So far, the situation was a bust.

The first pod she'd checked out had a corpse in it, one she recognized. One of the technical staff that she hadn't really gotten to know too well. He was a pasty, kind of scrawny guy who mostly kept to himself. He'd not gotten secured properly in the pod and the crash had killed him. He didn't have anything of any real value on him, and neither did his pod. The second pod was at least empty, so either it had launched on accident and then popped when it had hit the surface, or, more likely, whoever was in it had walked away.

Someone who, hopefully, knew more than she did.

Her mind also settled as she crossed the surface of the moon, now making her way towards her next destination: the lone structure. Kyra remembered that the Icarus had been in the process of coming back. She had been onboard that ship for close to a month. That's how long tours tended to last. So far, since signing up with the UAC, she'd done six of these. Six miserable months out in the deeper reaches of the solar system, trying not to go crazy, trying to keep well-maintained, well-trained, preparing for some kind of emergency.

There'd been none.

Well, not until now.

This particularly boring job had involved taking a series of scans of Neptune and its moon Triton. There was always the off chance of some kind of attack, or the crew might, in some capacity, go a little crazy, or a malfunction or meteor strike or something of the like, which was why the UAC insisted on having some Marines on standby. But it had all gone according to plan. Probably the only good thing about it was that Kyra had managed to get laid several times with a friend she'd made during the last tour who'd ended up getting thrown onboard the Icarus with her. He was probably ten years younger than her, a cute Corporal named Garret, and he was a pretty good friend with benefits. He was skilled and discreet.

He understood from the beginning that sex was as far as it would ever go.

She wondered, suddenly, if he had survived the incident.

As she zeroed in on the structure, Kyra pushed herself, strained her memories, trying to clear the mental fog. They had been coming back, and...there had been some kind of distress call. Yes. She remembered now. It had been the middle of the night, inasmuch as there was any kind of night or day in space. She and Garret had been asleep in her cabin. A call had roused her from that sleep, the pilots warning them that they were picking up a distress call and they were obligated to investigate, given that it was a Union Aerospace Corporation facility.

She and Garret had gotten up, showered, and dressed as fast as they could, then had started making for the bridge.

And…

Something had happened. She remembered an explosion and…

Nothing else after that.

Obviously someone had gotten her to a pod and into this suit. Probably Garret. Had he made it out okay? Had any of the others? There had been a small squadron of Marines onboard under her command, and a few dozen technicians, medics, pilots, and the other random assortment of personnel that made ships run.

So far, she just had one confirmed KIA.

Well, hopefully the answers would be forthcoming. She had arrived at the structure. It wasn't very large, whatever it was, just a squat, metal thing. As she moved in towards one of the windows, she activated her radio. It wouldn't be as powerful without the rover boosting it, but it should still be worth something.

"This is Staff Sergeant Kyra Morgan to anyone receiving, please respond. Over."

Still nothing. She peered in through the window. There was a room waiting beyond. She could see things: a pair of cots, an examination table, some cabinets and counterspace, several crates. From what she could see, the place looked like it had been raided. All of the drawers to the cabinets were open, the crates cracked open as well. Well, great. Kyra moved over to the airlock and tried it. It opened up. She stepped in and cycled through.

As she stepped inside and moved to clear the area, her sense that it had been cleaned out only grew stronger. The only other door, at the back of the room, led to a simple bathroom. The mirror hung open, the medicine cabinet behind it not exactly empty, but clearly ransacked. After making sure the area was secure, she took a further moment to hunt through all the various cabinets, drawers, and crates that occupied the area.

This was clearly meant to be some kind of emergency cache, and clearly some kind of emergency had happened, because it had been cleaned out. There were some supplies leftover, but almost none of it was useful. As she grabbed up whatever jumped out at her as valuable, Kyra felt...good. Okay, good might not be the best word. But she felt switched on, dialed in. She was actually doing something. This was the kind of shit she'd trained for, the kind of situation she'd endured and adapted to. An emergency.

Consequently, the next several minutes passed by smoothly and quickly. Now that the immediate area was secure and she'd gathered up whatever supplies she could find, she moved back to the bathroom and locked herself in. She took off her helmet and her suit, then checked herself over for wounds. She only found a few cuts and scrapes through rips in her uniform. The only real injury was her head, which, she realized, had a hasty patch-job done to it. She winced as she peeled away the bandage, finding blood.

Scalp wounds sucked.

She studied the wound in the mirror, pulling aside strands of red hair to do so. "Hell," she muttered as she looked it over. Finally, she ended up cleaning it as best she could manage with the supplies she'd gathered, then patched it up again. She took the opportunity to wash her face and get the blood off her neck and jaw where it had leaked from the wound, then pulled her suit back on and popped a few painkillers.

With that out of the way, she packed up the medical supplies into a portable kit and clipped it to her belt, then secured her helmet. As she headed for the airlock, intent on hoofing it to that compound in the distance, she stopped suddenly. She'd hit her head, and had been missing things ever since waking up in the escape pod. Did she have everything? Had she thought of everything? She closed her eyes and cleared her thoughts.

A half-minute later, she had it.

Oxygen.

She'd forgotten to refill her oxygen, and she was at less than ten percent. "Shit," she growled, tracking down a reserve tank built into the wall and hooking up to it. At least it hadn't been tapped dry. She brought herself back up to a hundred percent and then ran another check on her suit. Once it came back secure, she headed for the airlock. Several thoughts shifted through her head, questions, fears, theories.

There was so much she didn't know about this place, about her situation.

Anything at all could have happened, could be happening.

It was obvious that something had gone down here, if they'd issued some kind of distress call. As the airlock finished its cycle and she stepped out, Kyra felt a jolt of hope as her radio crackled to life.

"Hello? Is anyone there? This is Staff Sergeant Kyra-"

She was cut off by what sounded like someone screaming. It was distant and scrambled, but she definitely heard someone screaming.

Abruptly, there was a meaty thwacking sound and the screaming cut off.

Then a new sound came onto the airwaves, one that chilled her.

It sounded like…

Eating. Like animals eating. Like a feeding time of some sort.

Abruptly, the transmission died away. Theories and questions began to fall away, replaced almost entirely by fear.

She stared at the compound ahead of her and, after several seconds, forced herself to begin putting one foot in front of the other.

She had no choice: go there or eventually die of suffocation.

That bad feeling that had taken root from the second she woke up, that ominous tension that was not unlike the notion of being watched, only grew with every step Kyra took towards the compound. It was obvious that the first structure she was approaching was a port. She saw the telltale of the control tower ascending several stories above a huge, squarish structure. The fact that she could see the UAC logo stamped huge and obvious against the bland gunmetal gray structure's exterior did nothing to help abate that feeling.

The message, if it could be called that, had rattled her more than she'd care to admit. Fighting on Earth was, to be sure, a pretty awful predicament. She'd seen combat all over the place, ranging from the Battle of Alaska to putting down secessionist forces in Ukraine to taking on mercenaries in Bosnia, and a lot of other places in between. It was shit, but it was shit that she was deeply familiar with by now. She knew all about engagement, about storming a place, taking a hill, retreating, fighting in all sorts of awful, nasty environments.

But there was something just...creepy about outer space.

Everything had an edge of unease to it, an air of uncertainty. She tried to shake these thoughts as she finally made the final approach to the hangar. She tried her radio again, reluctantly, but got nothing, just dead air. She hunted down a manual access airlock, since she didn't want to make a big entrance if she could help it. She had two dead bodies on her hands so far, and a quickly growing collection of puzzle pieces. And now here she was, at the airlock, and there was no more time for thinking, it was time to actually do something.

She hit the button and the exterior airlock doors opened up. Kyra pointed her pistol inside, half-expecting someone to be waiting for her, some enemy or hostile or...Kyra shook her head and stepped into the empty airlock, then hit the cycle button. This situation was bad enough, she didn't need to go unlocking the footlocker of irrational fears that she'd buried somewhere deep and dark in a catacomb somewhere far within her mind. You kind of had to take a 'lock it up and throw away the key' approach when it came to certain fears in her line of work. A certain amount of fear was healthy, but what was threatening to come up now was bad stuff.

This was the kind of fear you felt when it was the middle of the night and you were alone in the house, there was a bad storm going and you thought maybe you heard a noise. Oh, and to top it all off, you were twelve, your parents had decided to test your responsibility by letting you stay home for the weekend instead of driving a state over to visit Great Aunt I Don't Fucking Like Her And Neither Do You, and you decided to abuse this trust by staying up too late watching a late night special on serial killers.

Kyra shook her head and made herself focus as the airlock finished its cycle.

Yeah, definitely didn't need that kind of fear rattling around inside her. She aimed her pistol at the doors as they parted in the middle, sliding open. A mostly empty room with a stack of crates in one corner and a few EVA lockers along the right wall awaited her inspection. She carefully swept the room for signs of life, and although she found nothing, Kyra's gaze settled on one of the Extra Vehicular Activity lockers.

It hung open, ransacked and vacant.

It sent a lone but powerful echo of apprehension shooting through her. Was she looking at the resting place of the suit the dead man in the rover had hastily pulled on before fleeing? It was possible, likely even. She moved on, taking a moment to check the crates. No clues there, they were empty. She moved over to the only other door in the room and reached for the open button, but her finger hesitated an inch from contact.

She was missing something again, something small, but potentially crucial.

Her oxygen. She was still using it. The airlock had confirmed that the internal atmosphere was stable, so she cut off her own internal supply and opened up the vents. She waited for the new atmosphere to filter in, to give her hints and clues, and warnings. And they came. She immediately picked up on a scent of blood, and of something burning. But there was something beneath it, embedded within the smell, something much worse that made her combat senses crank up. She tensed, squeezing the pistol, and almost fired off a shot.

Kyra made herself relax a bit and tried to figure out what she was smelling, but she couldn't. She had no idea what it was, what it might be, only that it was dangerous. Resolved not to get herself killed and figure out what in the hell was going on here, she hit the button. The door slid open, revealing a broad, open space: a hangar bay. Her eyes picked out the usual litter of crates, tables, workbenches, and toolboxes scattered around the area. But what drew her gaze like iron filings to a magnet were the things that didn't belong.

The blood stains.

The pockmarks of bullet holes.

The spent shell casings.

The scattered tools and spare parts.

Some kind of attack had definitely happened. Was this the move that her corporate overlords had been paranoid of? Some kind of hostile takeover or opportunistic strike by mercenaries or criminals? Or was this something totally different? She had no idea, but her instincts kept her on edge as she stuck to the wall and began to check over the hangar, looking for hiding places, for survivors, for whoever had done this.

She heard nothing but the faint hum of power and the quiet respiration of oxygen. No voices, no movement, nothing. It took close to five minutes, but at the end of it, Kyra ended up by the primary exit out into the main structure. She looked back once over the hangar, noting the utter lack of vehicles, of any kind. She sure as hell wasn't walking out of here. The facility beckoned, and so she left the hangar, carefully checking the lengthy passageway that lay beyond. It stretched away from her in either direction for several hundred meters. It was a quick way to access all of the hangars and garages, and Kyra could easily envision a heavy traffic of dozens of crate-toting personnel and hover-dollies and industrial-yellow forklifts.

A proliferating hive of buzzing activity.

But now it was a derelict shell of metal. There were more signs of conflict and some of the lights were flickering uncertainly. Kyra spotted a pair of corpses and hurried over to the nearest one, keeping a sharp eye out for hostiles. She got to the first body and crouched by it. He was a Space Marine, more than likely one of the locals. He'd been shot in the neck and had bled out. Someone had also picked the body over for ammo and supplies, and he just had on a uniform, no armor. The second corpse, a local technician, was in similar shape.

"Damn," she whispered as she left the corpses behind and made for the far right end of the passageway.

Her destination was the control tower.

There might, if she found some small ration of luck, be a few answers there.

She struggled to maintain a balance between moving stealthily enough for safety's sake and moving fast enough to get the hell to her destination and get some desperately-needed intel. She checked whatever open doors and offshoot alcoves she passed, finding often nothing but dim rooms and passageways of UAC-stamped metal. There was more blood, more bullet holes, but no more bodies. The sense of ominous tension only swelled as Kyra reached the entryway to the control tower. One of the doors was half-open, partially slipped into its niche in the wall, leaving maybe a foot of space.

To make matters worse, the doors were stuck like this. Sighing, she peered slowly through, gun at ready, and saw a receiving area and stairs. Sensing nothing in the immediate area, Kyra slipped through and then looked up. The stairs wrapped the interior of the tower, rising several stories. There was an elevator recessed beneath the stairs to her left. She ignored it, barely trusting elevators to work even when everything was running properly. Her boots clanged with an awful loudness as she moved up the winding stairs.

And yet, no one came to investigate the clamor, no alarms were raised. Kyra kept her anxious speculation under wraps as she made the final ascent to the control tower's peak. A single door awaited her, closed against the world. Pistol still ready, and almost trembling in anticipation at this point, she moved up and hit the access button.

The door slid open to reveal…

Just another hostile-free zone. Kyra sighed after clearing the room. Anti-climaxes were welcome in situations of life and death, but she was beginning to reach the point where she almost wanted there to be some kind of attack, if only to break the damned tension. When you saw an enemy, you could get a decent of idea of whether or not you could deal with it. When you had no idea where the enemy was, it was easy to imagine them as bigger and badder than they really were...if they even existed at all. But she didn't believe she was alone here.

It was obvious that the control room had seen some combat. A few of the screens were cracked or outright shattered, though thankfully the windows that made up most of the walls had remained intact. Although she knew it took a bit more than a few rounds to blow out one of those windows, they always made her nervous. But beyond that glass, she could see the rest of the facility. Kyra slowly walked to the far window.

Her gaze swept the surface of the moon.

There were four other large structures spread out across the area. They were huge, gray proliferations of metal walls and glass windows, of rooms and interconnecting corridors, each of them making some strange, abstract shape.

"There," she whispered as, somewhere distant, outside one of the farther back buildings, she saw the silent spark of gunfire. Someone was still fighting…

But who? Why?

It was definitely too distant to pick out any relevant details, and Kyra came back to herself. She turned back towards the mess of equipment, then quickly set to work. Several minutes ticked by as she dug into the internal network of the facility, and quickly discovered that it was a mess. Lots of information was simply cut off, links leading to nowhere, and she felt every extra wasted second by the long load times.

But finally, she teased out a few pieces of intel.

The first was that she was on Europa, currently in the UAC owned research facility called Typhon Station. The second was that something was wrong with the communications uplink, because she couldn't make the thing work for anything.

The third, and final, bit of information she received was that she was at a dead end, at least in regards to this control tower, because she couldn't find anything of any other real value. Whatever damage had been done here must have severed it from the primary database. If she wanted to find any further intel, she'd have to do it the hard way and go looking. Her best bet, she surmised as she resisted the urge to smash the screen, was to find a security center. It had the added benefit of maybe having something a bit heavier than this sidearm she had. To make matters worse was the fact that there was no fucking map, not even of the building she was in.

Frustration mounting, Kyra left the control tower, pausing once to investigate the site of the firefight she'd seen earlier.

There was nothing there now.

Thoughts shifted and flowed jerkily through her head as she descended the stairwell, pistol in hand again, but they all came crashing to a sudden and powerful halt as she heard a sound. It was a footstep. She was on the last of the stairs and froze immediately, aiming at the doorway through which she'd come not all that long ago.

For several seconds, she remained still as a statue, waiting.

She was almost positive she'd heard that footstep, but as the seconds ticked by, she became less certain, wondering if perhaps she'd heard an echo of her own heavy boots. She had good ears, but this was a nerve-wracking situation.

Just as Kyra began to move forward again, she heard someone mutter quietly.

Yes, someone was definitely there, just beyond the door.

She crept towards it, gun ready.