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.
FOUR
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.