Hell Divers Read Online Free Page B

riots. We’ll be dealing with pure chaos and anarchy from the lower-deckers.”
    â€œWould 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.
    â€œKeep this quiet,” Maria said. “That’s an order, Samson.”
    â€œUnderstood.”
    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