“Tubes are ready!” a voice yelled from inside X’s launch tube. Ty, the team’s technician, climbed out, wiping grease onto his yellow jumpsuit. He chomped nervously on a calorie-infused herb stick. No matter how many of the damn things Ty ate, he stayed thin as a whippet.
X grabbed a vest stuffed with flares and shotgun shells, slung it over his shoulder, and headed for the drop tubes, scanning the porthole windows as he walked. Nothing to see but swirling dark clouds. The divers from Team Angel made room as X and his men reached their tubes. Rodney and Will hurried over, but Aaron paused, as he always did, and nodded to X. It was more powerful than any words. Despite the tension from earlier, they trusted each other with their lives.
One by one, the divers climbed into their metal cocoons.
Even after all these years, X still felt the lump of fear as Ty closed the plastic dome over the top. It took a few moments of squirming before he settled into a comfortable position. His mind quickened, and the hangover fog began to clear—the stim tablets were finally kicking in.
X breathed out and tapped the minicomputer on his right forearm. Behind the cracked glass surface, the control panel flickered. He punched the button activating the Heads-Up Display (HUD). A green translucent subscreen emerged in the upper right corner of his visor, and digital telemetry scrolled across it.
He flicked the monitor on his forearm a second time. Another translucent subscreen emerged above the data on his HUD and solidified into a rectangular map. Four blips emerged, one for each member of Team Raptor.
X chinned the comm pad in his helmet to open a line to his team. “Raptor, systems check.”
“Ready, sir,” Rodney replied.
“Everything’s looking good,” Will said. A second’s pause, then, “Ready to dive.”
The faint quiver X heard in Will’s voice didn’t surprise him. This was the kid’s fifteenth jump, and according to the numbers it should be his last.
Fuck statistics, X thought. If the numbers told the whole truth, he himself would have been dead eighty jumps ago.
“Systems look good, X,” Aaron said. “See you on the surface.”
“Dive safe,” X replied, putting emphasis on the second word.
A new voice crackled in his helmet. “You’re mission clear, X.” Captain Ash’s voice, clinical and characteristically smooth.
“Roger that,” he replied. “We dive so humanity survives.” It was the Hell Diver motto, and his typical response—a reply that reassured the captain she could count on him.
As the Hive slowed to a halt, X flipped up his mirrored visor and pressed the thin polymer mouth guard against his upper teeth. The ship was now at hovering altitude, but he waited for Ty to confirm what he already knew.
“We’re in position,” Ty said a moment later. “I’ll launch the supply crate to the surface in a few seconds.”
X flashed a thumbs-up, and Ty locked the plastic dome over the top of the cylinder. He patted the translucent ceiling, removed the herb stick, and mouthed, Good luck.
A siren wailed in the launch bay. The first warning.
X felt the familiar tingle of anticipation building. It was a messy, addictive combination of fear and exhilaration—the feeling that pushed him to jump again and again. Although he would never admit it to a soul, X lived for this rush.
Every drop was risky, often in its own new way. You couldn’t jump twenty thousand feet from an airship, plummet through electrical storms, and land on a hostile surface without risk. And this wasn’t a normal salvage mission. The fuel cells Ash had ordered them to recover weren’t easy to come by. Only a few known locations on the continent remained where they could find the nuclear gold. Without the cells, the Hive wouldn’t be able to stay aloft. If they failed…
X clamped down on his mouth guard at the thought. He wouldn’t fail. He never failed.
The seconds ticked down on his mission clock. His senses were on full alert now. He could smell the worn plastic of the helmet, feel his hammering heart and the rush of blood pulsing in his ears, and see the soft blue glow from the interior LEDs of his helmet.
A second siren screamed right on time, and the emergency light bathed his pod in red. The sound of creaking metal, then a loud pop as Ty launched the supply crate from another tube.
One minute to drop.
X skimmed the data on his HUD a final time. All systems clear. Rodney’s, Will’s, and Aaron’s dots were all blinking, their beacons active. They were good to go. The final minute ticked down in X’s mind. He squeezed his knuckles together until they cracked.
Thirty seconds to drop.
The sirens faded to a faint echo, and the red glow shifted to blue—the last calm moments before the tempest. The clouds seemed momentarily lighter beneath his feet, but that had to be an illusion. Command had said no electrical storms in the drop zone.
The voice of Captain Ash, dispassionate yet soothing somehow, crackled in his helmet. “Good luck, Raptor.”
Five seconds to drop.
A shiver ran up X’s spine when he saw the unmistakable bloom of lightning across the clouds below. The distant flash waned and died, leaving only traces of fuzzy light.
Bumping his comm, X screamed, “Delay launch! I repeat…”
He reached up to pound on the dome just as the glass floor whispered open. His gloved fingertips raked the metal surface of the tube as he fell, his voice lost in the shriek of the wind.
For a moment, he felt weightless, as if he were nothing but pure consciousness. Then the wind took him, sucking him into the black void. Anger boiled up. How could ops have missed the storm? A faulty sensor? A negligent officer too busy playing grab-ass with some cute trainee? He didn’t know, and none of that mattered anyway right now. He had to focus on the dive and getting his team to the surface alive.
X surrendered to the forces lashing his suit and flinging him earthward. Stretching his arms and legs out, he broke into a stable free-fall position. The smooth, beetlelike shell of the Hive floated overhead, the turbofans flitting like insect wings. Far above the ship, deep in the meat of the clouds, he glimpsed something he hadn’t seen in a long time: a plank of golden light. The sun, struggling to peek through. Then, in the blink of an eye, it was gone.
He shifted his gaze back to his HUD. They were already down to nineteen thousand feet. In his peripheral vision, he saw the blue glint of Aaron’s battery unit. For a millisecond, he wondered what was going through his old friend’s mind, but he probably had a fair idea. Aaron dived with the weight of more than just his chute and armor. He had a son waiting for him above.
X had no one waiting for him or weighing on him. And that was what made him one of the best divers.
Feeling the cool mattress of wind pushing up on him, X reached outward a few inches with his left arm—just enough to make a slow rightward turn and check on the other divers. They were closing in, working their way into a wedge formation at three-hundred-foot intervals.
He angled his helmet downward, peering into the clouds again. A dazzling web of lightning forked across below them at fifteen thousand feet.
Static crackled from the speaker in his helmet as one of the other divers tried to speak, but the garbled words were impossible to make out. X trained his eyes on the swirling clouds. The darkness masked the size of the storm, but he wasn’t deceived. If it was already screwing with their electronics, it had to be huge.