Hell Divers by Nicholas Sansbury Smith Page B

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.
    â€œWhere’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.
    â€œLet 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.
    â€œHelp 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.
    â€œShit,” 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.
    â€œGreat. Just fucking great.”
    Weaver took another look at their surroundings.
    â€œSir, 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.
    â€œWe need to get moving,” he said. “Radiation’s off the graph here.”
    Jones nodded his acknowledgment and jogged ahead, his boots crunching over the snow. The greenish-black of his suit’s exoskeleton looked alien against the stark white landscape, the blue glow from the circular battery unit the only sign of life in a place where there was only death.
    Weaver pulled