PART THREE
–HELL IS COLD–
Kyra stalked impatiently through the busy corridors of Fort Minor, following in the hurried footsteps of the poor Private she'd scared into bringing her to Hangar Seventeen B. The place was abuzz with activity, men and women of all rank and file coming and going like it was...well, exactly what it was: the end of the world. Some part of her wanted to believe they could pull some kind of magic trick that could save the Earth, but even from what she'd seen so far, the odds of that seemed to fall somewhere squarely between 'infinitesimal' and 'forget about it'. Not that she intended to give anything less than one hundred percent. Even if she was doomed, she'd be damned if she'd do anything but go down swinging, and swinging hard.
"Here it is, Staff Sergeant," the kid said as he turned down a side hall.
They walked halfway down it and stopped in front of one of the closed doors. Traffic here was almost nonexistent.
"Thank you Private, that will be all," Kyra said, and opened the door as the kid scurried off back to whatever task he was supposed to be doing.
As she stepped into the room beyond, she spied a half-dozen men and women in combat fatigues standing around a table loaded with guns, ammo, and gear. Behind them were seven crates all with the word ARMOR slapped on the side.
"You must be our Staff Sergeant," one of them, a tall, well-built, tan-skinned man with a shaved head said, breaking away from the group and striding over to her with the confident gait of a longstanding Marine.
"Staff Sergeant Morgan," she replied as he came to stand before her. She was almost as tall as he was. He sized her up, as she did the same to him, then offered his hand.
"Lieutenant Linaweaver," he said. His accent placed him somewhere from the Middle East, though it was subtle and she'd been in space too long to be sure. She'd lost her ear for accents. "I'll be your XO for this mission."
"Understood," she replied, shaking his hand.
They walked back over to the table and she took the last spot open, looking over the gear. Grabbing a standard DX-12 sidearm, she began to check it over and immediately felt at ease. Or more at ease than she had in awhile. She was back in her element. Already, she could tell these were seasoned Marines who'd been in the shit more than once. They wouldn't be perfect. Every Marine had their flaw.
But they would likely make a solid team.
"Introductions all around," Linaweaver said, and began naming off the squad in a brisk, clipped tone.
Sergeant Collins, a demolitions expert, was a pale, squat but bulky man with a gleam in his eye. That kind of gleam Kyra had seen before, the one that said: yeah, so I'm a little crazy, but you're gonna need that where we're going.
And, in today's world, those people were usually right.
Sergeant Weldon was a tan woman of average height and weight. She had an air of calm professionalism, nodding once when introduced, then immediately going back to tightly packing one of seven field MediKits. She was their combat medic.
Corporal Pace was a heavyset man with a deep tan that came from a lot of time spent outdoors. He looked middle-aged and amicable, though the way he was fidgeting as he prepped a technician's kit indicated he was a bit anxious and excitable. He was to be their tech specialist.
Corporal Burrows was a tall, well-muscled man with dark skin and a bald head that gleamed under the bright lights of the hangar. He simply nodded once to her. He had an air of solemn finality to him, a deep sadness that could never be touched by therapy or friendship. It would be something he would carry with him for the rest of his life, whatever it was he had endured. Kyra had seen the type before. He was going over a chaingun with a monastic calm.
He was a heavy weapons specialist.
Finally there was Corporal North, the second woman on this new team Kyra found herself leading. She was lean and very pale, her hair cut severely short, her eyes a bit bugged out. There was a grim anxiety in her movements, and Kyra wouldn't be surprised to learn that the woman was a bit shell-shocked. She was a straightforward trigger-puller, someone who was there to shoot demons and nothing else. Kyra was the least certain of her.
"My name is Staff Sergeant Kyra Morgan," Kyra said once the introductions were done. "I'm in charge of this operation. If any of you have any concerns about my credentials, let's just get that out of the way now. I kicked my way across two moons and the other dimension itself, where these things come from, before dropping feet first into this mess today. I've killed bigger things than you've probably run into so far and before that I spent a long time in some of the shittiest hellholes this miserable rock has to offer."
They were all looking at her now.
"You've actually been...there?" North asked uncertainly.
"Is it...I mean, is it really Hell?" Pace asked. He suddenly looked deeply uncomfortable and Kyra had the notion that he was a religious man.
"I don't know," she replied. "It was sure miserable enough, but personally? I don't think so. I think it was just some other dimension, and these assholes happened to be the natives. I sure didn't see a big red jackoff with a pitchfork, if that's what you're asking."
Pace and a few of the others chuckled uncomfortably. Kyra had to imagine that intel was low, probably even nonexistent in a lot of regards.
There would be a lot of blind spots for them.
Hell, there were still a lot for her. She barely even knew what the fuck was going on. She looked at Linaweaver. "I was told there'd be a proper briefing."
"Yes, just a moment," he replied, and pulled out a datapad. "Focus up, people," he said as he plugged it into a little slot on the side of the table they were all using. Kyra realized there was a holographic projector in the center of the table, among the guns, ammo, and medical and technical gear. It flickered to life and a 3D image of a base suddenly snapped into focus. As they all set aside whatever they were holding for the moment, a voice began talking from hidden speakers. She recognized the speaker as General Taggart.
"Listen up, Marines," he said gruffly. "You're looking at Strata Station, a top-secret UAC research facility in Antarctica, about fifty miles from Mount Erebus. I don't know what the hell they were doing down there, but I do know that a close friend of mine, John Carpenter, was hired to run the facility. He's the one who sent the message claiming that they had vital intelligence about the war with the demons, and I believe him. Even though the idiot went to work for the UAC. Your number one priority is to find that intel and get it to command somehow, someway. I'd also appreciate it if you'd find Carpenter and extract him."
There was a pause and Kyra heard other voices in the background, talking excitedly. She had to imagine that Taggart had recorded this in some office, wherever he could find an even halfway quiet space, in a hurry.
"Gotta wrap this up. The intel is, unfortunately, light. I did manage to get my hands on the schematics for the base, so study them on the ride down. Another man you'll want to keep an eye out for is Doctor Wilford Blair. He's a genius, a biologist. Even now it's obvious to us that the eggheads are going to be crucial to winning this war and Blair's got quite the noggin on him, so grab him too if you can manage it. Also, while you're there, I want you to make a copy of their entire database. All of it. I don't give a shit about clearance or laws or anything, you do everything in your power to get me that data. It's us versus the end of the world now, and I want every single scrap of intel I can scrape together to fight these fucking demonic bastards."
He began to speak again but something exploded distantly. Then she heard running footfalls and more excited shouting. "Aw you gotta be shitting me. I gotta go. I managed to get you a fast-mover that'll get you there in six hours or less. Should be there by now. Anyway, good luck and godspeed, Marines. Get this done. Out."
"That was helpful," North muttered.
Linaweaver extracted the datapad and held it up. "This contains information on the base, so we're going to be studying it on the way down there and making a plan of action." He paused and his hand went to his ear. "Our ride just got here. I'm going to make sure we're squared away. I want you all wrapped up and ready to go in five!"
Kyra got to work gathering her gear.
The first two hours of the ride were at least halfway decent, in that Kyra had something to do. She studied the information as best she could after downloading it into her suit. Strata Station was divided up into four different structures, largely connected underground by a network of maintenance and utility tunnels. There was Support, Security, Utilities, and the Command Module, which was where all the really good stuff was likely to be. Already, she had visions of fighting snarling zombies and screeching Fiends in frozen, dimly-lit, subterranean tunnels of chilled, oily metal. Not exactly her idea of a great place to be.
Antarctica. The South Pole.
What a lot of people called the worst place on Earth. She'd shared drinks with some of the poor bastards who'd been involved in the Battle of Antarctica. She'd fought in snowy places before, but it sounded brutal down there. She hated the cold. But she had a job to do, so she made herself focus and studied the schematics closely for those pair of hours, because it was unfortunately all they had besides some weather information.
It was negative sixty down there right now. They'd probably be fine in their suits but you never knew when a suit might fail.
And it wasn't even that shiny blue Combat Armor, just the standard green Security Armor that most Marines enjoyed nowadays.
When the studying and planning ran out, she instead found herself looking at her fellow squadmates. For the most part they seemed solid, though North definitely had that thousand-yard stare with the unfocused, kind of glazed eyes and Kyra knew the woman was reliving some fresh hell or perhaps some old horror in her head, no doubt against her will. Memories had a way of doing that to you, sneaking up on you when you weren't expecting it.
Her mind slipped from the squad to the mission.
What was this special intel that was so damned crucial? She was extremely grateful that she'd gotten Jensen's data to the right place. Or, well, trusted that Anderson had managed it. That was going to be useful. But what could be so great down in Antarctica? Some kind of a super weapon? A demon-killing virus? A way to close the portals? Maybe some totally unrelated thing that would help in some crucial but abstract way? Whatever it was, she was just going to have to trust that it was still there and it was worth her time.
Because she was going to be spending six hours not killing demons.
Kyra glanced over as she saw Pace standing by a monitor built into the bulkhead next to the door leading to the cockpit of the fast-mover they were riding south in. As she looked, he stopped fiddling with it as the screen flickered to life.
"Hey everyone, I got the news!" he called.
Everyone, with varying degrees of reluctance, got up and moved over to join him.
Kyra crossed her arms, studying the screen.
It rolled with static before stabilizing, showing a man who no doubt was supposed to look attractive, handsome, and charismatic, a bland amalgamation of good looks that all news anchors had had for the past century, almost like they were machine-pressed. But he just looked haggard, pale, soaked in sweat, exhausted.
"This is Champ Marshall with Earth United News reporting on the latest developments in the invasion. We've just had confirmation that-" he broke briefly, choking a bit, then took a drink and cleared his throat. He set his jaw grimly. "We've just had confirmation that unknown parties, likely the Australian Armed Forces, have detonated a thermonuclear warhead in the central of Melbourne. The metropolis was the site of a massive portal. And...hold on. Yes, we're getting live drone footage right now."
Abruptly, the scene changed to a distant shot of what looked like a writhing mountain of deep black smoke. Kyra felt her stomach turn over as she got an idea of the scope of the devastation. And it did so again when, through the shifting smoke, she caught sight of a fiery portal. It was still there. Jesus fucking Christ, it was still there.
"A-as you can see, the attempt failed. The United Nations are broadcasting on all networks NOT to detonate any more nuclear warheads of any kind for now. Casualty reports are continuing to come in. As of now, there are an estimated four billion dead or missing." He began to speak but abruptly stopped. "I'm sorry. I can't do this. I can't-"
He turned and vomited.
Abruptly, the audio cut and the video changed to a massive, slowly scrolling list. It took Kyra a moment to realize what she was seeing.
Cities. Red cities were completely compromised by demonic forces. Yellow cities were being contested. Green cities were still safe.
Over half of the cities she saw were flashing in glowering, ugly red.
Most of the others were in yellow, and even as she watched, several began to flash red.
"Turn it off," Kyra said, turning and marching back over to her seat. She sat down heavily as Pace reached out and killed the feed.
"Fucking hell," she heard someone whisper.
No one said anything else for a long time after that.
It was only through the magic of having been in the Marines for over a decade and having been in some of the worst hellholes on the planet that Kyra actually managed to catch a nap on the ride down there.
Consequently, she was awoken by an explosion that almost bucked her out of her seat despite the restraints.
"What the fuck was that?!" she snapped, coming awake instantly.
"One of those fucking flying meatballs got itself jammed in one of the engines!" the pilot snapped in response over the team's private comms network. "I've lost it! We're going to go down! You all are going to have to bail out!"
"Shit," Kyra growled, getting out of the restraints and lurching unsteadily to her feet as the ship swayed and jerked around them. "Parachutes! Now!" she said as she reached under her seat and pulled out the chute meant for such emergencies. She pulled it on, watching the others do the same. "How far out are we?" she asked, trying to keep calm.
"We're there! Nearly! We'll be over Strata in forty five seconds, I'll tell you when to jump. Winds are bad though, so you'll get scattered. I'm keeping us as steady as I can for as long as I can," the pilot replied.
"Understood."
They finished getting their chutes on and took a moment to check each other and make sure they were on properly, then the pilot gave them a ten second warning.
Kyra staggered back to the rear cargo door and opened it up. Immediately the bay was filled with swirling snow and shrieking, frozen winds.
"Regroup at Support! Stay in contact! Keep on guard at all times!" Kyra snapped.
"Go now!" the pilot yelled.
Kyra jumped into the frozen hellish white beyond the open doors.