The tunnel that led to the final place Kyra intended to visit in this miserable hellhole was thankfully intact, and the tram rode smoothly enough across the tracks. Though it ran over a few corpses with ugly snaps and sprays of blood. She ignored it all, checking over the chaingun to make sure it was in top condition. She had no idea what might be waiting for her in the final structure: Site Echo. The second teleportation site.
As she finished making sure the chaingun was up to snuff, she set it aside and then looked over her latest toy, the primary item she had liberated from the locked armory. It was beautiful, somehow even more wonderful a sight than the chaingun had been. She had absolutely no idea what a DX-88 Eliminator Rocket Launcher was doing on a UAC moon-based research station, but honestly, she didn't give a single fuck.
What mattered was that she had a fucking rocket launcher.
And three rockets to go with it.
She'd also managed to find another few boxes of bullets for the chaingun, a stack of ammo for the assault rifle, and a box of shotgun shells. It was quite the haul, and this time she actually felt ready to fight through hell. Well, probably as much as she could, given the reality of the situation. The launcher looked to be in good condition. Of course the only real test was to pull trigger, which she couldn't really do. She planned on saving it for a real emergency, which...she supposed she'd know when she saw it.
Given everything she'd run into so far, especially considering what had happened in the machine shops, Kyra was prepared to see something a hell of a lot worse than the nightmarish horrors she'd run into by now. And having a rocket launcher to blast right into their screaming faces was a pretty great thing to have. Plus, she could use the chaingun until then. Kyra looked up. The tram was coming to a halt and the airlock was very close now. She stood up and began settling all of her gear. She was pretty much at her limit now.
The airlock finished its cycle and granted her access to the structure.
There were zombies waiting for her on the disembarkation platform. They were armed, and almost all of them were former Marines. Shit. This wasn't going to be easy. She was now more than grateful for the suit of power armor, because she probably wouldn't be able to carry five damned weapons at once without it, especially considering the chaingun. She let it hang across her back and selected the assault rifle.
The second the tram doors opened up, the three nearest zombies opened fire. Almost none of them were armored, at least. It was just a matter of point and shoot. Kyra took a few pistol rounds as she lined up the zombie's skulls and squeezed the trigger, letting out one round apiece and making a killshot each time. As the nearest three zombie bastards went down, others swarmed in. One of them had a shotgun. Kyra took cover and began to operate a bit more tactically. She set to work, wearing out the enemies numbers.
By the time she'd emptied her assault rifle, the last of the zombies was put down, as well as a pair of fiends that had shown up at some point during the firefight. She hastily reloaded and waited to see what else would come her way, but the local forces seemed to have been depleted for the moment. Kyra left the relative safety of the tram and stepped out onto the platform. Still nothing around. She didn't expect that to keep.
She spent a few minutes checking the corpses, gathering up some more shells and magazines for her pistol, finding nothing else of note. Though if there had been, maybe she might not be here to complain about it. After clearing the area, she passed through the security checkpoint that had been utterly wrecked by the invasion. The walls were painted in blood and corpses littered the area. There were, at least, corpses from both sides. Though it looked like something had been feeding on a lot of them. Kyra moved among them, grabbing whatever ammo she could find. Passing through the security checkpoint, she came to the crossroads. It was a pretty similar setup as the previous structure, with scientist's dormitories to the right, and a practically bombed-out security center to the left, and the teleportation core dead ahead.
She opted to go straight to the core.
The sooner she could get through this mess, the better. She hit the access button and scoped out the room beyond. It was similarly designed to the others she'd seen so far. The teleportation gateway was still intact, though it was powered down. She moved slowly along the periphery of the room, checking for any would-be assassins hidden among the shadows and workstations, which were almost wholly destroyed. There were a lot of bodies here, several of them ripped and torn apart, blood sprayed across everywhere, spent shell casings carpeting the floor. Hundreds of rounds had been fired off in this room, she realized.
Kyra tried to imagine what it must have been like to be here at ground zero when they came shrieking and slobbering and cascading out of the gateway. When the forces of Hell began ripping into them with teeth and claw, eating men and women alive. What must it have been like to watch everyone around you getting pieced and chopped and sliced to bloody ribbons? Had they known what was coming? Had any of them been in on it? Or had they merely suspected? Had they had no idea at all? She imagined that the money men at the top wanted everyone kept in the dark as much as absolutely possible.
Didn't they always?
Sometimes she thought she hated them the most. Not the brains who obsessed over all the perverse, dangerous, or outright insane doors science could unlock. Not the shady muscle who made it happen. Not the brass or the politicians who were drooling over the possibilities of increased power over their given domains.
No, the money men.
The slick, sick bastards with dead eyes and fake smiles and faker tans who looked at these atrocities, these horrors being committed, and saw nothing more than dollar signs. And why? More than one billionaire had admitted that the only reason they continued accumulating wealth far, far beyond the threshold of money that any single person or family could ever need was simply to 'keep score'. Were the ultra-rich even remotely human any longer? She had the idea that money was like a toxin, sapping things like empathy and compassion and trust, eroding them until they were gone, and all that was left, like a dark aperture, was the raw, hungry need to consume more and more currency at the expense of literally everything else.
She had the idea that the men at the top of the UAC were the mega-rich, and had looked into a LITERAL FUCKING GATEWAY TO HELL, and all they saw was a way to get more money. That was all they saw.
Kyra tried to reign in her cold fury and focused. After finishing up her search and securing the area, she walked over to the workstation attached to the gateway and fired it up. The workstation turned on, but it only took her a few minutes to determine that she might be fucked. A sign flashed across the cracked screen.
INSUFFICIENT POWER TO ACTIVATE GATEWAY.
"Oh come on," Kyra whispered. She reactivated her comms unit. "Doc!"
A pause. "Yes, Staff Sergeant?"
"There's not enough power to get this damned thing turned on. What's the quickest way to rectify this particular fuck-up?"
"Um...hold on." Another pause. "Okay, I'm uploading something to your suit's database. It's an update for your map. It looks like you need to reroute two junctions and then activate an emergency generator."
"Fine. Thanks."
"Indeed."
She severed the link and checked her map. It became superimposed over her HUD again, partially obscuring the room beyond. One of the relays was in the room, and rerouting it was a relatively simple procedure. Another was over in the scientist's dormitories complex. And, of course, the emergency generator was in an underground portion beneath the main lab.
"Great..." she muttered quietly.
Definitely saving that one for last.
Well, since the first power relay was closest, she tracked it down, finding it tucked away in a little alcove. The procedure was pretty simple. Just push a few buttons, flip a few switches, then pull a lever. There was a hum of power and that was it. Definitely a lot easier than mounting an assault on a roomful of goddamned fiends or pinkies. She didn't like leaving the relative safety of the teleportation core. Though she knew it might not last, given the fact that they could fucking teleport now. But the sooner she got this over with, the better.
Not that she was sure how long it was apt to go on.
She left the teleportation lab and returned to the antechamber. Something shifted overhead. She jerked back and raised her shotgun just in time to blow the head clean off of a fiend that was preparing to jump her from an overhead ventilation shaft. Its brains rained down all over her suit and she groaned and wiped at her visor, ultimately having to take out a cleaning rag and wipe it off. What she wouldn't give for a good set of wipers. She settled on the shotgun as she made her way slowly into the dormitory complex.
Definitely a bad place to be: there was almost no power in the network of bloody corridors. And she heard zombies groaning and shuffling nearby. And she had to assume that they were armed. With a soft sigh, Kyra hit the light-amp function in her suit and set to work. It wasn't perfect, as it turned everything an ugly green color, but at least she could make out basically what was happening in front of her. She turned a corner, following the route she'd memorized, and blew a hole in the chest of a zombified technician.
It roared and died, coagulated blood spraying the walls.
She pumped the shotgun and walked on.
Could it really be as bad as she was fearing? As bad as Jensen made it out to possibly be? Before today, Kyra thought that she wouldn't truly think it possible. She thought she had a pretty decent handle on what could and couldn't happen. And even adhering to the axiom of expecting the unexpected, Kyra knew that her worldview had been shattered by the discovery of basically a gateway to Hell itself. She still didn't know if she really believed that place was Hell, or just some alternate dimension that resembled it.
Although those pentagrams were pretty suggestive.
Either way, did it really matter? Because at the very least it was obvious that it wasn't biblical Hell. You couldn't kill actual demons, and even if you could, it should've been a lot harder than a well-placed shotgun shell. No, it was much more likely that these things just resembled demons. But they could be killed, and she was uniquely equipped to deal with this threat. Besides having a big arsenal, she was highly adaptable and had been through years of combat experience, dozens of battles all over Earth.
She could fight this war for a long time if she had to.
But what if they actually were invading Earth?
If that were the case, then she had to get back to Earth as fast as possible. She was going to fight like hell if these ugly motherfuckers were crawling all over terra firma. Kyra aimed and popped off another shot, blowing the head clean off another zombie, then almost decapitating a second one as it stepped out and she put a shell through its neck. Glancing at the fresh corpses in passing, she shuddered to think of them roaming the streets of a city.
What a fucking nightmare of an apocalypse that would be.
The problem was that after today, she no longer felt certain of her reality. Anything now felt possible, no matter how awful, how insane. She wasn't sure how to handle that. There it was, the power relay she needed to activate. Well, she thought as she worked, I'll deal with it the same way I've dealt with everything else.
Just keep going and try not to think about it.
There didn't seem to be much in the way of alternative options, and those few that were available all seemed worse.
After activating the relay and shunting power to the teleportation core, she quickly began making her way back out of the dormitories complex. That was two down, one more thing to do. And, of course, it was in the basement. In a way, it was stupid. It wasn't like going one level down actually changed much of anything. It was an atmospherically sealed base on a distant moon. The lower level was functionally the same. If it was any more dangerous, it wasn't because she had descended ten feet. And yet…
Basements still freaked her out.
What a stupid thing to be afraid of after all this shit.
She returned to the gateway room and tracked down the stairwell that would grant her access to the beneath. Opening the door, which was tucked away at the end of an alcove stuffed full of screens and readouts and keyboards, she stared down the dimly lit passageway. After lingering for several seconds, Kyra topped her shotgun off and forced herself down the stairs. The path to the emergency generator was a simple one, as simple as could be, actually. Dead straight ahead. All she had to do was walk down ten meters of corridor, activate it, then walk back and she'd be done. Easy. Except she wasn't so sure about how easy it could be.
As she came to the end of the stairwell, she felt like something was down there with her. After waiting for a few seconds, trying to scope the situation out, Kyra began to move forward. There were offshoot alcoves to either side of her every couple of meters. It was even darker down in those, a perfect ambush spot. She moved a little forward, as her light-amp only pushed back the darkness so far for some reason down here, and saw nothing. The alcove ended a few meters in, the walls studded with all manner of technology.
She felt almost certain something should be in there. But there was nothing. Sighing softly, lowering her shotgun, she moved on to the next one and checked it out. A blank space mocked her here, too. Kyra kept going, slowly picking up speed. Each alcove revealed nothing, and yet that feeling of not being alone, that pervasive notion that something was watching her, here with her in the subterranean part of the complex, not only did not abate, but strengthened. By now, she could see the small room holding the generator.
Pushing forward, figuring that she was at least halfway done now, she entered the room and cleared it. Yet still nothing. Following the basic instructions that came tagged with the update to the map overlay on her HUD, Kyra activated the generator. It kicked to life in a welcome hum of power and all around her, the lights turned up a bit brighter. Though not as much as she would have liked. Grabbing her shotgun again, she left the small room and returned to the corridor. Now all she had to do was walk back and-
A heavy footfall sounded somewhere nearby.
It was very close to that of the pinkies. Kyra whirled to the right, shotgun ready, finger on the trigger. Another footfall, another. It was getting closer, coming out of the nearest alcove. She prepared herself, ready to blast the thing back to where it had come from, but then something deeply frightening happened. She had pretty good hearing, and could judge the exact second the thing should have broken the threshold of exiting the alcove and entering the main corridor, the precise moment when it should have entered her field of vision.
But she saw nothing.
And yet the footsteps persisted, now very obvious, and drawing closer.
Was she going insane? Was this what madness felt like?
No, there was something there, she could feel it! Kyra aimed to the best of her ability and squeezed the trigger. And heard a roar! A spray of blood burst into existence! Was it a fucking ghost?! She pumped the shotgun and fired again as the footsteps picked up once more. A second spray of blood, and then the heavy, meaty smack of something hitting the floor. Whatever it was, she still couldn't see it. Kyra began to move forward, wanting to get a closer look at this thing, or any look at it, but then she started to hear more footfalls.
"Shit," she whispered.
There were more of them, and they were coming towards her. Almost without thinking about it, she sprinted away, back the way she'd come, and heard one of them roar. It sounded exactly like a pinky. Were they invisible now?! Is that what it is!? How?! No time to think about that. She made it to the stairwell in record time and kept going until she was back up on the first floor. She closed the door and locked it behind her, then moved away, back to the main teleportation room. They didn't seem interested in or maybe capable of following her, at least.
So now she had to contend with ghosts.
Great.
More paranoid than ever, Kyra moved over to the main console and fired it up. This time when she tried to engage the gateway, it turned on. She breathed a slow sigh of relief and scanned the PDA. It began the process of linking up to...The Acid Prison. Oh what a fucking fantastic name! But that was what the PDA said. And apparently getting through that place would take her to somewhere called The Blood Labyrinth.
"What kind of asshole named these places?!" she snapped.
But getting through there would apparently take her to a teleportation device that would finally grant her access to the lunar outpost. Why she couldn't just teleport from here, she had no idea. Despite how she felt about Jensen and all of his ilk, she did believe him. At least in regards to the notion that he wanted to help humanity, to help stop this madness. So if this was the route he was presenting her, it must be the shortest one between here and there. Now, it was up to her to get through Hell one more time and figure out just how fucked they all really were.
The gateway finished doing its awful thing, gathering the dark energy necessary to make such a wretched trip possible, and Kyra took the opportunity to check herself over once more. She really didn't want to go back into that awful place. But she had no other choice. And this time, at least, she should be coming through with all her gear intact. She finished her check, finding her gear adequate, weapons ready.
Forcing herself up onto the platform, Kyra stared into the seething black abyss and, hesitating for just a few seconds, stepped into it.