Something that Jack had come to learn was that some sayings were true. Very true. Not all of them, but some of them. And one that he firmly believed in was: it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets any better...if it ever does get any better. Nowhere in his entire career, in his entire life, had that idea been so thoroughly highlighted. They'd made it across the surface yet again, although each time they crossed, it felt like more and more of a lethal gambit. There seemed to be more monsters out there every trip.
The tram rolled into its station and they hauled themselves out onto the platform. Now they were in Deimos Labs.
As soon as they stepped into the wrecked, high-security entrance lobby, all hell cut loose. Jack grunted as he was kicked in the chest by a shotgun blast. Not point-blank at least, but enough to send him stumbling and to no doubt leave a big bruise across his ribcage. He heard gunfire behind him, the patter of Jenkins's SMG, and caught sight of a Z-Sec going down under a metal rain. Then it was all bloody, bullet-riddled chaos.
Jenkins and Jennifer were far enough back that all they had to do for cover was to step back a few feet and crouch down in either side of the big chrome door frame. Jack had no such option. He was out in the open, the only option he had was to dash forward, into the gunfire, and dive to safety inside of the big circular desk that dominated the center of the room. It immediately fell under fire as the small army of Z-Sec zombies that were pouring into the room opened up. Jack managed to pop up and get a lucky shot off.
He blew half of one's head away in a spray of sparks and gore. It dropped and flopped on the deckplates like a fish out of water, turning Jack's stomach. Humans didn't do that. He could hear the other two earning their keep, blasting away at any exposed black-armored assholes. He took whatever opportunities presented themselves and ended up depleting his shotgun in the process. After a nearly five minute shootout, the last Z-Sec fell and all became silent. Jack waited, his body tensed, seeing if anything else would show up.
But nothing did.
He let out his breath, relieved and trembling from the adrenaline. Slowly, he stood up and surveyed the area. It looked worse than before, somehow. Silently, the trio began picking through the remains, scrounging among the corpses they'd just produced, hoping against hope for more ammo. Jack tried to think of nothing at all as he searched the dead. The exhaustion he'd been feeling since not long after they'd left the Deimos Anomaly was only getting worse. After all they'd been through on Phobos, and now this…
He was seriously beginning to question if he could handle it, if he might not end up snapping somehow. He told himself that he was a Marine, goddamnit, tried to tell himself to suck it up, get over it, get moving. But it wasn't just the physical labor. It wasn't just the endless trekking or the shooting or all the other oddjob physical tasks that came up. It wasn't even the blood and the bodies and the signs of damage here, there, and everywhere.
It was the base itself.
Somehow, someway, the creatures were...subverting it. Changing it. Corrupting it. That was probably the best word for it. It was like the buildings had gotten cancer or something. It was screwing with him and he was paranoid that it was just going to get worse, they were just going to see even more screwed up crap.
"We got a map of this place?" Jack asked after they finished up. No luck with his shotgun, it was spent, but he'd managed to find himself another SMG finally, with some ammo to boot. Jennifer approached him, holding what looked like a PDA.
"We got lucky," she replied. "Map of the Labs. Gimme a minute to figure out the shortest route through."
"Excellent," Jack said and began moving around the room again, seeing if there was anything he'd missed. As he did, he tried to covertly study the others. As bad as he was doing, he wondered how they were holding up. All three of them needed to keep their shit together. From what he could see, Jennifer looked the most sturdy. He had an idea that she was probably the strongest of the three of them when it came to sheer willpower. Jenkins was doing better than Jack thought he would, but he was still the most worrying of the three of them.
Of course, Jack wasn't all that good when it came to judging his own mental competence.
The kid had been shot and he didn't like the sort of glazed look in his eyes or the sluggishness he sometimes moved with. But he was mostly holding up his own, and Jack meant what he said: Jenkins was a good Marine.
But even a fantastic Marine made mistakes, especially in a situation like this.
"Okay, I've got something," Jennifer said, rousing him from his ruminations.
He moved back over to join her and studied the map. Deimos Labs looked fairly complex, though it had the same basic layout as Phobos Labs, with the central core and four wings extending away from it, each ending in a large, circular structure. The path she outlined basically indicated that they could enter the central area, curve around its outer portion, then come out through the other side into the tram station.
Jack prayed that it was that simple.
"Well, the sooner we get out of this nightmare, the better. This place is really starting to freak me out," he said, heading off towards the main entrance to the labs at the front of the room. If only he knew how darkly prophetic his words were.
He opened the big chromed door and came up short. A foul green mist hung on the air and he could smell the acrid stench of spilled toxic waste. Sure enough there was a lot of it in view. Dead ahead of him, maybe five feet away, a creek of the stuff cut horizontally across his field of view, effectively denying them access to the way beyond. But even worse than that, beyond the creek of green sludge, which was perhaps five feet across, he saw a strip of land...then another one, and another strip of deck-plating, and another one after that!
"Well, hell," Jack muttered. "Don't suppose there's another way around?"
"No, not realistically, not unless we want to go outside," Jennifer replied.
Whatever dangers might be here weren't nearly so bad as what was outside. So Jack heaved a world-weary sigh. "Fine, we'll jump over this crap. Even if we don't make it, these suits should stand up to this stuff. For a little bit, at least."
"Great," Jenkins muttered.
"I'll go first," Jack said.
They gave him some room and he backed up several steps. Then he took a running jump and leaped over it. He landed with a hard, booming thud on the other side, his boots slamming into the deckplates. He also landed perfectly in position to alert an Imp that had been hiding out of sight, off to the right in a darkened alcove. The thing cut loose with a shriek and leaped at him. Jack yelled as he was thrown backwards.
He felt his shotgun slip off his shoulder and just knew it had gone into the green muck. No time for that now. The Imp was bearing down on him. Jack yanked his pistol loose and opened fire, punching holes in its chest and spraying its blood across the area. He aimed up and fired once more, turning its right eye into a plume of dark gore. As it slumped to the floor, Jack heard more hissing and a roar from somewhere nearby, somewhere too close for comfort.
"Come on!" Jack called to the others as he scrambled to his feet. He glanced back and could just make out the uncertain figure of his shotgun lying in the toxic waste, smoking. Yep, it was gone. Damn. He'd liked that gun.
Holstering his pistol, he grabbed his SMG and prepared to rock n' roll.
As Jennifer and Jenkins minded the gap, Jack looked ahead, SMG in hand. He saw Imps and Z-Secs coming out of the woodwork, apparently the place was littered with shadowy niches and perfect places to hide. He aimed and fired, aimed and fired. The bullets went in, the blood came out. Once Jennifer and Jenkins were safely on the platform with him, they joined in the firefight. Jack sent out controlled bursts of red hot lead, going for the head as often as he could. Between the three of them they ended up dropping eight Imps and half a dozen Z-Secs, as well as a pair of regular zombies that had wandered into the fray.
Jack slapped a fresh magazine into the Raptor and cleared the area.
"Okay, let's do this again," Jack said. "This time with less assholes," he muttered to himself.
He took a running jump and made it across the second spill. As he prepared to make the third jump, he hesitated. Something seemed wrong. He stopped and looked around, studying his environment intently. When his instincts were telling him that something was wrong, it paid to sit up and take notice.
"What's wrong?" Jennifer asked after they made the jump behind him.
"I don't know," he said softly. "Something is wrong, but I don't know what."
He walked up to the edge of the third and final toxic creek and looked left, then right. Suddenly, he had it. The spill continued a ways away before turning out of sight. This passageway they were making their way down via jumps was originally a broad corridor. But the walls over the spills had been broken away.
"What did this?" he asked finally, then explained what he saw. "I mean, this isn't simple damage. This is...beyond that."
"The base is continuing to change," Jennifer murmured.
"What's changing it?" Jenkins asked.
"They are," Jack said softly.
"What? The freaking demon things? The Imps? The zombies? How?"
"No, I think it's...something more. Some kind of...force," Jack replied.
"Force? Some kind of force? What does that even mean?" Jenkins asked, sounding more nervous than ever.
"I don't know," Jack said, rousing himself. "Only that this situation has even wider implications than I thought. But it doesn't matter right now. Come on."
He was freaking himself out, and by extension the others. Bad time and place for it. He jumped over into the next and final section. They'd come to the end of the hallway, the walls of which were done up in a mixture of slate gray octagonal patterns and computer screens that were displaying almost totally random data. Several showed static, others showed the UAC logo, others showed random strings of numbers and letters, others bled, and some just said TEI TENGA...whatever the hell that meant. Jack moved slowly forward, coming up to the next door. He opened it and found himself looking at a fresh visage of horror.
"What the..." he trailed off.
This was definitely becoming too much.
The area beyond was bathed in an impossible red light. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and it was overwhelming. And yet they could see everything with an almost unnatural clarity. Which sucked, because Jack really would have been fine without seeing what he was seeing. Hung from the ceiling on chains and hooks were limbs. Arms and legs, some bare, some with uniforms still wrapped around them.
They all dripped blood.
"This is messed up," Jenkins whispered.
"This is beyond messed up," Jennifer replied softly.
"Come on, we have to keep going," Jack said, heading off.
"But...Jack-" Jenkins began.
"Just don't think about it," Jack replied.
Silently, the pair of them followed him. Blood splattered across his armor and ran down his visor. He did his best to ignore it, trying not to think about the atrocities committed here, the horrors hanging just a foot overhead. This was deliberate, just like the dozens of personnel crucified back in the Phobos Anomaly. What had driven them to do this? What did they want? Where did they come from? Dozens of questions tore through his head and he didn't have answers to any of them. And any theories he came up with only distressed him.
So he kept them to himself.
He was so busy trying to stay focused that he almost didn't notice a slight change in decorum. The same gray paneling covered the walls, (bathed in red light), only now, repeated over and over, were strangely stylized engravings of a Baron of Hell's face, placed seemingly at random. They gave him bad vibes and he could almost feel all the eyes watching him. Jack shuddered and tried to shake the ominous feelings. He was only somewhat successful. Finally, they reached the end of this particular horror show in the form of a partially open doorway.
Jack peered through the crack in the middle. He spied a transitional area beyond, but nothing alive at least. Jennifer helped him force it open and they headed through. Dead ahead was the way they needed to go.
"Oh, come on!" Jack groaned.
It was locked down. They needed a blue keycard to get through it.
"Maybe we can find an alternate route," Jenkins suggested.
"We could but..." Jennifer frowned, clearly considering something and not liking it. "It'd probably be dangerous, though it'd probably be dangerous either way. But what's really getting me is that...Phobos Labs had their own comms system. Deimos Labs surely should, too. Maybe we should check it out? See if we can get someone on the air? Mars City? Other survivors? It'd be good to hear from someone else..."
"You have a point," Jack murmured. He sighed. "Okay, let's see if we can find this blue keycard," he said, looking around.
There was a little security kiosk tucked away in a nearby corner, little more than a booth a guard could sit in and monitor the situation from. Jack entered through the side door and quickly checked it over for supplies. No luck there, someone, or something, had already been through. But one of the screens was still functional, so he booted it up and got to work. The main system of Deimos Base was even more fried than Phobos's was, but at least this time it worked with instead of against him. He didn't need to screw around with clearances.
He found the keycard tracker and located the blue keycard. He also found a yellow keycard. Although they weren't near each other, he had Jennifer mark both of them on her map. "Might as well get them both," he said.
Jennifer nodded in agreement. They left the kiosk and began making their way towards the blue keycard first. It was down the bottom right wing of Deimos Labs, near the back. Jack found his mind wandering as they started making their way through more mercifully 'normal' portions of UAC architecture, which at this point meant steel corridors sprayed with old blood and tattooed with bullet-holes, and deckplates carpeted with shell casings.
He found himself thinking of Jennifer again.
What kind of life could they have together? Or what kind of life could they have had? Despite how grim he'd been most of his life, Jack thought of himself as an ambitions man. He didn't really settle. He couldn't. But the last year had really taken it out of him. Could he have settled for pulling guard duty on Mars as a damned Space Marine, working for a company that put a bad taste in his mouth whenever he saw their logo?
Well...maybe he could have, if he had Jennifer with him.
He almost hated himself for thinking it, because it sounded so cliché, and also so pathetic. How many men and women, good, smart, strong people, had he seen settle down in a relationship? A good relationship or even a bad one, and give up ambition? How many had he seen resigned to marriage? How many could clearly do better, either with another person or even by themselves? He'd been contemptuous of them in his past, then bitter, then depressed.
But now?
Now he felt kind of...sympathetic. He kind of got it. There was only so much fight in a human. How long before you had it kicked out of you? Life was a grim, miserable, brutish existence. It was painful, lonely and depressing.
And it became surprisingly tolerable when you had a significant other.
Jack knew it was crap, it was just your body tricking you into thinking that you were happy with empty chemical promises. And when it was gone, white-hot, passionate love tended to fizzle into passive acceptance and security, and by then you'd forgotten how to be single, and you remembered the horror of loneliness, the soul-crushing torment of isolation, and you looked at your partner and thought to yourself:
Better than being lonely.
Jack at least tried to console himself with the fact that he was at least sure he wouldn't be settling when it came to Jennifer Taylor. One of his abilities that he'd had for a long time, something that was ingrained in him, was the ability to read people, and read them well. He could just...tell about people. And he could tell that Jennifer was every bit as strong, smart and competent as she appeared. Probably more so, actually.
He realized that his biggest concern with committing to her was being worthy of her, of making sure that she didn't feel like she was settling.
As they came to another door and opened it up, Jack's train of thought derailed. No, more than that. It didn't just derail, it jumped the tracks, flipped end over end into a nearby canyon, and exploded into a million thought fragments.
"I'm not going in there," Jenkins said.
Jack didn't blame him, not one bit.
The corridor beyond continued as it should...except that it didn't look anything like it should. Huge portions of the walls, floor, and ceiling had been replaced with...with flesh. Pulsing, squirming, bleeding flesh. Jack felt his stomach roll over lazily, his last meal threatening to come up. "We have to go in there," he said finally.
"Can't we go around?" Jenkins moaned.
"There's no other way around," Jennifer murmured.
"Fuck..."
Jack led by example and took the first tentative step in. The floor squished horribly beneath his boot and he almost fell back. But no, he had to do this. Just like before, with the hanging garden of bloody limbs, just one foot in front of the other, keep going, don't think about it, stay focused. Jack looked around as he walked into the room, unable to keep his eyes from sliding over everything. Possibly the worst part was the fact that he could still see obvious signs of the UAC facility that had once been.
Like islands among a sea of horror, Jack spied a few sparking workstations, some panels of the original wall and floor, and a few light fixtures that flickered weakly overhead. "It's somewhere in here," he whispered.
Whispering seemed appropriate.
"Let's split up and find it," Jennifer replied.
He nodded and headed deeper, while Jennifer broke left and Jenkins made for the right side. Everything else that had come before this, at least when it came to the strange changes made to the base itself, to the architecture, seemed to pale in comparison. They were walking on a floor made of flesh. Blood was dripping occasionally from the ceiling. How was this even possible!? The whole world had gone insane.
As he hunted for the blue keycard, Jack suddenly found himself wondering if he'd gone insane. The situation was so crazy, so far beyond the pale of normal, and he was so isolated, surrounded by nothing but chaos and hellish horror, that it almost seemed likely that he'd snapped. Maybe he was in a coma? Or an asylum? Would that actually be better? He didn't even know. He thought that it wouldn't, ultimately.
Losing your mind was probably scarier than this.
Well, maybe.
"I've got it," Jenkins said, though he didn't sound too happy about it.
Jack turned and hastily retreated, wanting to be out of this room very badly. He and Jennifer converged on Jenkins, who looked like he was sorting through something. When they finally came to stand behind him, Jack realized why he wasn't too happy about having found it. The blue keycard was buried beneath a tangle of spilled guts. He finally fished it out and twitched his wrist a few times, trying to get the blood and gore off. Wordlessly, he passed it to Jack, who accepted and pocketed it. "Let's get the hell out of here."
They hurried back the way they'd come, gratefully leaving the awful flesh-room behind. Thankfully, they didn't run into any more of the malignant entities that haunted the forsaken starbase. As soon as they were back at the main door, Jack swiped the keycard and opened it up. The door revealed...a darkened section. Of course. Reigning in his fear and frustration, Jack activated the flashlight on his SMG and peered into the gloom beyond. Another large antechamber awaited them, with a huge silver door dead ahead and two open doorways, one to either side, that led to the circular corridor that ringed the inner portion of Deimos Labs.
"Shit," Jack muttered as he walked inside. "Doesn't matter what keycard we have, we aren't getting into the core without power to this section."
"So we've gotta find another generator," Jenkins muttered.
"No, I don't think so. The areas around us have power, I think we'll have to make some basic repairs," Jennifer replied.
"Any idea how to figure out where and what repairs?" Jack asked.
"Yeah, I just have to find a working terminal," Jennifer answered.
They decided to break left, because it had better lighting. Although they could see some Demons stomping around far along the corridor, accompanied by a trio of Lost Souls hovering thither and yon. The Demons would bat at them ineffectually whenever they drifted close enough. In a way that made him feel like his sanity was slipping a notch, Jack thought that it was almost cute. He raised his SMG and opened fire, turning the three Lost Souls into bone fragments. They managed to put down the three pink Demons before the things got close enough to do some damage. Jack slapped a fresh magazine into his Raptor.
Just in time, because suddenly there was a huge, red Cacodemon floating around the corner at the end of the hall. Its huge eye flashed madly and it opened its vast, gaping maw of a mouth. A blue-yellow ball of fire shot out. He tried to sidestep but misjudged it and the ball smacked him in the shoulder with enough power to spin him and throw him to the floor. He grunted as he landed on his ass and heard the others opening fire. Reduced to a single magazine for the SMG, Jack remained sitting, aimed, and fired careful volleys of shots, accompanying the others as they tried to put the giant beach-ball thing down.
It popped off another four shots before it, itself, popped and sprayed the area with its gory red innards, then smacked wetly to the deckplates.
"You okay?" Jennifer asked, helping him up.
"Uh-huh," Jack replied, looking at his shoulder best he could. The blue armor was singed with soot now, blackened a bit, and he'd have another bruise and a sore shoulder for a week at least, but he was otherwise unharmed.
"Those things are so weird," Jenkins muttered. "I mean, it looks like they're...grinning, you know what I mean?"
"I do," Jack replied. "They're creepy as hell."
"Nowhere near as bad as the Lost Souls," Jennifer said.
"Yeah, those things are freaky," Jack agreed.
They spied an intact terminal up ahead, near the curve in the corridor where the Cacodemon had appeared from. The trio hurried over to it, and Jack and Jenkins secured the area while Jennifer worked the terminal. After a bit, she had it.
"Okay, two bits of good news...well, good-ish news. I was right, we need to make repairs. I can make them. Unfortunately, they're in a crawlspace beneath the floor. Fortunately, it's nearby. On top of that, we do need the yellow keycard to get into the core area. It's hidden away in the upper left wing," she explained.
"Well...I guess we should make the repairs first," Jack said.
She nodded. "I'll need some cover down there."
"I'll go with you," Jack said. "Jenkins, you'll stay up here and provide overwatch."
"Got it," he replied.
She led them to the nearest access panel, which was back a little ways, towards the main room they'd first come into. Once she found it, she crouched, hit the manual release and pulled it open. They pointed their flashlights down into the hole. A world of close confines and gritty industrial tech awaited them. They couldn't see any hostiles down there. Jack dropped into the hole, crouching and quickly checking out the area around him.
"Clear," he said, then made way for Jennifer, who dropped down.
"This way," she said, leading him further back towards the original room. Their trek was made slowly, painfully, made all the worse by the damned suits of armor. He loved them in all other respects, but in tight places? It made movement nearly impossible. Seconds bled into minutes, but finally they hunted down the thing they needed to repair.
"Looks like a stray bullet got down here," Jennifer murmured as she pried open a sparking panel. She pulled a toolkit off the wall and cracked it open, then began to fuss at the interior. Jack looked around, keeping watch. There were just two ways into this compartment: the way they'd come, and an opening ahead. He crouch-walked over to the second entrance, making sure that they were secure. Listening to her work, Jack approached the entrance. He couldn't see anything out of place, couldn't hear anything else.
A Lost Soul suddenly appeared from the right, dancing silently into the flashlight's beam. It issued a shriek and began to beeline for him.
"OH FUCK ME!" Jack screamed as he scrambled backwards and squeezed the trigger. Bullets sprayed everywhere, one of them hitting the skull and knocking it off course. He heard Jennifer shout something but was too blinded by his own terror as he stared death in the face. The thing ended up sailing up into the deckplates overhead. It bumped into them, then reoriented itself, faced Jack, and began to come straight down for him.
Abruptly, it burst into bits and pieces. He snapped his gaze over and saw Jennifer holding a smoking shotgun.
"Thanks," he whispered, trembling all over from terror and adrenaline.
"No problem," she replied, sounding just as dazed.
"You okay down there!?" Jenkins called. Both of them jerked in surprise.
"Just fine!" Jack called back. "Almost done!"
It took another five minutes, but Jennifer finally closed the panel and Jenkins called down to them that the lights were back on. They crawled back out of the dark hole and emerged back in the central corridor, then began making their way down it, towards the yellow keycard. Just one more thing to do, one more thing on the list, one more goddamned task. One in a long, long chain that was surely only going to get longer before all this was over. Jack trudged along, taking point, pistol in hand now since he was down to half a magazine for his SMG and he'd lost his damned shotgun. He missed that shotgun.
The chromed tunnel curved around, slowly revealing more of itself, more devastation, more blood. Jack wondered if there was anywhere untouched on this whole damned moon. It seemed as if the...the incident, for want of a better word, had reached into every corner, every nook and cranny, every room and every corridor.
Was anyone else left alive on Deimos?
As they found the way into the wing they needed, several strange things became apparent. The first was that most of the walls in the area had been bashed down or otherwise removed, the result of this being that they could see practically the whole wing from where they stood at its head. The second thing was that there were huge, gaping holes in the walls and ceiling, letting in a lurid red light. The third and final, (and possibly the strangest), thing was that, at the very far end of the wing, some three hundred meters away, Jack could just make out what appeared to be a section of the ceiling slowly lowering and then raising, like a giant crusher.
"Well...I guess that answers that question," Jennifer muttered.
"What question?" Jack replied. He glanced over and saw that she was tapping at a small control pad on her wrist.
"This room is obviously atmospherically compromised. I just sampled the air. It's breathable. So...wherever we are has a breathable atmosphere. Obviously it's not Mars out there."
"Then where in the hell are we?" Jenkins asked miserably.
"I don't know. I get the feeling maybe we'd be better off not knowing. Come on, the keycard is at the other end," Jack said, setting off.
As they began heading into the enormous room, it was like some kind of unseen, unheard alarm had been tripped. Monsters started coming out of the woodwork, appearing from behind piles of rubble and workstations and small mountains of crates. Lost Souls and some Cacodemons drifted in through the holes in the ceiling.
Jack just groaned, raised his pistol, and set to work.
In the end, it took them a solid twenty minutes to clear the way. They shot, they dodged, ducked, and ran. They took cover, gained ground, and retreated. They blasted their way through a small army of zombies, (few of them Z-Sec), a couple dozen Imps and Demons, and a flotilla of Lost Souls and Cacodemons. As he blasted away, finding more ammo for his SMG and using it all up, and ultimately being forced to take out a huge chunk of the enemy forces with every last round in his chaingun, Jack found himself extremely grateful that they hadn't run into another Baron of Hell. Or some other new horror.
Were there more types?
Of course there were, there had to be.
What all of this resulted in, ultimately, was the three of them standing at the crusher. It was, in fact, a giant crushing thing. It was a huge stone block, rising and lowering slowly with a machine precision. When it came down, it did so about an inch short of the base, which was a raised section of the deckplates. There was a lot of blood and gristle on that base. Obviously several things, (were those Imps, or zombies on there?), had gotten stuck under there, somehow. And, of course, the yellow keycard rested in the middle.
Before anyone could open up debate about who would do it, Jack took a step onto the base as soon as the great stone block began to rise and there was enough room.
"Jack-" Jennifer began, then fell silent, figuring he needed to concentrate. But honestly, he didn't. It was slow moving enough that he snagged the card and stepped back out right about the time it hit the top and was beginning to come back down.
"What in the hell is the point of this?" he asked, staring at it. "Where did it come from? Who the hell put it here?! Why is it here?!" Neither Jennifer nor Jenkins seemed to know how to respond. Jack realized that he was getting a lot angrier than he had any reason to be and forced himself to cool it. "Whatever, let's just go."
They'd apparently cleared out the hostile forces in the immediate area, having to only put down a handful of roaming zombies and Imps, which was good, because Jack had expended all ammo save for his sidearm, and he just had four magazines to his name for that. Jenkins was in about the same position, and Jennifer was running low for ammo on her shotgun. They made it back to the central door, unlocked it and found themselves heading up a tight spiral staircase, the walls of which were covered in those same green vines that rustled and stirred disturbingly every now and then. A control center waited for them at the top.
"Damn," Jack muttered, staring at the destruction. It looked like an army of Imps had been through, ripping everything asunder and brutally murdering anyone around. The windows were broken out, the consoles, workstations, and terminals thoroughly trashed, those that weren't dead were periodically bleeding sparks, and the floor was a mess of blood, corpses, and spent shell casings. Jack found himself staring out over the vast desolation of Deimos Base, which, he realized just then, in a dazed kind of way, was also built into a crater. Overhead and all around, he could see that same strange red haze, like blood in zero gee.
In the far distance, he thought he could see the vast, dark shapes of a mountain range, but he couldn't be sure.
"Well, the comms for Deimos Labs are down for sure," Jennifer said.
"How can you tell?" he asked, turning around. She was also at the windows, on the other side. He moved to join her.
She pointed. "That's the transmission tower," she replied.
It was trashed, little more than metal debris spread out across the red-gray ashen surface of the moon. It glinted dully in the strange, ambient light. Some Lost Souls drifted by over the former transmission site.
"Great," he muttered. In the distance, he could see the shapes of the last three places they had left to go: Command Control, the Nuclear Plant, and the Hangar. "Well, this was a waste of time," he muttered. Slowly, he turned away from the window and surveyed the room one more time. Everything was utterly destroyed.
There was nothing more here for them.
"Let's get over to Command Control and see if the view is any better from there," he said, heading for the spiral staircase.
The others followed him silently.