"So what's Blair's deal? Is he possessed? Or just working with them?" Kyra asked as they made their way back to Command Control.
"I don't know if we'll ever know for sure," Carpenter replied. "I do know that I've never trusted the man, but then again, I've never trusted a UAC scientist or executive that I've ever personally met. I do know that about a month ago, he personally joined an expedition to the other place and he and his team went off the grid for a solid two days. When he returned, he was basically unharmed, but his team was dead. He said they'd been ambushed by a horde of demons and slaughtered, and he barely managed to get away, though he didn't seem all that upset about it. Something was different after that. He'd always been secretive, but he became a ghost half the time, the other half he was obsessively monitoring some of the experiments. As administrator of the building I had power, but not enough. The real power lay in the executives, who wouldn't come anywhere near this place, and the head scientists, namely him."
"Of course," Falcheck muttered.
"If he's possessed, there's no obvious way to tell. But I don't think he is. I think they promised him something during that lost expedition. Power, more than likely. Immortality maybe."
"Did you check him for this 'demonic energy'?" Kyra asked.
"Yes, actually. First thing I tried. Nothing. But it's not a perfect system, they were still working the bugs out, and it isn't capable of detecting small amounts of it. So the amount required to possess a human but not turn them into a zombie might not be enough to set them off yet."
"Wonderful," Kyra said.
They arrived at Command Control. Carpenter punched something into the keypad once everyone was in position, and the doors began to slide open.
"Special ultra-executive override I cooked up myself," he said, "once I began to get really paranoid about this place."
"Good idea," Powell murmured.
The door opened to reveal...a vacant security checkpoint. They passed through it quickly enough, checking it for signs of life, but there were just two dead guards, shot in the head. As they walked through a short corridor and came into a large control room. There were a lot of dead technicians, all of them shot through the head or the neck or the chest.
"Blair," Carpenter muttered as he walked deeper into the room.
Kyra and the others followed, checking the shadows, the corners, and the dead bodies for signs of life on either side of the line. But there was nothing. No Blair visible, and no survivors. Carpenter settled into place behind a large, rounded workstation and Kyra and Linaweaver joined him, standing nearby. Kyra thought he was on the level, but she no longer trusted her own senses on a person. Just how far did this possession or betrayal go? Admittedly, she sided with Carpenter's theory. So far, the only 'possession' she'd seen were the zombies and it was absurdly easy to tell if someone was a zombie or not.
If the demons were capable of possessing someone enough to successfully trick the average person, she thought they would've seen it by now.
Unless the zombies were intentionally designed to throw you off the scent and make you think exactly what she had just thought.
She suppressed a sigh. A problem for later.
"Aw fuck me," Carpenter muttered. "Blair's downstairs, in the gateway chamber, and the thing's powering up it looks like, drawing a shitload of energy, and rising."
"Are there levels beyond 'off' and 'on'?" Linaweaver asked.
"I believe so. Stronger portal probably means stronger demons coming through."
"Oh fucking great," Kyra growled.
"Good news is that we have comms again. As in full-on, we can radio the outside world. If you want to message Taggart or whoever is left at Command, do so now."
"What about the data?" Kyra asked.
"It's downstairs on a closed server. We'll have to physically retrieve it. And we need to go down there anyway to kill Blair and shut down the gateway."
"Can we do it remotely? Even manually? Can we disconnect it from the nuke plant?" Powell asked.
Carpenter sighed and shook his head. "It's also on its own power supply. The lab is pretty self-contained. We'll need to be there physically to do it."
"Hook me up to the comms network," Kyra said.
They spent a moment syncing her suit radio with Strata Station's communications array, and then she linked with command, firing off a quick summation of events in a data packet after trying to get ahold of someone on the other end and failing. "This is Staff Sergeant Morgan reporting from Strata Station. Sit-rep is as follows: Made contact with Carpenter. He is alive and kicking. Station almost a total loss. Demonic presence confirmed and dangerous. We are working with what is left of the locals to go underground and destroy a gateway that leads to the other realm, and to recover crucial intelligence as outlined by General Taggart. Intelligence is location of theorized demonic leader in the other dimension. We will transmit the intel as soon as we have recovered it from the underground portion of Strata. Out."
She fired it off and hoped that someone was on the receiving end.
"So we're just gonna go down there, kick in the door, blow away Blair, and flip a switch?" Linaweaver asked.
"Ideally, a switch and then push a button, but yes, basically," Carpenter replied.
"We all ready for this?" Kyra asked, looking around. Everyone looked back at her and gave her a grim nod of approval. "Then let's finish it."
Carpenter led them back out into the initial security checkpoint and through another door that had been utterly demolished, bashed out and open by brute force, the short corridor leading to an elevator beyond it utterly coated in blood.
"Don't suppose there's stairs anywhere," Kyra said.
"No," Carpenter replied. "If OSHA was still a thing, they'd have a fit."
"The fuck is OSHA?" Weldon asked.
Carpenter sighed as they got onto the elevator. "I am very old."
Seeing no alternative, they boarded the elevator and descended into the cold, dark depths beneath Antarctica. Kyra tried to prepare herself for the worst. Again. Visions of blood and horror and screaming demons and gnashing razor teeth filled her mind's eye as the elevator plummeted. She wondered if something new would be waiting for them down there, some fresh horror conjured from the deepest, darkest pits of Hell.
Maybe they'd get lucky. Maybe Blair had committed suicide and his corpse had fallen onto a big OFF switch and all was well.
Wouldn't that be nice?
The elevator settled into its metal nest and the doors dinged open.
"Oh hell no," Falcheck growled.
A long, flickering corridor, bathed in blood, was revealed. That alone would not have moved Kyra. It was the lines of human sacrifices that had been crucified to the walls with industrial strength bolts. They were all, as far as she could tell, mercifully dead.
"Linaweaver, help me check them and make sure no one's still alive in this godforsaken hellhole. Everyone else, head on down to the end of the corridor and get it open, we'll be along shortly," Kyra said quietly.
"Let's go people," Carpenter said, leading them on, his boots squelching in the blood.
It was grim but quick work, checking each of the corpses, both of them taking a side of the corridor and working their way down it. Mercy had found them, in a manner of speaking: there were no survivors. You could come back from this, Kyra knew, being crucified wasn't exactly life-threatening, but what in the hell had they gone through before? She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to think about anything but maybe crucifying Blair and leaving him there to die a slow, painful, miserable death.
The others had just gotten the door open as they finished their undesirable task. Kyra joined the survivors of her squad and Strata Station, and bore witness to the room that held the gateway. It was horrifying.
The ceiling was a good forty feet above them, and the room was the size of a warehouse. The area was flat, but made of a maze of workstations and equipment, all of it spread out around the core that everything was built around: the gateway device. It was a huge ring of dark metal, twenty feet tall, stuck up on its end and built into a platform of equally dark metal. This was the sheath of the technology that had ripped a hole between the two dimensions, and allowed the demonic infection to pour into their own.
The tech that had unleashed hell on Earth.
Inside the ring was a glowing, pulsing, writhing ring of flame.
"That's a portal to Hell if I've ever seen one," Collins muttered.
"Where's Blair?" Carpenter growled.
"There," Kyra said, scanning the periphery of the room and finding a control booth off to the far left. It looked solidly built, encasing the man that had to be Blair in a cocoon of stainless steel and shatterproof glass.
"Ah, at last you arrive," he said, his voice being blared out from a surround sound system. "I was hoping you would be killed at some point before now, but you have turned out to be quite impressive, I must say. Especially you three, Carpenter, Powell, Falcheck. Though I suppose if anyone was going to survive the slaughter of Strata Station, it would be you three."
"You're done, Blair," Carpenter said, motioning for Powell to follow him as he began stalking over to the control booth.
"I'm afraid not. I'm just beginning, in fact," the scientist replied.
Kyra and the rest followed after Carpenter and Powell. She kept a sharp eye on the portal, in case anything else came through, but other than being actively on fire, it seemed quiet for now. Though she couldn't deny that even through her suit, she felt a sense of tension, of something building on the air, some unseen presence or power. Carpenter walked up to the control booth and began punching something into the keypad.
Blair sounded painfully smug. "Your clearance won't get you into here, Carpenter."
Carpenter ignored him, continuing to work the controls. Suddenly, the door opened up with a chime. Blair paled and his eyes widened as Carpentered marched into the booth.
It was at this moment Blair realized that he had fucked up.
"Oh shit," he said.
Without hesitating, Carpenter brought his shotgun up and blew the man's head clean off his shoulders, splattering the interior with blood.
"Powell, shut down the gateway, I'm going to get the data," Carpenter said.
"I'll see if I can figure it out," Powell replied.
Kyra walked in as Powell kicked the man's corpse out of the way and took his seat, then began to work the controls.
"When you find the data, I want you to upload it to mine and Linaweaver's suits," Kyra said. "Just in case."
"Agreed," Carpenter said as he typed at the control panel.
"This was easy," Linaweaver muttered.
"Blair didn't know about my special override," Carpenter said. "And he's always been an overconfident, condescending jackass. I've wanted to do that since I met the man. Even with my relatively low-level administrator access, the shit I was able to dig up in his file would turn your fucking stomach inside out. He bio-engineered a goddamned virus ten years ago that killed three hundred thousand people."
"Jesus," Kyra whispered, staring at the corpse. "That was too good for him."
"I know, but torture isn't really in me and I don't have time for it anyway," Carpenter replied. "I'm ready to get into this fight."
"You sure you don't need a nap first?" Falcheck asked.
Carpenter laughed. "I'll sleep when I'm dead...okay, this is it! I've found the data. The location of this massive demonic energy source. Link me to your suits."
"Linaweaver, here. Everyone else, get out there and make sure nothing shows up to ruin our day," Kyra said as she began wirelessly linking her suit with the computer. "Powell, where are we at with that gateway?"
"It's definitely gaining power," he muttered. "I'm trying to find out how to actually shut the fucking thing down. This system has obviously been reworked. Either that, or they were using some truly esoteric programming."
"Faster the better," Carpenter said.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm working as quick as I can…"
A minute passed as Kyra and Linaweaver got their suits hooked into the system and Carpenter uploaded the data file to them.
"How do we actually track this energy source?" Kyra asked.
"We've got sensors for that, I think there's some around here, but I know they were equipping some of the Hell Outposts with them. Obviously someone'll have to go into that godawful place at some point to actually try and find a way to assassinate this leader, so they'll have to put them to use," Carpenter replied. He looked at Kyra suddenly. "Is it really that bad all over? I got some of the news when I sent that message out to Taggart, I was hearing a lot but…"
"It is," she said. "Fuck, the last I'd heard they'd nuked Melbourne in a failed attempt to destroy one of the gateways."
"Holy shit," Carpenter replied bleakly. "Do we have...a plan?"
"Right now, I think this intel is gonna be it. Otherwise, I don't fucking know. I just came from the goddamned Moon into this shit."
"It's on the Moon?" he asked.
"There was a UAC outpost there. And on Mars, and Mars's two moons. And two of Jupiter's moons. I was on Europa first, then made it to Io. Those two bases are ripped apart. Went through Hell, literally, to get to the Moon. Place was screwed, too. Met a couple who'd been to hell and back, again, literally, more than once across Phobos, Deimos, and Mars City."
"Christ," Carpenter whispered. "It is a full-on invasion. Anywhere there was a gateway…"
"How many more outposts are there?" Kyra asked.
"I know they had something out on Neptune's moon Triton, there was a research colony on Venus that might have had a gateway. There was some truly below the board dark-ops shit going on in the asteroid belt, some prison colony…"
"Experimenting on prisoners?" Kyra asked.
"I don't know for sure, but that'd be my guess. I think I remember hearing about a research station way out on Pluto, but I doubt that had a gateway...then again, any of them could've had one. Even I could tell that the research had shifted, and shifted heavily, towards teleportation tech once they made that breakthrough."
"Uh, guys, we have a problem. I can't shut this fucking thing down," Powell said.
They all looked over at him. "Is it locked?" Carpenter asked.
"Can't you just kill the power?" Kyra asked.
"It's not locked, I just can't figure it out. There's a lot of dead ends in the system, and I can't even figure out how to kill the power."
Kyra considered it, looking around at the others. "Then we do it the hard way: cut the cords. Can we do that at least?"
"Maybe," Carpenter said. "I wasn't very privy to this area. They kept me out of it as much as possible, but let me see if I can-"
"Whoa! I think something's coming through," Powell said suddenly. "There's a huge power spike and-"
Kyra wasn't listening any longer. She had stepped out into the main area again, staring with wide, stricken eyes at the portal.
It was pulsating madly now, almost like it was enraged.
The fire was turning somehow darker, and black energy crackled away from the sides.
"Get ready! Get into position!" Kyra shouted. "Linaweaver, Carpenter, need you out here! Powell, SHUT THAT THING OFF!"
Something was coming.
Kyra managed to duck down behind a workstation and switch to her plasma rifle before something emerged. It was small, or so she thought at first. As she focused on it, the object emerging near the top of the portal, she realized with a start that it wasn't small. It was, in fact, a huge head, the size of a small car, with massive horns mounted on its sides. Blazing bloodred eyes the size of dinner plates stared out at them as it emerged from the portal, and a mouth not all that dissimilar from a T-Rex's opened up and issued a bellowing roar of fury.
She realized that it was ducking to get through the portal as the rest of it emerged. She saw a dark brown torso that looked like it had been carved from a slab of granite. She saw two huge arms, one ending in a hand with black claws the size of her forearm, the other terminating in a huge, boxy metal rocket launcher. Its legs were of an equal dynamic: one ended in a massive black hoof, the other in a polished, shiny silver metal hoof. Its guts were exposed, showing a curious mixture of red wiring and red meat.
This, Kyra realized with sick black terror, was the CyberDemon Jack and Jennifer had told her about. Only they said they had killed it.
She switched to her rocket launcher.
But how had they done so? Obviously this was another one, it was not a unique creature. The thing stood to its full twenty five foot height and issued a roar that nearly blew out her audio sensors. It seemed to rattle her bones and shake the foundation of Command Control. Kyra was screaming something as well but it was lost in the earthquake of a roar escaping that thing's mouth. She was already zeroing in on it with her launcher, desperately trying to remember exactly how Jack had killed the thing, what he'd told her.
The CyberDemon raised its own launcher and fired in one smooth motion.
Collins disappeared in a cloud of flame and blood.
Kyra shot a rocket, and sent another off immediately after it. Both of them sailed through the air and connected directly with the thing's broad chest. Both exploded and briefly wreathed its face in clouds of smoke.
And both seemed to do hardly any damage at all.
"Oh fuck me," Kyra whispered, and immediately began to reload the launcher.
Everyone else opened fire, and the gateway chamber descended into pure chaos. Bullets and shells and balls of plasma pelted the creature from all different directions, and it didn't seem to care beyond just getting angrier. Kyra finished loading another two rockets and shouldered the launcher. She fired both off simultaneously this time, remembering that that was an option, and aimed a little higher. They both shot through the air and connected dead on with the creature's face. And they seemed to do as much damage there as they had its chest.
Kyra screamed as it launched its own rocket at her. She began sprinting away while frantically trying to reload, knowing that either the rocket launcher or the plasma gun were the only things that might have any kind of an impact on the big bastard. She wasn't sure if they were getting out of this one alive. The rocket cruised past her with a disturbingly loud hissing noise and smashed into the wall some thirty or forty feet away. The impact sent her stumbling right as she finished shoving another pair of rockets in the launcher.
After this, she only had two more.
How had they done it?!
She kept on running, trying to jumpstart her memory, because this was clearly not working. There was some way of killing it beyond just brute force, but how?! The others were running around with her, frantically pouring everything they had into the beast. Chainguns roared, shotguns blasted, a plasma rifle whined as it sent a steady stream of the blue-white energy into the thing. None of it seemed to be having the desired effect. The CyberDemon roared and launched another rocket as some of the plasma smacked into its horrid, immense face.
The rocket crashed into the wall across the room and shook the whole area. Now the huge beast began stomping around, and she could hear the awful sound of hydraulics running at least some portion of its meat-machine body. It smashed through workstations and nodes of equipment as it lumbered around, enraged, firing off more rockets. If they didn't kill it soon, it was going to bring this entire place down on them. Kyra aimed for the launcher arm this time, hoping to at least remove its largest and most effective weapon.
The twin rockets sailed off. One missed, the other actually connected with the metal contraption and sent its next rocket wildly off course and saved Linaweaver's life. He finished regaining his footing after the resulting explosion and kept firing. Adrenaline and terror screamed through Kyra's head as she loaded her last two rockets. As she did, the thing turned away from her, aiming for Falcheck as he bathed it in plasma yet again. And that was when she saw it: a module of some type mounted on its back.
And that was when it clicked.
The back, that was what had done the job last time.
She took aim before the opportunity vanished, but then it did as the thing turned back around to face her, almost as if it had sensed her plan. Kyra ran, cursing, and narrowly managed to avoid the pair of rockets it sent flying her way.
"Keep it busy!" she yelled. "Distract it! I've got a plan!"
She hid behind a large piece of concrete rubble that had fallen from the ceiling during one of the rocket impacts and waited to see if it would come her way. It honestly was too hard to tell with all the screaming, gunfire, roaring, and crashing.
Then Linaweaver came onto her headset. "Kyra go!"
She shot to her feet and took aim with the launcher. She was only going to get one shot at this. Steadying herself, Kyra aimed and hit it.
The rockets launched from their metal tubes.
They flew through the air.
And missed.
The CyberDemon sidestepped at the last second and as they sailed by, it turned back around with a furious roar and took aim at her. Kyra began sprinting away, abandoning the launcher, a rough idea snapping into existence in her head: get between it and the gateway and it can't shoot you. Probably. Hopefully.
She kept running, seeing it tracking her with its rocket launcher arm.
What was she going to do!? How was she going to get out of this one alive!?
She heard the sound of the rocket firing, and almost immediately there was an explosion. She saw a flash of darkness consume everything for a brief second, and in the same moment felt a surge of strange energy that was somehow both searing hot and freezing cold slam through her entire body. Everything seemed to go numb and suddenly she was blind and deaf and immobile. Terror shot through her like frozen black lightning.
Something flashed across her vision.
Someone screamed.
There was a sense of movement, of tremendously fast velocity.
Something spoke in an impossible voice that dripped evil and vile corruption in a language she was positive no human had heard before.
And then she was somewhere else. Her vision came back to her in a snap, like someone reactivating a screen, and she grunted as she was dropped several feet. Her legs went out from under her and she collapsed to a stonework floor. Blind fear and battle hype still surged through her veins, so Kyra quickly got back to her feet, groping for a weapon. For a few seconds, as she looked around this strange new environment, she tried to figure out what in the fuck had happened. Only, she slowly realized, this environment wasn't new.
In fact, it was familiar, painfully so.
It had been seared into her mind not all that long ago, and she had hoped to never come back here again. Although she knew that was a false hope if there ever was one, she had at least hoped she'd be able to stave off a return trip to Hell at least a few weeks longer.
The teleporter had destabilized, and it had sucked her through.
Her hands settled onto her plasma rifle and she felt tremendous relief. She'd come through with not just her weapons, (or some of them at least), but her armor as well. Which meant she still had the location of the primary demon.
Kyra studied the place she had been spit out at. There was obviously no receiving gateway on this end. It was just a gymnasium-sized room of crumbling stonework, all of it a strange gray-green color. Rusted iron-barred windows dotted the walls, and there were holes in the ceiling, letting in a muted miserable red light from the churning bloody skies above. She slowly walked to the nearest window and looked out onto a landscape of misery and death and bleak alien horror. Deadwood trees and huge spikes of black rock jutted up out of the cracked ground, and in the distance she could see vast oceans of lava or acid and huge spiky mountain ranges that soared for miles and miles into the impossible crimson sky.
Abruptly, she became aware of a humming sound, and felt the familiar feeling of power building in the air all around her. She could feel it even through the suit. Something was coming. Kyra glanced down at the plasma rifle.
There was barely a fifth of the charge left in the power cell, and she didn't have any others. All she had otherwise was her shotgun and who knew how many shells.
Then there was a great flash of dark light and her jaw dropped open in sheer, stupefied terror as she saw the CyberDemon appear and slam into the floor with a resounding crash that drove dust and chunks of mortar from the ceiling. The great beast roared and thrashed, and as she raised her weapon and some militaristic part of her mind seized control yet again, she realized that something was wrong, tremendously wrong with the cybernetic entity.
At once, she saw what it was: the thing had been sheered right in half. Everything below its waist was completely gone. As it continued thrashing and roaring, she saw its circuit-intestines hanging out in stringy red pulp, leaving a blackish-red substance in its wake. Was it dying? How long did it have to live?
Maybe she could outrun it, or maybe it wouldn't notice her-
The thing suddenly turned to face her and stared at her with those huge, huge eyes of pure unfiltered hatred.
It roared and aimed its launcher at her and she heard a loud click.
Kyra realized her entire body had tensed in anticipation of the rocket that would have snuffed her out like a candle in a hurricane. She heard another loud click, and another. The CyberDemon roared and continued fruitlessly trying to fire its rocket launcher. Something had clearly gone wrong, but that might not keep. Kyra took aim with her plasma rifle and sent a concentrated burst of energy right into the foot-wide black barrel in the center of the gunmetal block. She let out a laugh of shocked joy when the CyberDemon's arm twitched, then jerked violently, and the rocket launcher spat a stream of sparks, then suddenly exploded.
The CyberDemon roared its eternal rage, thrashing violently again, spraying its black-red blood everywhere. Its arm now ended at its elbow in a twisted, gruesome mess of sparking cybernetics, torn flesh, and broken bone.
Kyra stopped laughing when the thing reached out, dug its claws into the floor, and pulled itself towards her with a startling speed.
"Ah fuck me," she growled and began backing up rapidly while also firing off a salvo of plasma into its face. The thing roared again and she ceased fire and fell back as it jerked itself forward another disturbing amount of distance. For now, she simply turned and ran, putting some more space between the two of them.
Even now, cut in half with one arm blown off after getting shot to hell and back, it still was proving to be too much for her!
It was leaking a ton of...blood? Oil? Whatever, it was leaking a lot of it and that had to mean it was going to die soon, right?
Even if that was true, was it soon enough to save her ass?
She began looking around for something, anything to help her out. A weapon that had come through the portal with her, or maybe a cache of explosives or…
"Oh shit," she whispered as she looked up.
A big section of masonry was sagging noticeably overhead, and she thought with some well-placed plasma shots, she could bring it down like…
Well, like a ton of bricks.
Kyra looked back at the CyberDemon. It was still coming for her, reaching for her with a hand that could crush her to pulp. She began sprinting off, leading it on a chase after her through this bizarre, abandoned structure somewhere deep in the pits of Hell. It roared and came after her, adjusting course. She heard several bricks crash to the floor and glanced up. The sagging masonry was sagging even more now. Shit.
She kept running until she was just a few feet beyond it and had put it right in the path of the crawling half-CyberDemon.
"Come on, bitch!" she yelled, switching to her shotgun quickly and blasting a few shells into its face. The CyberDemon let out a roar that drove dust from the ceiling and began coming for her even faster. Kyra backed up a few paces, switching back to her plasma rifle. She had to time this just right...she waited as it drew closer, aiming for its face, firing a few plasma balls into it. And then the time came, and she jerked the gun up and unloaded a volley into the masonry. As it smacked into the brickwork, for a second, nothing happened, and Kyra felt total terror overtake her as the CyberDemon reached for her.
And then a solid piece of the roof, a good six feet across and two feet deep, probably weighing an actual ton, detached and fell.
It slammed into the CyberDemon and crushed its huge bull-like head, splattering Kyra and the entire area with that black-red blood.
Its roar cut off all at once.
She looked around for a few seconds, then sighed and started hunting for a way out.
There was a lot of work to do yet still.