When they reached the edge of the parking lot, he scoped the buildings in the distance. There were three—two, really, and a pile of rubble. The sight of the debris sent another wave of doubt through him. Their chances of finding fuel cells and pressure valves out here were looking more unlikely by the second.
Thunder growled to the west as they continued into the wastelands. Sam stopped a few feet ahead to stare at the swirling storm over Hades. Lightning streaked across the muddy clouds. “Looks like it’s growing,” he said.
“More reason to move our asses,” X said. “Come on.”
They worked their way through knee-deep snowdrifts for the next few minutes. They were getting close to the crate.
“On me,” X said. He broke into a trot, passing Sam and waving the team forward. To the east, he could see where the snow dropped steeply away. They worked their way to the ridgeline overlooking the stark landscape. X halted at the edge and tested the snow with his boot before peering over the other side. He didn’t need his binos to see the supply crate at the bottom. It was jammed between oblique concrete walls that jutted like headstones from the snow.
“Think we need a rope?” Murph asked.
X shook his head. “No time. Follow me, and be careful on your way down.”
Sitting down, he tucked his hands against his sides and slid over the embankment, glissading over the slick surface. When his boots hit the bottom, he used his momentum to roll up onto his feet and trotted over to the crate.
Magnolia and Sam came sliding down a few seconds later. Murph came down a little less elegantly, kicking up a cloud of snow.
X opened the crate and tossed Sam an assault rifle.
“Load up and move out,” X said. He waited a few moments for Magnolia and Murph, then started off with Sam. They trekked side by side over a half-covered highway, just as Aaron and X had done so many times before. The trust felt good. He was beginning to like Sam.
“Keep up!” X shouted. “Our suits won’t protect us from this radiation forever.” The words were the perfect motivation. He could hear Murph’s and Magnolia’s labored breaths as they struggled to catch up.
A harsh wind beat against the team as they worked their way through the blast zone. They loped along for another ten minutes—long enough for X to work up a sweat inside his layered suit. When they reached the outskirts of the wasteland, he swore. The road ended at a mountain of snow that had drifted around the two buildings and the pile of rubble between them. The wall of white rose several stories high.
Neither building bore any marking—nothing to indicate where they should be looking.
Thunder clapped in the distance, and X glanced at the storm rising over Hades. They were running out of time.
“You got any idea what we’re looking at, Murph?” X asked.
“The Hive’s database puts the location right here. But it’s not accurate enough to tell us which building.”
“Ah, shit,” X said. “We need to split up. Sam, you and Murph check the building to the left. Magnolia, you’re with me. Stay in radio contact.”
“Copy that,” Sam said. Slinging his rifle over his back, he began climbing the wall of snow around the first building.
X scrambled up the mound to the right. The snow was compact and hard under his boots, and by kicking steps into it, he could move at a good clip. When he got to the top, he unstrapped his rifle and pointed it through an open window. The hallway beyond was covered in a layer of snow. He checked it for tracks before climbing through.
“Stay close,” he said. “Eyes up.”
“Right behind you, Commander.”
X hurried down the frozen corridor to the first room. The door was gone, probably buried under the snow. He shouldered his rifle and eased into a room furnished with rusted chairs and a boxy metal desk.
“It’s an office,” X muttered. “A fucking office.”
“What’s that mean?” Magnolia said.
“It means no fuel cells or pressure valves.”
She lowered her rifle. “So what do we do?”
X looked around, thinking. For the first time on the mission, he felt a helpless dread growing inside him. He had doubted that they would find the needed parts here, but he had hoped for something.
“Follow me,” he said, anger replacing the dread. He aimed his rifle down the hall and continued to a stairwell. The frame of the door lay on the landing below, blown off its hinges long ago. A cracked picture frame still hung on the wall.
He flicked off his night vision and clicked the headlamp on, angling the beam up and down the stairs.
“What’s this?” Magnolia asked.
X centered the beam on the next floor. A network of cracks had splintered the walls, but somehow they had held over all these years.
“X,” Magnolia entreated.
“What?”
“This looks like some sort of map.”
He turned to find her looking at the picture frame he had passed earlier.
“Looks like we’re in an ITC building,” she added.
X hurried to her side and brushed off the dust. He was scanning the map when his helmet speaker crackled.
“X, this is Sam. Looks like a dead end here.”
X kicked the wall. “There’s nothing here, either.” The building they were looking for was likely buried under a pile of rubble and snow. He stared at the map again, scrutinizing it for something he had missed. He rubbed off a layer of dust covering the upper corner. The fourth floor was labeled “Operations Center.”
An idea seeded in his mind. Jordan had said they didn’t know the exact locations of the cells or valves in Hades. Maybe, just maybe, there was something inside the ops center that would tell X where to find them. If the Hive was forced by circumstances to send all three teams into Hades, he could at least tell them where to go.
“Sam! Murph!” he yelled. “Get over here. I may have something.”
* * * * *
Captain Ash sat impatiently in the command center on the bridge. Over an hour had passed since Team Raptor jumped off the ship. Desperate for news, she picked at a crack in the chair arm’s leather. The wait during a dive was always excruciating, but this time it was even worse. The human species’ very existence rested with the luck of a few brave men and women twenty thousand feet below.
An alarm chirped on the top floor of the bridge. She craned her neck up to see Ryan rush to his station. “What you got, Ensign?”
Ryan stared at his monitor, then swiveled his chair to a second display. “I’m … not really sure, Captain.”
Ash jumped up from her chair and rushed to the second floor. “Jordan, get over here.”
Moments later, she and her XO were crowded around Ryan’s monitors.
“Captain, the storm appears to be growing again,” Ryan said. “It’s moving. Fast.”
“Bring it onscreen,” Ash replied.
The main display on the floor of the room activated. The edges of the electrical storm were surging outward like a loaf of bread expanding in an oven. And the Hive was right in its path.
The lesion in Ash’s throat burned at the sight. She turned away from the view toward her XO. “Do we know where Raptor is?”
“No. We haven’t had any sign of their beacons for an hour now.”
“Ensign, how much time do we have before the storm hits us?” Ash asked.
Ryan shook his head and typed several commands. Lines of text scrolled across the screen.
“This can’t be right,” he said, looking up. “According to the data, if the storm continues moving at its current rate, we have about forty-five minutes. And that’s just an estimate. It could be here faster.”
“Jordan, direct power to the rudders and hold position for further orders. I want to be ready to move the moment they get back.”
“But, Ca
ptain, that’s going to drain the backup power.”
“Jordan!” Ash barked.
He snapped to attention. “Yes, Captain.”
“See if you can get X online. Tell him to get his ass back here,” she said. “A private comm link, Jordan. I don’t want his team to panic.”
Jordan hesitated. His features hardened, and he said, “We can’t afford to wait for them to get back.”
She watched a streak of lightning zip across the display. It arced to the top of the storm clouds and vanished into inky darkness. It was hard to imagine a sun still shining somewhere above that blackness.
The thought blossomed into an idea. The ships were built for limited high-altitude flying. If she could fly them above the storm …
“Maybe there’s another way,” Ash said. “Jordan, divert all available power to the turbofans. I have an idea.”
FIFTEEN
Weaver looked up. The high-rise across the street was gone, its top four stories sheared off by the impact with Ares. The embers of his home, his family, and all that he held dear smoldered just a city block away. The flames from a recent explosion in the hulking wreckage continued to lick the sky, warding away the scavengers that swooped and wheeled overhead.
The debris was spread as far as he could see: hunks of smoldering metal, the twisted blades of turbofans, a piece of an engine, parts of bodies.
He had assumed that he would feel rage when he got here. He was supposed to feel it. But as he looked over the destruction, all he felt was hollowness. His emotions had evaporated like the helium from a ruptured gas bladder.
Holding Sarah’s blaster out in front, Weaver continued toward the crash site. The battery unit, food, and water he had retrieved from her corpse had prolonged his life, but he wasn’t sure for how long. The sky was filled with ravening monsters. Their unearthly cries reverberated through the city as they searched for an opening in the flames below. The screeches flowed together in a rhythm that surely meant something to them.
There were dozens of the creatures, maybe more. He still couldn’t quite get his mind around the idea that they had survived down here. Somehow, they had adapted to the brutal life on the surface. Maybe it was their leathery skin, or something else he couldn’t see. He didn’t give a shit either way. All that mattered was keeping the abominations away from his family.
Weaver holstered the blaster, pulled out his binos, and focused them on the ship. The bow was buried under a mound of dirt, and the hull was split down the middle, exposing aluminum beams like the rib cage of some prehistoric behemoth. He flinched as another explosion rocked the ship. A yellow plume of fire billowed up in his scope. The tendrils reached into the sky and engulfed one of the winged creatures. Screeching, it managed a few more wing beats before spiraling down into the flames.
Seeing it, Weaver felt some hint of emotion at last: a tingle of satisfaction. He stuffed his binos back into his vest, scrambled up a mound of snow, slid down the other side, and bolted toward the nearest building. Reaching it, he slowed to a walk, hugging the walls, his blaster trained on the sky. The winged Sirens didn’t seem to notice his presence. They were more interested in the ship.
The distraction allowed him to get closer. He ran down the final stretch of street, slipped around the corner, and took shelter in the lobby of a building lit by the glow of the burning debris field.
He watched for an hour from the safety of the doorway. Falling snow slowly drowned the raging fire, and thick plumes of smoke rose into the sky. The lowering flames allowed the creatures to get closer to the wreckage. Weaver watched one of them swoop down between the exposed ribs of the hull. It flapped out of the swirling smoke a moment later, fighting for altitude. Something was weighing it down.
Weaver pulled his binos again and zoomed in on the monster’s legs and the charred body gripped in its talons. His rage forced him out of the safety of the building.
“No,” he whispered. “I won’t let you take my family.”
Another Siren sailed over the debris field and grabbed a tiny corpse and flapped away into the darkness. Several others soared after it, screeching in their strange, dissonant language.
“NO!” Weaver shouted, his voice edging on hysteria. He strode out onto the street and aimed his blaster into the sky. The fierce anger of a father who had lost everything returned. Blinking away tears, he ran toward the wreckage of his home. Beyond his blurred vision, he saw something that brought a pain worse than what he had felt when Ares came crashing down.
Corpses and body parts were strewn across the snow-covered dirt. His friends and family sizzled as the snow hit their scorched bodies. Their faces surfaced in his memory, but he buried them. He wouldn’t let their memories weaken him right now. He needed his strength for what was about to happen.
“Hey! Hey, you flying fucks!” Weaver shouted in a voice that sounded deranged even to him.
The shriek of a Siren answered his call. It pivoted in the sky, flapping toward him now. Two more of the creatures flanked the beast, cutting through the air and diving at him. Weaver centered the iron sights of his blaster on the approaching monsters. When all three were within range, he squeezed the trigger.
The gun made a strange popping sound, and sparks shot out the left barrel. The creatures whistled through the air, the wind over their backswept wings rustling like the suit of a diver in free fall.
Heart pounding, Weaver hit the selector switch and pulled the trigger a second time. This time, the gun fired two Magnum loads of double-aught shotgun pellets. The projectiles spread, punching through delicate wings, and tearing into lean muscle. The Sirens let out a cacophony of pained wails and crashed to the ground ten feet away in an explosion of dirt and ash. Weaver snapped open the breech, ejected the two spent shells, and dropped two fresh ones in.
Weaver stared at the field of the dead. The dying embers scattered across the dirt shimmered under a flash of lightning. Pulling his gaze away, he raised his blaster and fired at another formation of monsters swooping toward him.
* * * * *
The beams from Team Raptor’s headlights cut through the darkness, dancing across the concrete walls of the narrow stairwell. Sam was on point, with X on his six. They moved up the stairs quickly, with Magnolia’s and Murph’s footfalls close behind.
“Should be the next floor,” X said. “Check it out.”
Sam moved with a soldier’s precision, sweeping his weapon across alternating fields of fire. He continued up the stairs to the next landing and disappeared from view. X used the moment to check the radiation. It was lower here but still high. They had to move quickly.
“All clear,” Sam said a moment later.
X glanced at Magnolia and Murph, in the shadows below. He didn’t need to see their faces to know they were terrified.
“Stay here,” he said to them, and he was darting up the stairs before they had a chance to protest. Sam waited outside a heavy door on the next landing. He grabbed the handle and twisted it, but it clicked: locked.
“See if you can hack in,” X said.
Sam searched the wall and brushed off a layer of dust to reveal a rectangular security panel. Pulling a cable from his vest, he uncoiled it and plugged one end into his wrist computer, the other end into the panel.
X was impressed. Sam operated as if he had done this a hundred times before. Hacking into Old World facilities wasn’t all that hard if you had the right gear. The minicomputers the divers carried had codes to most of the ITC facilities, and enough juice to jump-start the old tech. It was just a matter of time before they cracked this one.
The wait was shorter than X expected. The panel chirped, and the door creaked open.
“On me,” X said. Rifle up, he swung the door open.
Inside was a space frozen in time. Row after row of dusty tables filled the room. The floor was littered with shattered computer monitors. In the center
of it all, a single desiccated corpse stared with empty eye sockets up at the ceiling.
X worked his way down the aisle toward the body and motioned for Sam to take the adjacent row.
“Think any of these computers work?” X asked.
“Probably not, sir.”
X stopped to examine the corpse. There was little left. The clothes had mostly disintegrated, revealing a membrane of dried skin stretched over bones. It was hard to tell whether it had been a man or a woman.
“Murph, Magnolia, get up here,” X said over the comm. He flung his assault rifle over his back and continued toward a rack of file cabinets at the front of the room.
“Murph, see if you can get one of these computers working. Might be a long shot, but it’s worth a try.” X checked his mission clock. They were down to the bone: thirty minutes remained.
He pulled open a cabinet and thumbed through the contents. “Magnolia, get over here and help me,” he said. “Sam, you watch the door.”
Magnolia said, “What am I looking for?”
“A map, I don’t know. Something that tells us the location of the manufacturing buildings in Hades.”
He pulled out a piece of paper that flaked apart in his hands. The next piece was so faded, he couldn’t make out the text.
“God damn it,” X said.
They spent the next fifteen minutes digging through the contents, looking for anything that might give them a lead to the location of the ITC factory in Hades. X tried to think, but it was impossible to concentrate when they were so close to the wire. The Hive was waiting, and without anything substantial, he considered telling the team to abandon the search. With the ship running on backup power, Ash still needed time to maneuver into position over Hades and drop all three teams. On top of that, they needed time to actually find the parts and then get back to the Hive. He hated the idea of returning with nothing concrete, but they had run out of time.
“Nothing works,” Murph said ruefully.
X scanned the room. It was a dead end. They had gambled and lost, and there was nothing to do but suck it up and return to the Hive.
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