X shook his head and stalked off, muttering an oath.
Ignoring Jordan’s whispered plea to let the diver go on his way, Ash followed him into the hall.
“Commander!” Ash barked.
X paused, chest still heaving, but kept his back to her.
“I’m sorry, Xavier. Truly sorry. We lost good men today. But they didn’t die in vain. Those cells will keep our reactors running for years.”
X bowed his head and shoved his hands into his pockets, his face half turned in her direction.
“Aaron told me long ago that if anything should happen to him on a dive, he wanted you to take care of Tin,” Ash said.
“I know. Those were his last words. I’m done, Captain. You got that? No more fucking jumps. After what I saw today, I’m through. Between the pointless deaths of my team, and the creatures I saw down there…” His volume lowered as his words trailed off.
Ash considered letting it go, but if there was another threat on the surface, she needed to know about it. She kept her voice cool and calm. “What did you see down there, X?”
“Done,” he said, barely above a whisper.
“Xavier, I need to know what you saw.”
“I don’t know what I saw,” he snapped. “But I never want to see it again.” He took a step down the hall and stopped. Glancing back at her, he said, “They were monsters. Something I’ve never seen before.” Then he was gone, off to find a bottle of ’shine or maybe something even stronger.
Although she would be well within her rights, Ash wasn’t going to reprimand him for insubordination or recall him to his duty, either. Her heart ached for X. Ached for Tin. Ached for everyone on the ship who had lost a loved one. But her rational, efficient mind also knew that X had spoken out of anger. He was addicted to diving as much as he was to the booze. He wasn’t going to give either of them up anytime soon.
Ash tugged on the sides of her uniform to straighten it. They had succeeded in their mission today, but the ship was running out of Hell Divers. She couldn’t afford to lose X. One way or another, he would be back in the drop tubes the next time the Hive needed him.
It was morning, not that you could tell by the blackness outside the portholes. The airship drifted through the clouds above the eastern edge of the continent once known as North America.
On a normal day, X would have ignored the slight rocking motion and the clank of footsteps from the sea of passengers hurrying through the dimly lit hallways, off to start their shifts at whatever job or task was theirs to do, each of them weighed down with the worries and frustrations and minor indignities that went with life aboard the stifling environment of a broken airship.
On a normal day, X would have just rolled over to sleep off his hangover. Aaron had always said he could sleep through a level-five alarm, but this morning he was awake and dressed before nine, because today wasn’t a normal day. Today they would honor the members of Team Raptor who had made the ultimate sacrifice to prolong the miserable lives of those aboard the Hive. It was purely ceremonial, of course. When they lost a diver, there was never a body to burn.
X walked to Aaron’s apartment to pick up Tin. Snaking along the corridor ceiling were the red pipes carrying helium, and next to them the narrower-gauge white pipes for water and yellow for natural gas, and the wider black sewage lines. He heard the twang of lower-deckers as they complained about tight rations, and the more refined accent of the upper-deckers moaning about the same thing.
The walls, ceiling, and bulkheads had all been covered in murals and graffiti. Some of the artists had a sense of irony, painting fluffy white clouds over the hatches that covered the ship’s windows to hide what clouds really looked like. The rusted steel curtains were centuries old. No one but Captain Ash seemed to care anymore what was on the other side.
“Hey, X,” said a familiar voice from the crowd. He nodded at Tony, the lead Hell Diver from Team Angel, who quickly vanished in the sea of passengers. Pausing, X held his ground in the surging mass of people to study the image of an ocean wave painted around one of the red helium pipes. Large gray fins protruded from the faded blue.
The picture brought to mind the creatures he had seen on the surface. He still had no idea what the hell they were, or how he would describe them to Captain Ash and the other Hell Diver teams.
As a boy, he had longed to see what was on the surface. He had heard the stories about a green world with growing things, and a blue sky, and he believed them. Then he had seen what the world was really like. Humans could never return to that poisoned desolate surface. They could never risk landing the airship. It wouldn’t last a day in the radioactive wasteland, or survive the monsters lurking there.
X walked on, studying his surroundings as if for the last time. He did the same thing before a jump. His mind, by force of habit, wanted to experience everything it could just in case he didn’t make it back. Usually, this involved booze. Today, it meant taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the Hive in all its battered glory.
Pushing through the next corridor intersection, X thought of all the Hell Divers who had been sacrificed to keep the airship in the sky. What bothered him even more than the lingering burn on his skin was his inability to remember their faces. His first diving mentor had warned him that the first thing you forgot about someone was the sound of their voice. That had certainly proved true with Rhonda. He couldn’t quite recall the lilt of his wife’s voice, but he would never forget the dying screams of his comrades over the years.
At the next junction, he saw something that stopped him again. The single LED overhead illuminated a snaking line of men, women, and children of all races and ages, mostly dressed in rumpled rags, waiting for their daily food ration.
These were the lower-deckers, who did the important but dirty jobs that kept the ship running. Frail and hollow eyed, they were easy to spot. Many of them had cancer—only one floor of shielding separated their two communal living spaces from the nuclear reactors. No matter what engineering did, the radiation seemed to get through to the lower decks.
The sight was never easy to stomach, but it was reality. And it wasn’t going to get better anytime soon.
He eyed the Christian crosses some of them wore around their necks. Their belief in God and the hope of something better after death seemed to help them come to terms with their squalid lives. Like a lot of others, X followed no religious doctrine. Pascal’s wager posited that a rational person should live as though God existed, and seek to believe in God, but then, X wasn’t an entirely rational person. He was a Hell Diver. If God did exist, he had better things to bother with than the fate of the human race. The closest he got to God was at the end of a bottle of ’shine.
The lower-deckers made up the majority of the Hive’s population. They were the citizens he had spent his life trying to save even as he watched their quality of life deteriorate every day. In moments such as this, he wondered what he was saving them from. Maybe there really was a heaven after death, and all his efforts did was prolong their suffering and delay their passage to a blissful paradise.
“Hurry up!” a woman at the end of the line yelled, pulling X back to reality. “My son hasn’t eaten in two days!” A pale, hairless boy stood next to her, his hand clasped in hers. She saw X staring and glared at him with contempt. “What you looking at, mista?”
X wanted to say something, give some bland and useless words of comfort and hope, but it seemed pointless. He shied away from her gaze as the line surged forward. Two gray-uniformed Militia soldiers stepped closer to the crowd. That small motion quieted all but one of the restless lower-deckers.