When I say Hell, I do not really mean in the literary sense.  Although the fire and brimstone worlds do exist.  That's from past experience.  But out of the possibilities that there are of alternate worlds, then this was possibly one of the worse.

Rembrandt had travelled through before I had, and had a good twenty second head start.  He had taken a set of supplies with him.  Food, clothes, etc.  Working for the Consortium made sliding a luxury and we could afford to take items through with us unlike before when we were limited by what we had on our person.  I had not bothered, not wanting to risk either losing the luggage on-route in the wormhole, or getting hit on the head by it.  So Rembrandt had packed a few spare clothes for myself and was waiting on the other side, the twenty seconds giving him plenty of time for clearance.

I slid. 

The ride was more bumpy than usual.  The idea of the least distance between two objects carried over to inter-dimensional travel, and not accounting for other anomalies such as other dimensions passing through the wormhole (something I had never seen and never wanted to), the ride was straight, short, and comfortable.  I could have quite happily drank a pot of tea while in one of these wormholes.  Normally anyway.  The bumpy ride should have given it away that something bad was going to happen.

I emerged somewhere.  I could not really tell because it was night-time, and for a change, no lights were piercing through the darkness.  Even the light of the moon did not help.  The wormhole gave off some light, but it quickly disappeared.  Suddenly something grabbed me and pulled me down. 

Rembrandt had just saved my life, as many something's, presumably bullets, launched themselves where the vortex had just been.  Then I heard the noises.  Our mission may have been to discover what had happened to the production of the gas, but we believed that we had figured that one out.  Unfortunately, we could not return to the Consortium to tell them for another five days.

This world was at war.

Authors Notes

Yet again sorry this took so long.