Hell Divers by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

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?”
    â€œPlease 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.
    â€œCaptain,” 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.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œWe’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.”
    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.”
    â€œAye, Captain,” the ensign replied. He shifted his