Ghosts

EIGHTEEN

Magnolia was going to kill Jordan when she got back to the ship. Trying to murder her was one thing, but getting Andrew killed and risking the lives of the other divers to prove a point? That was psychotic. She wasn’t sure how she would kill him, only that it would be up close and involve her hands.

First, though, she had to find a way out of the Hilltop Bastion and back to the ship. So far, they weren’t making much headway. She crawled ahead of Rodger through the utility tunnel. He seemed to be enjoying the view, judging by the beam from his light. It danced across the tunnel but conveniently seemed to center on her backside most of the time. A free view of her ass was the least she could give him for coming down here to find her.

Her light picked up another pile of feces ahead. The sight almost made her gag even though she couldn’t smell it. Bones and a single feather protruded from the pile. The Sirens had been inside the passages, and while these remains weren’t fresh, the number of piles was alarming. She began to wonder whether the creatures lived in the ducts.

The thought made her check the knife sheathed at her thigh. She continued crawling, doing her best to keep her rifle from banging against the metal. Rodger was having a hell of a time behind her. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear the ruckus he was making. Whatever was sticking out of his vest pocket kept catching on the strap of his rifle.

“Stow your shit,” she hissed.

Magnolia continued wriggling through the narrow passage, her elbows scraping on the metal walls, and her helmet grazing the ceiling. She squirmed faster, like the soldiers she had seen ducking under barbed wire in the films from the archives. Her HUD clock showed they had been moving for thirty minutes, but with Andrew dead, the mission clock didn’t mean much anymore. Their mission had changed from rescue and salvage to survival.

The light on her helmet showed another junction ahead. She pushed on until she was about five feet away, then pulled in her knees and turned to look at Rodger. He was scrunched like an animal in a crate. His beam hit her in the visor, and she ducked, shielding her face with her arm.

Rodger moved it away and then scooted up so they were visor to visor. His eyes searched hers in the half-light of her low beam, and for the first time in years she felt a flicker of something other than disdain for the opposite sex.

“Didn’t Timothy say to take a left here?” she asked quietly.

“A left, then right, then left, then another left.” He nodded confidently. As she turned away, he covered his vest pocket.

“What the hell do you have—”

The sound of claws scratching metal cut her off.

“Move!” Rodger said. Crouched on his knees, he brought his rifle muzzle up as she pivoted back toward the junction. Her light captured a Siren moving on all fours toward them, spiky back hunched and scraping against the sheet metal. A rope of saliva swung like a pendulum from its wide mouth.

A deafening crack filled Magnolia’s helmet, and the flash dazzled her eyes. Another shot followed, and she scrunched down to give Rodger more room. Agonized screeches bounced off the walls. She blinked away the stars and saw the beast flopping around, crashing off the metal ductwork.

“Hold your fire!” Magnolia barked.

As soon as Rodger lowered his rifle, she was crawling toward the monster. It was making too much noise; the racket would draw every Siren in the area to their position. She centered her light on the beast as it thrashed, smearing its blood all over the sheet metal. With a side-armed motion, she threw the blade down the tunnel. It sank halfway to the hilt in the side of the creature’s head. A moment later, it went limp, and Magnolia was moving on her elbows and knees toward it. She stopped a few feet away to make sure it was dead before grabbing the hilt of her knife. She tugged, and the blade came free, releasing a stream of gore onto the floor. It was hard to believe this had ever been human.

Magnolia went to push the corpse out of the way when the beast suddenly slashed at her. Something stung her right shoulder as she brought her elbow pad down on the creature’s skull. There was a screech followed by a thunk, thunk, thunk. Fueled by adrenaline, she slammed her pad down over and over. Soon the creature’s skull was like the shattered shell of a boiled egg, and her armored elbow was covered in blood.

“You can stop now,” Rodger said. “It’s dead, okay?”

A guttural roar seemed to answer him. The noise came from somewhere below them, but Magnolia didn’t need to see through the duct to know the source. The glowing beast from the cryogenics lab was out there, hunting them.

She looked down at her arm. The beast had gotten her good. Her light captured a pair of deep, bloody gashes. The claws had shredded her layered suit, and blood seeped out of the tears.

“Magnolia?” Rodger said again.

She applied pressure with her left hand and said, “I’ll be fine.”

The wound burned, but it was the radiation, not blood loss, that concerned her. Here inside the facility, the rads were minimal. She could survive for a while down here, but before she went topside—if she ever got out—she would need to patch the tears in her suit.

One thing at a time, Mags.

She pushed the pain and thoughts for the future out of her mind, and they moved quickly down the passage for several minutes. Her light ran over walls covered in scratch marks, and before long they came upon another pile of feces. This one was fresh, and she instinctively held her breath as she crawled over the top.

Halfway to the next junction, she came across an area with three vents on the right side of the wall. The metal grate of the center vent had been pried off.

She kept her rifle cradled as she squirmed toward the opening, waiting for a Siren to pop out into the passage. Every few feet, she stopped to listen, but the ringing from the gunshots made hearing difficult. Beyond the high-pitched whine was a faint humming that reminded her of the nuclear power plant on the Hive.

Timothy had mentioned that they would cross over the engineering room on their way through the utility tunnel. If that was where they were now, then they weren’t far from a passage that served as a back door to the control room.

She didn’t stop as she passed the first two vents, but approaching the third, she slowed. Her light captured the opening but barely penetrated the space beyond.

“Lights off,” she ordered.

Both beams flickered off, and darkness filled the tunnel, leaving only the faint blue glow from their battery units to guide them. Pain shot up her right arm as she heaved the gun up toward the opening.

She squirmed a few feet on her elbows and knees and slid over the vent cover. The ringing in her ears had finally faded away. She couldn’t hear the monsters, only the reassuring hum of machines. Curiosity prompted her to bump her light back on. If this was the engineering room, it could contain valuable fuel cells for the Hive. Perhaps she could use them as a ticket back onto the ship. She would deliver them to Jordan right before she plucked the eyes from his skull and fed them to him.

Shifting her helmet toward the opening, she raked the beam back and forth. Below was a room so big, the beam didn’t reach the other side.

“What do you see?” Rodger asked.

Magnolia angled the light downward, capturing the outline of several tarp-covered mounds. Beyond these, she could see shelves stacked with what could be supplies.

“Hand me one of your flares,” she said.

Reaching back with her uninjured arm, she felt one of Rodger’s sticks in her palm. She pulled off the top and hit the flare’s tip against the striker surface. The flame burst out, and she dropped it into the room. Two heartbeats later, the flare clanked to the floor.

The red flare lit up a room larger than the lab they had just left, revealing a fleet of vehicles. Trucks, cars, jeeps, and even a motorcycle were parked below. Unlike the rusted hulks she had seen on the surface, these vehicles had intact windows and unblemished paint, although their tires were flat.

Curiosity once again getting the best of her, she reached back for another flare.

“Weaver’s waiting on us,” Rodger protested.

“This’ll only take a second.”

He scooted up closer and tried to see past her, but Magnolia just moved her fingers, signaling for the flare.

“Fine,” he huffed.

She grabbed it, struck the surface, and flung it out as far as she could. This time, the red glow bloomed over something that took her breath away.

“Come on, Mags. Tell me what you see.”

She waited just to be sure, but the familiar beetle shape sitting on raised platforms across the room wasn’t a figment of her imagination.

“Hey, Rodge, do you remember Timothy saying anything about an airship down here?”

She moved aside to let him see.

“Holy shit,” he murmured. “Is that really a ship?”

Magnolia smirked. “Think you can figure out how to fly it?”

Sweat rolled down Weaver’s forehead even as his armor shed the water from the treatment plant. He couldn’t see much without his night vision, and the quiet darkness was starting to unnerve him.

The optics weren’t all that had malfunctioned after his swim. His battery charge had dropped from 70 to 20 percent, and the glow from the dying unit penetrated only a few feet around him. If the heart of his suit gave out, his worst fear would come to pass and he would die in this tomb, blind and deaf.

But Weaver refused to die alone, in the darkness underground. He had lived his whole life in the sky, and he couldn’t bear the thought of spending his last moments trapped down here. He wouldn’t go out like Andrew, especially at the hands of the Sirens.

Blaster in one hand and broken femur in the other, he continued up the steps. He had discarded the wet shells, and though the ones on the outside of his vest were just as wet, he had found a couple of homemade buckshot rounds, which he kept in a pouch. The two shells weren’t going to save him if he encountered the Sirens again, but the ammunition made him feel a little less helpless.

A rattling around the next corner signaled a new threat approaching. He set the thighbone down and placed his palm over his headlamp before switching it on. He took his hand away for an instant before covering the lamp again. In the single moment of light, he glimpsed something unexpected in the stairwell above.

Tubes webbed across the walls at the next landing. He pulled the cup of his hand away from the headlamp and ran the light over them. Pores dotted the rubbery black skin, and every few feet, a halo of spiky growths surrounded bulbous black openings like lashes protecting an eyeball. The walls that the tubes ran across were not equidistant here. They appeared bent inward, and Weaver quickly saw why. The tubes fed into wider holes in the concrete, leaving gaps that exposed the earth. Feathers and white grit had piled on the floor.

This wasn’t another nesting area of the Sirens—it was the home of the cyclopean camouflaged beasts he had encountered outside the treatment plant. The tubes appeared to be some sort of passage or burrow to move from the facility through the earth, and perhaps back to the surface. The openings appeared to be doors of some sort.

Vultures, he mused. These mutants looked something like the carrion birds from the archives. But the camouflage made them even better scavengers.

Not good.

Weaver was sandwiched between the nesting grounds of a new type of mutant, and the home of the Sirens ten floors below. This place, unlike the other ITC facilities he had raided on past dives, seemed to be home to a variety of monsters.

As he picked the femur back up, he considered the barrier in the stairwell. For some reason, the Sirens didn’t seem to venture up this way, which meant these emaciated vultures must be more dangerous than they looked.

Holding his weapons loosely in his gloved hands, he continued up the landing. There was only one logical way out of this monster-infested facility, and that was up. He would take his chances with the one-eyed, one-armed scavengers over the eyeless beasts below.

On three, you’re going to stop this lollygagging around and run like a man.

He bolted up the stairs on the count of two. The ceiling and walls had shifted as if an earthquake had hit the stairwell. Wide cracks spiderwebbed across the concrete. Navigating around the barbed spikes that lined the holes, Weaver brushed up against one of them, and the lash-like growths scraped his armor. But they weren’t hard like teeth after all; they reminded him more of stems from the glowing bushes he had encountered on other dives.

He leaped over a tube crossing the stairs and ducked under another hanging from the ceiling as he approached the next landing. All the while, he heard a low, insistent hissing sound, like air escaping from a ruptured pressure suit.

Weaver kept running, but the sound seemed to surround him from all sides. Motion flickered from an opening in a tube above him, and the spiky eyelashes fluttered. All at once, eyeballs on stems popped out like periscopes to peer at him. A vulture pulled itself out of the tube overhead and plopped onto the landing.

Weaver swung the femur. The bone connected, and splattered the eye with a loud pop. Milky fluid peppered his armor as he ran past the beast. It crashed into the wall, clawing at its ruined eye.

He rounded the corner and halted before running up the steps. The rubbery surfaces of the burrows bulged as vultures crawled through them. Spiky lashes opened like the mouths of Venus flytraps, disgorging a dozen of the feathery beasts into the passage. And those were just the ones he could see with his lamp. Others, fully camouflaged, skittered across the walls.

This must be why the Sirens didn’t venture up here, he thought grimly.

The gray creatures snapped their hooked beaks at him as he ran. Those that ventured too close on the right, he batted away with the femur; those to his left, he smacked with the barrel of the blaster.

He fought for every step, swinging, stabbing, and bulldozing his way through the small army of mutant creatures. But it wasn’t the beasts he could see that were the problem. How many more were hiding in the shadows?

The tubes around him continued to bulge with reinforcements. He considered firing his blaster, but the two shots were too valuable to squander on beasts the size of a dog. Their curved beaks and claws were sharp, but they weren’t as strong or as fast as the alpha-predator Sirens.

He batted three of them out of the way and rounded another corner, followed by the squawking din. Creatures he couldn’t see grabbed at him with their single arms and pecked at his armor with their beaks. A sharp pain stabbed his right shoulder. Claws slashed his ankle, drawing a cry of pain as he dropped to one knee. He swung both weapons in a wide arc, sending several of the creatures crashing into the wall.

Something moved above him, and only then did he realize how badly he had underestimated the little monsters. If there were enough of them, they didn’t need to be strong or fast to take him down and pick his bones clean.

By the time he looked up, the beast was already on him. It landed on his booster with such force that he hit the stairs with a grunt. The hiss that followed wasn’t from the vultures; it was from the escaping helium. Worse, a crack now rickracked across his broken visor, letting in the toxic air.

Through the cracked visor, he could just make out a door at the top of the stairs. He was almost to the operations room. The rusted door was at the landing not ten steps above him, but with his suit and visor compromised, he wouldn’t survive long even if he made it there.

In a fit of rage, Weaver bucked the vulture off him. He stabbed another beast through the chest with the ragged end of the thighbone and swung the barrel of his blaster into a pair on his left. Then, lowering his helmet, he bolted up the last stairs, spearing through the remaining vultures as they snapped and pecked at him with their beaks.

Summoning what strength remained in him, he pushed away the pain and fear. He barreled through a vulture that came darting down the stairs, swatting it with the thighbone. Claws slashed at his legs, and a beak sank through his boot as he crushed the thing. Gritting his teeth in pain, he shrugged off another creature that had landed on his back.

Weaver could smell them now: a mixture of gamy meat, body odor, and filthy feathers. His battery unit continued to drop, and each breath filled his lungs with toxic air, but through it all, he held on to hope that he could still escape.

He kept his gaze on the door ahead and smacked another vulture to the floor below with his blaster. The tubular burrows ended at the upper landing, but they continued to bulge with more of the creatures. Weaver stabbed the jagged end of the femur through the rubbery skin on the final step, impaling a vulture he couldn’t see. He pulled the bone free and stabbed another before it could emerge. Then he squeezed the trigger of his blaster. Fire flashed from the muzzle, and buckshot punched through the control panel beside the door.

Past the ringing in his ears came the shrieks of the frightened vultures. He jumped onto the landing and turned to see the beasts flocking down the stairs, squawking in their ghastly language. Hell, if he had known it would scare them off so easily, he would have fired earlier.

Injured and exhausted, Weaver stumbled over to the door. He shined his light through the crack and listened for hostiles, but all he heard were the squawks of those still retreating down the stairs. Placing both palms against the door, he pushed it open, fully expecting to find it overrun with monsters.

The station was deserted. Desks covered in dusty computer equipment furnished the small room. He took a step inside and dragged the nearest desk over to block the door. Metal screeched across the floor as he added two more tables to the barricade.

He scanned the room, playing the light across the steel shutters on the far wall. He found the radio station on a desk in the center, then looked for the backup power. A control panel was mounted on the wall to his right.

Weaver flipped the breakers, and the overhead lights blazed to life. His eyes closed at the sudden brilliance, but opened again at the sound of a voice.

“Hello and welcome.”

Blinking in the brightness to locate the source of the voice, he banged into a desk.

“Do not be alarmed,” the voice said. “I am Timothy Pepper, the manager of ITC Communal Thirteen. How may I assist you?”

Weaver eyed the hologram skeptically. He had heard of AIs, but this was the first he had ever met. According to the archives, the cost of the technology had made them unaffordable over 260 years ago. Others, like the one on the Hive, had malfunctioned not long into service. Captain Ash had told stories of those days, but Weaver didn’t know the details. He wasn’t even sure his old airship, Ares, ever had an AI.

All Weaver knew was that he didn’t trust the image standing in front of him. Hell, he barely trusted humans.

“Sir, you are injured,” Timothy said. “May I provide medical assistance?”

“I don’t have time for that. I need to use your radio.”

Timothy clasped his hands behind his back. “Certainly. I can assist you with that.”

Weaver limped over, leaving a streak of blood on the tile floor. His leg and foot were in bad shape, and his visor was useless. Although he knew it was only his imagination, he swore he could already feel the radiation eating away at him.

“I need you to transmit an SOS over this channel,” Weaver said. The piece of paper he pulled from his vest was wet, the numbers streaky. “Think you can read these?”

Timothy checked the paper and then gestured for him to take a seat at the radio desk. The speakers crackled and coughed after years of sitting idle as Timothy scanned through the channels. As he worked, Weaver tried to reach Magnolia and Rodger on the channel.

“Do you copy, over?” he said.

Static crackled over the channel. They were still radio silent.

“The other divers are on their way to this facility,” Timothy said, without taking his focus off the radio.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I provided them a map to get here,” Timothy replied.

Weaver relaxed a bit. If Magnolia and Rodger trusted Timothy, maybe he could, too. He held up his hand at the sound of another voice. This one was coming from the speakers on the radio.

“Wait, go back,” Weaver said. “What is that?”

“One moment,” Timothy said.

Static filled the room. Then a voice. Not Rodger or Magnolia, but an oddly familiar voice that Weaver hadn’t heard in years.

“If anyone’s out there, this is Commander Xavier Rodriguez. I’m leaving Hades and heading east toward the coast.”

Jordan strolled into the launch bay for the first time in months. He usually sent Katrina to supervise these things, but this was one launch he didn’t want to miss. He nodded at Sergeant Jenkins, and the militia guards closed the double doors. One of the windows was missing, the glass shattered by a militia soldier trying to stop Michael and Layla. The valuable glass wouldn’t be replaced anytime soon.

Outside, people jostled for a look through the small windows.

That was fine. Jordan wouldn’t stop them from watching; it would be good for them. An execution from time to time reminded the citizens of the Hive just who was in charge.

He crossed the room with his hands folded as if in prayer. It seemed fitting, really, since he was about to cleanse the ship of a false prophet.

Janga stood inside drop tube 13, with only her head visible beneath the domed lid. A single tear rolled down her bruised face. She wiped it away with bloodied fingers when Jordan began walking toward her.

He stopped at the red line surrounding her tube and let his hands drop to his side. He tried to appear nonthreatening, as if he were about to have a conversation with an old friend. Ty stood a few feet away, arms folded across his chest, jaw clenched. Jordan could see he wasn’t happy about his new position as a Hell Diver, but so far, his only protest was the frown on his face.

“Leave us,” Jordan said to the former engineer.

Ty glanced at Janga once more and walked over to the operations room. The hatch shut with a loud click that echoed through the vaulted space.

Jordan stepped over the red line and smiled at the old woman. “Part of me was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” he said. “Part of me was hoping you would keep your mouth shut belowdecks and stay out of the archives. But you gave me no choice.”

A snort of disgust came from inside the tube. Janga looked up at him with a stubborn gaze that reminded him of Captain Ash. Both women had believed they were doing what was best for humanity.

Both had been wrong.

Janga knitted her brow, squinting. “You know what’s down there, Jordan. You know why Maria’s dream of finding a home on the surface can never be in our lifetime. But you also know you can’t keep the Hive flying forever.”

Jordan looked over his shoulder to make sure the guards weren’t paying attention. Both men were facing the doors, backs turned. He took another step toward the launch tube and leaned down toward the plastic surface so his face was just above Janga’s.

“Before Captain Ash died, she told me in detail what happened to those facilities, and I put the other pieces together by reading the restricted archives. Why do you think I’ve stayed clear of those red zones for so long?”

“Because you’re a coward.”

“I’m a realist,” Jordan said.

She met his eyes again. “Your lack of imagination prevents you from seeing past your fear. We all will die up here unless you follow the path Maria laid out.”

“You’re the only one dying today.”

Jordan retreated outside the red barrier and shouted for Ty to prep the launch tube. He kept his eyes on Janga. There was sadness there, and pain, but he saw no sign of fear. That didn’t sit right with him. He had beaten her, so why was the old woman looking at him as though she had just won?

She pulled a chain from her robe and kissed the smooth surface of a black stone pendant. “Your time will come, Leon Jordan,” she said. “The man from the surface will lead these people home—but you won’t be among them.”

A voice crackled in his earpiece as he prepared to launch her into hell.

“Captain, do you copy? Over.”

Jordan pulled his hand away from the green button and flipped the minicomm to his lips. “This better be important, Hunt.”

“Yes, sir. I just received an SOS from Weaver. He’s requesting that we move back into position to evacuate the divers.”

“Have they found any power cells?”

“Negative, sir, but they did rescue Magnolia.”

Jordan ran a finger under the collar of his uniform. Magnolia was a tough woman to kill. Good thing he had a contingency plan.

“Weaver said he and the other divers will be ready for evac in less than an hour.”

“Who knows about this?”

Hunt hesitated for a moment. “Just me, sir.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” Jordan replied. “I’ll be on the bridge in a few minutes.”

Jordan glanced down at Janga once more and shook his head. He would have liked to stay, but he had more pressing issues to deal with.

He pressed the launch button and strode away without a backward glance.