They lucked out: there was a tunnel that was a straight shot between the utilities building and the command module, and it was relatively clear of demons.
Powell even managed to get through the lock on the door and admit them access without any real fuss. It was going so well, in fact, that Kyra was beginning to get suspicious. That question was coming into play again: intentional or coincidence?
It would be impossible to tell until some nightmare horde of demons descended from the ceiling or burst forth from the shadows or broke down half a dozen doors at once, screaming, shrieking, slathering, salivating for their fresh flesh.
"Powell," Kyra murmured quietly as they stepped into the area beneath the lobby of the command module and began looking for a way up, "how well do you know Carpenter or Blair?"
"I don't," he replied. "Not really. I've seen them a handful of times, Carpenter more than Blair."
"What were your impressions of them?"
He paused to consider it. "Carpenter is a hardass, but he gets the job done and I figured you can trust him to not bullshit you. Blair...seemed like a typical middle-aged, higher-up science type. Focused on his research and his data and his work to the point of obsession, to the point that he wasn't bathing or eating or even sleeping at normal times. But there was something fucking creepy about him. I figured that was normal, though. I've never gotten on well with guys like him."
"If both of them was telling you the other was trying to kill you, who would you believe?"
He looked at her for a long moment. "...Carpenter. Why?"
"Because Blair says Carpenter has turned on us and is working with the demons."
"What? That's ridiculous," Powell replied. "How would that even work? I haven't seen one do more than grunt or scream, how would they even try to communicate a deal?"
"How much do you know about what's happening?"
"Not much."
"You didn't seem surprised when I called them 'demons'."
He looked at a fiend corpse and nudged it with his boot. "I mean...look at this thing."
Kyra laughed bitterly. "Yeah." She considered telling him what was happening worldwide, then thought of Parnevik and thought better of it. Even if she thought he was a professional who could handle it, he'd operate better if he didn't have to handle it. "All right, I need your help, Powell. You seem pretty competent. My team was sent here to rescue people, retrieve crucial data, and shut down whatever the fuck is going on."
That wasn't entirely true but she fully intended to destroy the portal or gateway or whatever they wanted to call it.
"I'm in," Powell replied immediately.
"Okay. What can you tell me about the command module?"
He thought about it, sighing unhappily. "Not much, unfortunately. I didn't spend hardly any time around here. Brass didn't like me. Carpenter did, but the actual guys I had to work under didn't. I think I threatened them somehow. But I know how most of this shit works. I've been a UAC tech for twenty years."
"Seriously?" she asked.
He laughed. "Yeah. I know, you think I'd be a piece of shit at this point. I knew they were into some shady shit but…" He hesitated, looked away for a moment, his features becoming dark and largely unreadable. "Let's just say that it was justified when I joined up, and then it didn't matter anymore, and then...eventually, I figured that I should stick around the UAC because I might be able to fuck something up royally for them if the right time, right place ever arose."
"Well congrats, this is the right time, this is the right place. The UAC is going down."
"I figured...so these things are demons? What's actually going on?" he asked.
She sighed. She'd been hoping to avoid this. "It's...let's not get into it. This is what I will tell you: the UAC discovered teleportation technology, only it wasn't what they thought it was. It tore a hole into another dimension, what is for all intents and purposes Hell. These things lived there. They came through and apparently have a healthy appetite for death and destruction."
He considered that for a moment, looking again at the dead fiend, then nodded. "Okay, that makes enough sense. I thought it might be aliens, but...interdimensional makes sense, too."
"You're handling this pretty well," Kyra murmured.
"I read a lot of science fiction and a lot of horror growing up. Living it is a world of difference away from reading it, but I get the concept, at least." He shifted around, rolled his shoulders, popped his neck. "What do you need from me?"
"I want to find survivors," she said. "If I get you to a LifeScan, can you either run it effectively or tell me if it's fucked?"
"Yes," he replied simply.
"Good. What I like to hear. Now-"
She froze as something pinged in her HUD. An incoming message. A data packet, she realized.
"I found the way out," Collins said.
"Hold up, I just got a message," Kyra replied, opening it up. It was text only.
Morgan, comms damaged
need backup asap
in sci. dorms mess
-Linaweaver
"Shit," she growled, hurrying over to Collins and motioning for Powell to join her. "Just got a message from Linaweaver. His comms are busted," she explained as she began climbing the ladder Collins had found, "he needs backup. Scientist dorms."
"Well let's save his ass," Collins said.
The three of them scurried up the ladder and came into a desolate, ruined security checkpoint area. Bulletproof windows were cracked and smeared with blood, the thin blue carpet was littered with hundreds of spent shell casings and broken corpses. Dredging up her memory of the layout of the module, Kyra turned left and hurried over to the door that would lead them to the scientists' dormitories wing. The door was stuck most of the way open, spitting sparks occasionally, and the way beyond, another security checkpoint, looked vacant.
They moved through it, snagging some ammo as they went, and came into the dormitories. Something seemed wrong and Kyra couldn't quite parse what it was. The antechamber that served as the primary access point to the dormitory section held three exits, each with a long corridor snaking away from it.
All three doors were open, all three corridors were empty.
The corridors to the left and right were each lined with doors, dozens of them, all of them leading to bedrooms or apartments or whatever passed for living quarters down in Antarctica. The way ahead was painted with blood and littered with corpses, and the lights overhead flickered occasionally. But it was empty.
It felt like a dark omen of some kind.
Kyra heard no shouting, no roars, no gunfire. No sound of any kind beyond the steady drip-drip-drip that was no doubt blood leaking from somewhere.
"Something's wrong," Collins whispered.
"Yeah…" Kyra activated her radio. "Can anyone hear me? Anyone at all?"
Nothing. Dead air. Not even static now.
Her radio might as well have not been turned on.
She swallowed and continued staring down the bloodied, flickering passageway. One way or another, the battle Linaweaver was in was over, but why could she hear nothing at all? There should be some signs of life, it seemed unlikely that both sides had completely wiped the other out. Finally, knowing she had to do something, and that she could be wasting precious seconds while Linaweaver or North or, shit, even Parnevik, could be bleeding and dying somewhere nearby, Kyra walked up to the threshold.
"Can anyone hear me?!" she called into the empty metal tunnel.
Tensing for some explosion of activity, a chorus of shrieks, some reaction, instead, she got nothing. Cursing softly, she motioned for the others to follow her and set off down the corridor, shotgun at ready. There was only one door open in this corridor out of the four she could see. Each was clearly labeled. Gym. Rec Area. Lounge. Cafeteria.
The one labeled Cafeteria was the only one open.
She tried the one across from it, the Gym, and couldn't get it open.
Collins was right: something was definitely wrong. But they had to find Linaweaver. She moved slowly up to the open door, almost trembling with anticipation as she peered into the wrecked area beyond. She expected to see a sea of pale faces, an ocean of zombified personnel all screaming at once the second they laid their dead, glowing eyes on her, but only more desolate devastation met her gaze. She saw several broken tables and many shattered chairs, a lot of blood, a handful of corpses, and a lot of scattered silverware and plates and cups.
"Linaweaver?" she asked, stepping carefully into the room.
No response.
It was as if all of Strata Station was holding its breath. Hesitating for a second, an idea suddenly came to her.
"Watch my back," she murmured, and took a moment to type out a response to Linaweaver's message. Why hadn't she thought of that in the first place!? She supposed because she, like basically every other Marine who had access to it, hated the manual message system. They only gave it to Sergeants and higher, and even then it was a bit random if you got access to the program. They wanted the average grunt to have as few ways of leaking intel, even something as basic as position, as possible. And on top of that, the system was a bit spotty. They'd never gotten the bugs worked out, or, she suspected, they hadn't tried.
They just preferred commlinks. So did she, but they didn't always work, even now, in the twenty-second century.
She decided to keep it simple.
where are you
A pause, and she was shocked to get a response.
kitchen area
She looked around and spied a door behind the serving tray line, where the food was served out. The door should lead to the kitchen area.
"Collins, guard the door. Powell, stay here and watch my back. Linaweaver says he's over there," Kyra said.
"...why don't we hear anything then?" Powell asked uncertainly.
"Linaweaver?!" Collins called.
Kyra tensed again and nearly snapped at him to shut up, but she was just as worried and curious. There was no response.
"Sit tight," Kyra replied, and set off. Shotgun clutched tightly, she moved up to the serving tray line and then cautiously around it. Nothing but more mess and death back there, but no fiends, no zombies, not even a skull spider lurking. Shit, what the fuck was this? She crossed the serving area to the open door and looked inside. Here was what she about expected to see: a bloodied, destroyed kitchen area. Ovens, stoves, refrigerators, shelves, racks. Lots of food splattered and mixed in with the blood. But no sign of Linaweaver.
"Linaweaver, respond, now. That's an order," she said, and waited.
Nothing. Not even the slightest hint of movement. The room felt empty, and yet...it didn't. Like an unseen presence hovered just out of sight, invisible to her but scrutinizing her intensely. She swallowed and took another step into the kitchen area.
Something caught her attention. An armored hand, just visible behind a prep island that dominated the center of the room. She moved over to it, stepping carefully around the island, and froze as she spied who the hand belonged to.
Parnevik. The man was dead, his armored chest ripped open, blood and intestines everywhere. Beyond him, broken in a similar state of death, missing half an arm and most of one leg, she spied North, the pale woman's mouth open and frozen in a silent scream of death behind the cracked, stained glass of her faceplate.
She didn't see Linaweaver.
"Staff Sergeant, every door out here just opened!" Collins called.
Kyra's heart froze and her stomach dropped out. She spun around.
"Oh shit!" Collins screamed as she heard a thunder of crashing feet that was immediately followed by roaring, shrieking, and screaming. And then gunfire as Collins opened up. Kyra raced back out into the serving area to see Collins rapidly backing up and Powell shifting into position, both of them pointing their weapons at the door.
As she raced forward, she saw an army of fiends and zombies boiling in through the entrance to the room. Even as she opened fire, standing there with Collins and Powell in the center of the mess, she saw the flickering glow of flying skulls, and soon enough, they began coming in through the top of the doorway and a broken vent shaft nearby. Kyra began pumping out shells in a mad rage, working that shotgun as fast as her power-armor-enhanced hands could possibly work, and blitzed through eight of them in a flash.
Six fiends and a trio of zombies went down as her adrenaline-fueled reflexes went into maximum overdrive, but even as she rapidly fed another eight shells into the shotgun, she knew they were fucked. Unless some miracle happened, they just did not have enough firepower between the three of them to take on this horde. Maybe they might get away wounded if the flying skulls hadn't been there, but between all of them, it was only a matter of time before something took one of them down, and then certainly the other two were likely to follow.
Well, Kyra thought grimly as she resumed fire, guess the only thing left to do is to take down as many of these motherfuckers with me as possible.
"I'll take the floaters! You focus on the grounders!" she screamed as she shifted aim and popped one of the flying skulls.
Powell and Collins both snapped off tight responses. Kyra emptied her shotgun again and began feeding the final load into it, putting down eight flying skulls. There were still more coming in, but as she shouldered the shotgun and prepared to keep going, she felt the faintest glimmer of hope that maybe, maybe they might somehow make it out of this.
And that was when she heard a thunderous crash behind her.
Spinning around, she let out a scream of rage and terror as she saw that a pinky had just burst through a weak section of the wall behind them. Blowing snow and more pinky demons were visible behind it.
"FUCK!" she screamed as she finished reloading and opened fire. "Keep shooting!"
She put a shell right between the glowing golden eyes of the lead pinky and must've hit something important because it dropped with a snarl. The others thundered on. Two came, then two more behind those. Kyra pumped the shotgun and kept going. She dropped one, two, three of them and then the gun was dry.
She pulled out her pistol, dropping the shotgun smoothly now that it was dead, and resumed fire, now peppering far less powerful rounds into the advancing pinkies. Three were left. Kyra glanced up as she spied something off her right side and cursed as she saw two things: a flying skull and Collins. He'd drifted off in that direction and the thing was coming right for him, preparing to divebomb him like a damn kamikaze fighter.
"Collins! Drop!" Kyra screamed.
The man responded instantly, knees going out, his whole armored body dropping like a puppet with its strings cut. It would have been comical if the situation wasn't so insanely dangerous. Kyra tracked the skull and popped it with three quick shots. While it turned into a puff of smoke and a rain of bone fragments, Collins lurched to his feet screaming Kyra's name.
"Move!" he yelled, and barreled towards her.
She saw the pinky coming at her right before Collins smashed into her and sent her flying several feet. She just barely caught sight of the pinky smashing directly into Collins and sending him flying across the goddamned room. He crashed into a table and broke it, and then she lost track of him as she aimed from where she lay on her back and emptied what was left in her pistol into the pinky. It was the one she'd already put several rounds into, and she managed to put the final bullet into one of its eyes. As she ran dry, it collapsed.
Of course, that still left two more coming her way, and yet more still coming in through the hole the first one had made, all of them covered in a fine layer of snow. And the zombies, fiends, and flying skulls and now, she saw as she glanced towards Powell making his desperate last stand, a big group of maggots coming in through the front entrance.
They were toast.
That was when she heard a strange, high sound that was somehow familiar. Behind the living wave of demons and undead, out in the corridor, she saw a blue flashing. Something seemed to change in the tide of monsters coming in, as they all collectively hesitated. Kyra leaped on the opportunity. She surged to her feet, reloading while stepping back towards Powell, and resumed fire on the pinkies encroaching on her territory.
Those were plasma rifles.
She heard two of them.
Someone was coming to pull their asses out of the fire.
They just had to hold out a little longer. Kyra reloaded again and blasted through another magazine keeping the pinkies at bay, but it was a pain. They were tenacious fuckers, big, thick with muscle, and no doubt dumber than a rock. There was nothing in their eyes but animal bloodlust, not a hint of intelligence nor any semblance of sentience. She managed to drop one more and heard Collins begin firing again, when Powell let out a shout.
"Backup's here!"
The plasma rifles were now actually in the room, and a stream of blue-white plasma balls suddenly shot past her and smacked into the face of a pinky that was too close for comfort. Its face melted and blackened and peeled away as smoke began billowing, and it managed one, loud, pig-like squeal of pain before it collapsed.
"Let's go!"
She turned and ran, spying two armored figures in the doorway, standing amid a heap of smoking corpses. One she recognized as the final member of their team, Sergeant Weldon. The other was a pale man with a narrow face she didn't recognize at all. He was wearing heavy-duty blue Combat Armor that she immediately envied, and also had a pair of pistols on his hips and a chaingun slung across his back, as well as a Raptor SMG hanging off his shoulder.
"Move your ass!" he shouted, and Kyra ran. Powell was already heading their way, and Collins was staggering in that direction. She saw a big crack in his armor and knew that he had been hurt by that pinky bash.
No time for that now, unfortunately.
More pinkies were coming, and when she looked back, she saw a group of maggots out in the snow behind them.
Weldon and the new guy stood on either side of the entrance they'd taken into the mess and ushered them through, hosing the encroaching army down with overlapping waves of plasma fire. They fired until Kyra, Collins, and Powell were through, and then Weldon joined them. The other guy stayed behind for a bit longer, firing even longer, then he joined them as well and took off running, deeper into the facility.
Kyra and the others followed after him.