.
“If I were in your shoes, like you said: I’d plot a course and get there as fast as possible. You can reevaluate the situation when we arrive.”
“He has a point,” Jordan said.
“Indeed, he does,” Ash replied. “And I agree with the commander. I won’t abandon Ares. I won’t risk the extinction of the human race if there is something we can do.”
“Unfortunately, Captain Willis already put us all at risk when he decided to fly to Hades,” X said.
The words lingered as the PA system crackled and played an automated message. Ash used the stolen moment to check the clock. When the static cleared, she stood up. She had made her decision. “Jordan, plot us a course,” she ordered.
“Aye, Captain.”
Ash looked to X. “Get some sleep tonight, and lay off the ’shine. Tomorrow you start training your new team.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off. “I know, you said you were done. But Ares needs you. An endangered species—yours—needs you. Are you really going to say no?”
He glowered for a moment, then shook his head. “No.” He stiffened. “No, Captain. We dive so humanity survives.”