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.”