"This is what happened," Green began.

They had made it out of the Nuke Plant and to the last tram out of hell. Or at least Jack damned well hoped it was. Up ahead, the Hangar loomed, though it was a long ride. He didn't like their odds about crossing the surface, given how many monsters were out there, but the tram tunnel was intact and there didn't even seem to be anything inside of it. So now they sat in the tram, listening to Green's and Stratton's tale of blood and death.

"Stratton and I are the only surviving members of Gehenna Squad. We were one of a few squads that, before the incident, were sent regularly into Hell to provide protection for an outpost the UAC had constructed there. We've since learned that they've known about this place for close to a year, and have multiple operations going on. Not just here on the two moons, but elsewhere in the solar system as well. Unfortunately, we have no idea where or what their status is. They made it seem like this was brand new, like we were the first into the region, but it was all BS. Anyway, we'd recently been shifted over to Deimos, but they wouldn't tell us why, so that's where we were, in the Deimos Anomaly, when it all went down."

She stopped talking then. She'd taken off her helmet. Green looked harrowed and haunted, her eyes bloodshot and baggy. She'd produced a pack of cigarettes, Yeheyuans, from somewhere and had given one to Jack when he'd asked for it. The two of them smoked now as everyone listened to her miserable tale.

"We fought. And fought. And fought. They were endless. I watched most of my squad die, most of the staff die. Then one of the Imps got on me and choked me out. I thought I was dead. I woke up a few times, being dragged through the base, but I don't really remember it. The next thing I know, I'm strung up, naked, with about a dozen others. Only four of them were still alive. I managed to get myself unhooked and the others down as well before anything came looking. We found out we were in Command Control and skulked around for awhile. I had Stratton, two Space Marines, and a terrified tech with me.

"After quite awhile of creeping through vents and crawlspaces and the shadows, we managed to get together uniforms and some kind of weapons. We started pulling guerrilla tactics on them, taking the things down wherever we could. They were everywhere in Command Control. We decided to head back to the Anomaly, to see if we could figure out some way of getting these assholes out of here, since it's obvious that's where they came from..."

She trailed off, a miserable look on her face, and took a long pull on the cigarette. She exhaled a huge formless cloud of blue smoke that wreathed her tired face. "It was a total fucking waste. Lost the tech and one of the Marines in the process, only to find out that the gateway wasn't going to be any damned help to us, especially when we realized where we were."

"Wait...where are we?" Jack asked.

"You mean you don't know?" she replied, looking at him evenly.

He thought he did know. He glanced uncomfortably at the others, who stared silently back at him, then returned his gaze to Green and shook his head.

"We're in Hell," she replied simply. "The whole moon got sucked in somehow. I'd recognize that goddamned sky anywhere."

Jack felt his stomach turn over again. He thought that if he had anything left, he might have puked right then. With an effort, he got himself back under control.

"So then what happened?" he managed to ask. He needed something to keep him distracted, and Green's story of survival was fairly compelling.

"Well, we fought our way back through the buildings. We managed to find a bigger arsenal on the way, so we started kicking ass and taking names. We were going to head for the Hangar. Unfortunately, we got bogged down back in the Nuke Plant and ended up losing the other Marine in the process...and then you showed up and saved our asses."

"Thanks for that, by the way," Stratton said.

Jack chuckled, then frowned. "We did a scan of the whole moon...didn't find any life signs but you, us...and one other in the Hangar. They weren't looking so good."

"Damn, I was hoping there might be survivors in the Hangar..." Green muttered. She shook her head and stubbed out her mostly dead cig on her armor, then flicked it away. "Well, maybe he'll have some answers."

"To what?" Jenkins asked.

"To where the hell we're going to go. How we're going to get out of here. I mean, even if we find a ship, where do we go? We're no longer in our own universe. We're in a parallel dimension. We're in Hell. We need another gateway, and I can't imagine they're just lying around," Green said, frowning deeply.

Jack felt cold all over at that. He'd been somehow avoiding thinking about that harsh reality. He'd been thinking that if they just got to the Hangar, if they just found a ship, then...somehow, everything would be okay.

But that was no longer the case.

Not even by a long shot.

He almost wanted to give up, right then and there. Going home now seemed impossible. Utterly impossible, inconceivable. It was no longer a goal, merely a fantasy. Right then, as he sat at the edge of despair, he suddenly heard the voice his drill instructor from boot thundering through his head: "Suck it up, Private! Impossible is just a big word, thrown around by small men!" It was like a bucket of icy water across the fires of his mind, combating against terror and despair. With a sigh, he took a long, hard pull on his Yeheyuan, stubbed the rest out on his armor and flicked it away as Green had, then blew out a huge plume of smoke through his nostrils.

"Maybe he will," he said finally.

Right now, they had no other destination in mind but the Hangar, no other place to go. So either it would hold the answers...or it wouldn't.

Jack hoped against hope that it would. He got up and headed for the front, suddenly wanting to be alone as he heard Jennifer and Jenkins begin to tell their own story about how they'd come up from Mars City on a rescue mission, and the bloody, brutish hell they'd found. They were on the final leg of their journey. Something occurred to him a moment later and he poked his head back out. "Update them on the names of the creatures," he said.

"Good idea," Jennifer replied, and proceeded to do so.

Jack sank back into the conductor's chair and gently massaged his temples, his helmet abandoned on the floor beside him. He was so damned tired...he wanted to say something like, I'll sleep when I'm dead. And although it was more than likely true, he felt like he was on his last leg. Whatever they found in that Hangar, Jack knew that he would need a break once they were safe. If that ever happened. Or he was going to make a mistake sooner or later, and it was going to get him, or worse, someone else, killed.

"We're almost there," he called back as the tram started to go into the airlock bay. He reached down, grabbed his helmet, and locked it into place.

One more fight. One last battle.

For now, at least.

As they cycled through the airlock and rolled into what Jack prayed was the last goddamned tram station he had to see in his whole life, he felt like something was wrong. It was a feeling he'd become familiar with. There was a kind of pattern to the madness of this place, of these two slaughterhouse moons. Ironically, he felt...well, safest wasn't the right word, but most secure, when he was duking it out with some of the creatures, shooting and ducking and strafing. Because he knew what he was doing then.

But at times like these, when he came to an area that should be crawling with bad guys and there was nothing? It felt off. Like, the universe was tricking him into a false sense of security, showing him an empty room as if to say, Nothing bad's going to happen. You can relax. And then bam! The other shoe dropped like a fucking hammer. It was a paranoid thought, of course. The universe didn't actually work that way. There were no laws governing things like that. Then again, he'd also thought that the universe didn't contain living monsters before today, so…

So now he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

All of this felt like it was building up to something, especially considering this was the last building on the whole moon. What better time to snatch away victory, to yank away their hope, than right before they were going to get it?

Jack shook off the dark, paranoid thoughts as the tram finished settling into its station. It looked relatively intact and not all that bloody, which made him even more paranoid. Well, it was pretty far from the maelstrom that had hit this place, so it stood to reason that it was the least damaged. He headed back to join the others.

"We all ready for this?" he asked.

Green nodded, then yawned suddenly. "Goddamn, gonna need a nap soon," she muttered.

"Don't we all," Jack replied. He hefted his pistol. It was the only weapon he had left that had ammo in it besides the rocket launcher. He honestly hoped he didn't need the damned thing. Leading the way, Jack opened the doors and stepped out onto the dark metal platform beyond. The place was decently well-lit and deserted. Abandoned tools lay scattered across the area and a lonely corpse, a woman in a blue jumpsuit missing her arms, lay beside a pile of silver crates bearing the UAC logo. Seeing that damned logo sent a wave of anger through him.

How many people had died as a result of their goddamned tinkering? Hundreds? A thousand? More? He had no idea how far this thing had even spread. Green had said that there were other research sites in the solar system. Where? The moon? Europa maybe? The asteroid belt would be a great place to hide one of those…

Earth?

No, he pushed that thought away immediately. No, not Earth. They would never be that stupid. Even with all this bullshit happening, they would never be that stupid. He marched across the platform. They had a lone survivor to find. Getting up to the door, he hit the open button and held his pistol with both hands, aiming it into the entrance lobby beyond. No immediate threats, but he didn't like what he saw as he moved in.

"What...what is this?" Jenkins whispered.

"It's...webbing," Jack muttered.

"Webbing, like...like spiderwebs?" Stratton asked, the fear naked in his voice.

"That's what it looks like," Jennifer replied.

"Stay sharp," Green snapped.

He glanced back at her as she said that, and it suddenly occurred to him that she outranked him. He hesitated. "Sergeant Green, um...I'm sorry," he said awkwardly.

She blinked, staring at him, utterly bewildered. "What?"

"You outrank me. I was assuming command," he replied.

She laughed. "I think we're beyond command at this point. Let's just...keep doing what we've been doing. We shouldn't get hung up on who's in charge until a command decision is needed, and so far, there hasn't been one."

He nodded reluctantly. Honestly, he'd been very happy to pass the torch back to someone else. After Blackmore died, he'd awkwardly assumed command again. Though when there did come time to make some kind of decision, he planned on deferring to whatever she came up with. She seemed smart, focused, and tough as hell.

They kept walking through the lobby. The main entrance to the hangar bays themselves at the back was utterly covered in thick, white strands of webbing.

"I'm not sure we're going to get past this," Jack muttered, studying it from a safe distance. He didn't like the look of it at all...it did look like a spider's web...but what spider was big enough to produce this?

As if they didn't have enough problems.

"Let's check out the side corridors and see what we can see," Green replied.

They broke left first. Jack and Green took point, opening the door and moving slowly into the corridor beyond. The lighting was poor and they activated their flashlights. There was more webbing along the ceiling, and the fact that almost every single vent grate in the area had been broken open did nothing to set his nerves at ease. There were just a few doors to check out and they set to it. The first was a break room that had mostly been covered in webbing. There didn't seem to be anything of use in the room and Jack thought he heard something move, so he quickly closed the door and let it be. The next was a bloodied bathroom that was otherwise vacant. The final room was a storage bay, but it held nothing of value.

"That was a bust," Stratton muttered as they left the left side.

"Hopefully the next one will give us more luck," Green replied.

It turned out that it would. They cleared a few more vacant rooms with webbing across the ceilings and some of the walls, and finally managed to locate a blowtorch. Jack picked it up, studying it, and figured it'd be as good as anything to get them through that webbing. It wasn't like he was particularly eager to go crawling under the floor again. Especially with all these webs around. He'd never really gotten over his fear of spiders.

As they regrouped in the main lobby and he began to set fire to the webbing, he winced, expecting some kind of retaliation, perhaps a furious roar or the sudden appearance of some fresh horror conjured up from the deepest, darkest pits of hell. But there was nothing. The webbing caught easily and burned away, clearing a path into the corridor beyond. The hallway was huge and riddled with blood and bullet holes. Obviously some kind of fighting had gone on there. Along the wall ahead of them, he could see varied doors that led into the hangar bays. He noticed there were about eight bays and that the design of this place seemed sleeker, more efficient.

Deimos Base had gotten preferential treatment.

Not that it honestly freaking mattered in the end.

"Where to?" Jennifer murmured.

"Control Tower," Green replied, and set off. They followed after her. Jack was getting anxious, he wanted to get the hell out of there. Not that he was sure how they could even do that at this point. But he wanted to progress somehow, wanted to make some kind of advancement towards getting out of this place and back to a normal life. It was funny, he thought as they came to the Control Tower. Before, when he'd been shipped to Mars, he'd practically been contemplating suicide. His response to the idea of being a Space Marine.

But now?

That life looked like goddamned paradise compared to this hell.

It was very interesting, and horrifying, in a way, just what a change in perspective could do to you. How it could change everything. They reached the Control Tower's base and did a quick sweep of the ground floor, which had a small galley, a break room, a bathroom that doubled as a shower room, and a small storage room that had several cots in it, likely for technicians and air traffic controllers to take quick naps on long-haul shifts.

It was basically clear of destruction and webbing.

But that wasn't the case as they ascended. They hurried up the stairway that folded back in on itself several times, leading up to the Control Room itself. The webbing got thicker the higher up they went. Jack led the way with his pistol, feeling like they were getting close to something important, though he had no idea what. As they finally reached the top, they came into a room where the walls were utterly covered in the stuff. And this time, they began to see shapes in the webs. Dark, cocooned figures.

"Are they..." Jenkins whispered.

"The base personnel," Jack finished. "See if any of them are still alive. There's a good chance this is where that life sign was."

They spread out. The webbing here was so thick that the windows were almost completely covered and only a muted crimson light bled in through the thinner parts, giving the room an awful, sickening feel. It was like some of the places he'd seen in his nightmares just recently. Most of the bodies were so utterly cocooned in the webbing that they were nothing more than uncertain shapes. He could still make out their heads, though, and he took the opportunity to shoot each in the skull once, just in case they might still be alive.

It was probably a waste of ammo, but he wasn't willing to leave someone here like this.

Near the front of the room, over the primary workstation, they found their sole survivor. Their mysterious life signal.

"Doctor Carmack," Green growled. She practically spat the words out.

"Who is this?" Jack asked, staring at the man who was strung up against the wall, mostly covered by the thick, dark gray webbing. His head, neck, and some of his chest were still exposed. He looked painfully thin, his lanky black hair hanging around his pallid, gaunt face. He coughed weakly and smiled at them.

His teeth were a broken ruin of blood and enamel.

"Sergeant Green, how lovely to see you again," he said, then coughed again. "What brings you to my neighborhood?" he asked, then offered a thin, wheezing laugh.

"Cut the shit, Carmack," Green snapped. "This was one of the men in charge of the project over on Phobos," she explained. "The brains behind it."

"You do me too much credit. I was in charge of the science department...but I was just one component," he said, then drifted off, muttering to himself. Abruptly, he winced and a look of agony ripped across his face. Whatever it was that was plaguing him subsided, if only for the moment. He looked at them again.

"I don't have much longer, so if you want to chat, make it fast," he said.

"Where are we?" Green asked.

"Where do you think we are? We're in the other dimension. We're in Hell, hovering in the skies of Hell Itself. Somehow we were pulled through the gateway."

"How do we get back? The Deimos Anomaly is gone," Green demanded.

He began laughing again, then coughed raggedly and spat some blood onto the floor. "There's just one way left, as far as I know," he replied. His humor was gone now, he looked very weak and very near death. "The Tower of Babel, on the far side of the region. Trust me, you'll know it when you see it. Get there. We established a portal there, a smaller version of the big daddy in the Anomalies. If it's still functional, it'll take you straight to Mars City."

"Mars City!? You built a portal in Mars City?!" Jack cried.

Carmack opened his mouth to respond, perhaps to defend himself, but what came out was simply: "Time's up...God forgive me..."

Before any of them could do anything, his skull abruptly exploded, spraying them all with blood and gore. From the bloody ruin, something was birthed. A new horror emerged. Six spindly legs emerged from the visceral debris of Doctor Carmack's head and at first Jack thought he was seeing the man's skull over the body of this...this spidery horror. As it moved, shifted, gained its feet, perching awkwardly on the body and the webbing, he realized that the skull was its body. It was flipped over, upside down, and the mouth was on top.

The mouth opened and issued a little shriek.

"What the fuck!?" Jenkins screamed.

The thing jumped at Jack and he screamed as it wrapped around his helmet. Eight black, maddened, alien eyes stared in at him through his faceplate, mere inches away, as he stumbled backwards, tripped over something and fell flat on his ass. Screaming in raw panic and terror, he dropped his pistol and reached up. Grabbing the thing, he literally broke it off of his helmet. He could hear the loud snaps of its legs as he ripped and tore at the thing. He suddenly felt it jerked away from his helmet and saw it get thrown across the room by Jennifer. As soon as it was clear of him, Jenkins blasted it away with a shotgun shell.

"Holy shit," he moaned as he groped for his pistol. Even in his terror his mind wouldn't let him forget that he'd dropped his weapon.

He found it and took Jennifer's proffered hand. She yanked him up. "You okay?" she asked, face pale and eyes wide with worry.

His faceplate had been cracked in the process, and he was shaking worse than he had since this whole thing had started, but he was okay. He nodded. "Yeah...yeah, I'll be fine," he replied, looking down at his pistol.

"We need to leave, right now..." Green hissed at them.

Jack felt a fresh bolt of black terror shoot through him and he raised his pistol. Looking around, he saw dark slots all along the base of the room. Ventilation shafts, he realized. And black eyes were staring out at them.

As soon as they began backing up, a veritable flood of the horrible skull spiders began to spill forth from the vents.

"Fall back!" Green roared. "Fall back!" She punctuated her sentence with a burst from her submachine gun.

Jack raised his pistol and opened fire as he moved backwards with the others. Having a clear threat was helping throw off the sense of horror and mindless terror of his experience. He began popping off rounds, covering their retreat, as dozens of the spider things poured into the room. These spiders let out not shrieks, but deep, guttural growls that sent chills up and down his spine. It was not a sound they should have been able to make.

He emptied the magazine and reached for a reload, then felt a fresh wave of cold fear slither through him as he found that he had one left. He was down to these bullets and his rockets. And rockets didn't really seem like the best thing to use against these little bastards. A dozen of them fell to the gunfire as reached the door, then another dozen, and finally they were all through the door, back into the stairwell.

"I'm out!" Jack called. He'd fired his last shot.

Green tossed him a mag for his SMG. "Make it count!" she replied.

He snatched it out of the air and reloaded his dead weapon, briefly resurrecting it. At least the door to the room was closed now, though even as they hurried down the stairs in a single, strung-out file, he could hear those deep, guttural growls. God, those things freaked him the hell out. Why did it have to be spiders? Why?!

Despite this, despite everything, all the horror, he actually felt good. Thrilled. Ecstatic even. Because they had a goal! They had a ticket home! Okay, it was kind of a flimsy ticket, all they had was the words of a dying, evil madman, but it was something to work towards. It was a clear goal. And Marines tended to work way better with a clear, concise goal in mind. Or at least that had been his experience thus far.

"Oh, shit!" Jennifer cried.

She was ahead of him and looking up as they pounded down the metal staircase. He followed her gaze and echoed her sentiment.

"Oh, shit!"

More spiders were coming at them, they were descending rapidly from the ceiling on thick strands of webbing.

"Go, go! Run! Don't waste ammo!" Green called.

They ran and soon found themselves leaping down entire flights, landing with heavy grunts and then repeating the process. The spiders issued those awful growls as they drew closer. Eternity passed and they finally managed to hit the ground floor again. As soon as they were out, back into the main corridor, Green hit the close button.

"Keep going!" she called. "We've got to find a ship!"

Jack knew she was right. He kept running, not letting himself rest even for a second, and hit the first door that was available. Hitting the open button, he looked inside, sweeping the vast hangar beyond with his gaze in a tight arc.

"Empty!" he called. There was nothing there but scattered crates and a lot of webbing. No ships, not even a land vehicle.

They ran on, hitting the second and third hangars, and finding them in similar condition. Apparently, fourth time was the charm. Jack stepped through the door, SMG raised, as he spied a ship. He had no idea what condition it was in, beyond the fact that the exterior seemed relatively intact and it wasn't obviously broken.

"Ship!" he called out.

The others hurried in behind him and they closed the door. All became still and silent. Suddenly, Jack's good cheer leeched away. Something was wrong here. The hangar was vast and dark. It felt like a mausoleum. The webbing was thick around here, but he could see no movement among the shadows, could hear no growls or the tick of bony legs as they scurried across metal deckplates. But there was definitely something here.

"Secure the area," Green said quietly.

They spread out. There were a great deal of crates around, a lot of them stacked up high in haphazard piles. There were parts and tools scattered everywhere among other debris. Jack moved away from the ship, to the right side of the hangar, with Jennifer. Green and Stratton took the left and Jenkins moved slowly towards the vessel itself. Jack kept his SMG ready, flashlight on to help push back the gloom.

Nothing around him but crates and more crates, and evidence of battle. He glanced at Jennifer, who returned his nervous gaze. She could sense it, too. They all could. Death was lurking somewhere nearby, watching them from the shadows.

Jack heard a faint creak of metal, like something huge shifting, somewhere behind him, and turned around, looking for the source of the sound. That's about the time he saw Jenkins slowly backing away from the ship.

"Uh...guys?" he asked, his voice breaking.

Green and Stratton hurried back to see what was happening, reappearing from their own crate maze. A piece of metal debris, long and slender, was hovering in the air, following Jenkins slowly away from the ship.

After everything that had happened, after all the surprises and terrors and impossibilities, Jack had to admit that he was not ready for this. His mind tried frantically to piece together some reason, some explanation for what he saw before him. Could it be a Spectre holding it aloft? But no, that didn't make sense. Besides the fact that he couldn't see the faint shimmering effect of one, nor the fact that it didn't stand to reason that this was something a Spectre could do, it was being held too perfectly, too rigidly, and advancing too steadily.

That same creak of metal came again, and this time he saw it was the ship that had shifted slightly. For a second, his gaze snapped up.

A second was all it took.

"OH GOD!" he screamed in raw, unabashed terror.

He saw it. He saw it plain as day and had no idea how he could have missed it when he'd turned around. It should have been the most obvious thing in the universe. He had thought of those growling spiders they'd faced as giant spiders, but now he knew he was sorely mistaken. This was a giant spider...except that it wasn't a spider, not exactly. He could clearly see what appeared to be a milky white female torso sprouting from a base where eight legs grew from as well. Coming out the back was the rest of the body, what looked to be a big, bulky back end, like that of a tarantula. Jack's terrified mind could come up with what it was called.

She stared down at them with a constellation of eyes as black as polished obsidian. And she knew that they had spotted her.

The horrible beast had been holding her arms up. Suddenly, she thrust them forward. Down below, the rod-shaped piece of debris that had been hovering abruptly shot forward. Jenkins screamed, though only briefly, as the debris penetrated his helmet and skull, shattering his visor. He dropped to the floor in a crumpled heap of armored limbs.

"JENKINS!" Jack heard himself scream as he opened fire, hosing the spider-woman thing down with SMG fire. The others screamed as well and joined him. The giant spider issued a shrieking roar of rage and suddenly hopped off the ship, making the whole thing shudder. It, not she, it was a monster, a creature, a demon, landed with an earth-shattering crash in a large open space in front of the ship. Twisted bits of metal flew everywhere. The enormous, sickly white spider-woman seemed to absorb the gunfire.

Jack's SMG clicked empty. The others' weapons were empty as well.

Still the beast stood.

It gestured with one hand and a crate rose up, then smashed into Jack, sending him flying. He grunted in pain as he hit the floor, bounced, hit the floor again and slammed into a stack of crates. His world became a chaotic mess of rending metal and crashing crates. Struggling to get out from beneath the crates, his mind worked furiously to figure out how to deal with this thing. Except that he knew that his options had been reduced to a singular course of action. Jack shoved a crate off of him and surged to his feet.

"Get it away from the ship!" he screamed as he groped for his rocket launcher. He knew he'd saved it for something.

Except that he couldn't seem to reach it.

"Shit!" he screamed as he realized it was missing. "Get it away from the ship! Keep it busy! I can kill it!"

He didn't know if the others had heard him, or even their condition. All he knew right now was that he needed to find his damned rocket launcher or none of them were going to live. He turned around, searching frantically for his missing weapon. There were crates and debris everywhere. He began violently shoving them aside. His faceplate was cracked worse now, making the job that much harder and more irritating. Behind him, Jack could hear the others screaming, gunfire, the crash of something being thrown every now and then, and the high-pitched shrieking of the spider monster. Where the hell was it!?

"There!" Jack whispered, seeing the tube sticking out from beneath one of the crates. He flipped the crate over and snatched up the launcher.

Turning around, he saw that they'd led the monster away from the ship. This needed to be over, now. Jack sighted the launcher, mounting it on his shoulder. He saw that his HUD linked automatically with the digital zoom scope, so that was nice. Aiming, he primed the weapon, activated the red laser and played it over the thing's huge body.

"Get clear!" Jack screamed.

As soon as the others dove out of the way, he squeezed the trigger. The huge spider queen turned around, perhaps sensing the threat at the last second, and managed to line up its face directly with the path of the rocket.

The explosion was spectacular.

The creature disappeared in a red-orange fireball and a plume of gray gore. Flaming bits of it rained down over the entire hangar bay. All fell still and silent. Jack slowly lowered the still-smoking rocket launcher. He didn't know what to say, or do, or think even. He felt...empty. Mute. Like all of his thoughts had just been kicked out of his brain and it would take awhile to gather them again. Movement, up ahead.

He saw Jennifer emerging from behind a stack of silver crates and clung to the first thought that popped into his mind upon seeing her: check and see if she's okay. Automatically, he slung the launcher and started walking, crossing the hangar towards her, his boots echoing loudly on the deckplates. As he approached, Green and Stratton emerged.

"Are you okay?" he asked quietly.

Jennifer looked over at him. She seemed as dazed and shell-shocked as he felt. Slowly, she nodded. "Yeah, I'm fine...you?"

"I'm okay," he replied.

Then he looked over and down at Jenkins's corpse. He'd basically been decapitated by the attack. Now he was just another dead body, another headless corpse, among the dozens, the hundreds that populated Deimos Base. He'd been reduced to an object. Jack shook his head slowly. He felt anger begin to rise in him, but it didn't get far. He was simply too tired. But he wouldn't let Jenkins become just another body…

Except, what could he do?

What could he do, beyond remember him?

Nothing rose to the surface of his mind and he felt a little bit like crying. But like the anger, it was subdued, pallid and mute.

"We...we should check the ship," Green said finally.

They had gathered in the area where the spider queen had been killed. Jack followed her gaze to the ship, their ticket home.

He nodded. "Yeah, we should do that. See what condition it's in." It was a dumb, obvious thing to say, but saying it helped ground him back to reality. While Green and Stratton headed for the ship, which wasn't so much a ship as it was a little transport vehicle, the kind they'd ridden up to Phobos in all those hours ago, (hours that felt like years now), he turned back to Jenkins's body. A little voice in his head, persistent and flat, told him that the man wouldn't be using his ammo anymore, and Jack didn't have any for himself.

He forced himself to search the body, his hands slowly, methodically going through the pockets of his security armor. He came up with some shotgun shells and a few magazines for his pistol. "Thanks," Jack said softly as he stood back up. He paused, then said, "I'm sorry." It seemed like the most appropriate thing to say.

He turned and saw Jennifer lingering, halfway between him and the ship. She was looking at him. He moved to join her.

"I'm sorry he didn't make it," she said quietly as they joined Green and Stratton at the ship.

"So am I," he muttered.

They walked to the ship and set to work trying to figure out how functional it was. Nearly half an hour passed as they determined this. Jack slowly came back to himself, the work helping ground him again. The ship was in surprisingly good shape. It had some wear and tear, and its power cells would have to be swapped, but otherwise, it was actually flyable. Once they'd determined this, they gathered in the main bay of the vessel.

"Okay, so," Green began, "we should search the area for supplies and replace the power cells. Then we can fire it up and-"

"Sergeant Green," Jack said. She looked over at him. "I'm sorry, but...I need a break. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm almost literally dead on my feet. I'm not going to be any use until I get some sleep and a meal."

She looked like she was going to argue, but then she glanced over at Jennifer, then at Stratton. She sighed. "You're right," she said quietly. "We need a rest. We have no idea what's down below. Well, Stratton and I have something of an idea, and we're going to need to be up to par if we're going to take this on."

"How long can we afford to stay?" Stratton asked.

"The only timeline we're working against, at least that I know, is the nuke plant," Jennifer said. "I might have been exaggerating a little with the nuclear plant when I said we only had a few hours. We should probably be safe for a day or so, and I mean, that's even considering something goes wrong. Which, given our luck lately..."

"We'll risk it," Jack said. "We don't have much choice. If we're going into Hell, I want to be rested and fed."

"And showered," Stratton said.

"Yeah, that too," Jack murmured. "I guess we should get to it. We'll have to secure the area, inventory our supplies, figure out shifts..."

"Then let's get to it," Green said, and began trudging off out of the hangar.

It took close to two hours to prep the area. They locked up the ship and Green managed to key its alarm system to her armor, so it would warn them if anything even approached it. They moved back to the area beneath the control tower, not the most desirable place, but it was surprisingly clear of corpses and blood.

And monsters.

They were paranoid of the littler spiders, but didn't see them anywhere. When Jack finally probed the vents, he found several of them inside, and they were dead. The best he could figure was that they were being controlled somehow by the queen. And given that she was now in several hundred charred bits, they must have died. Sucked to be them, but great for him and the others. Once they were secure, they picked over the supplies. That's what took the most time, since they did a quick sweep of the whole entire structure.

It was disheartening.

It seemed as if the forces of evil had done a pretty good job picking the place over. They hardly found more than a half-dozen magazines of ammo, a little bit of medical supplies and, thankfully, some good stores of food and drink. Once that was finished, they secured a corridor that led to a break room and a bathroom/shower area. They were too paranoid to completely let their guard down, and ended up doing everything in shifts.

Jack and Jennifer managed to track down more uniforms and headed into the shower room while Green and Stratton sat outside it and ate. The two of them stripped down and got into the shower. They took awhile to patch each other up, then wash up, and then, despite the fact that he didn't think he'd be able to, given all that had happened, he and Jennifer had a frantic, short-lived lovemaking session. When it was over, they dried off and dressed in the new uniforms. Jack felt renewed and refreshed as he laced up the boots, though it wasn't the same boost he'd received the last time he'd managed to do this on Phobos Base.

As soon as they were out, Green and Stratton went in and had their own shower. Jack and Jennifer grabbed whatever food and drink they could find from the break room, sat outside the shower area and ate, standing guard.

And, judging by the sounds coming from the shower area, it seemed that Green and Stratton had a similar relationship to him and Jennifer.

Once they were finished, Jack and Jennifer ended up going to sleep first, passing out on some cots they'd ended up pulling into the break room. Almost the second he laid his head down, he passed out. Mercifully, there were no dreams, though he woke up what felt like a few seconds later with feelings of intense but uncertain fear and anxiety.

Green was waking him up with a hand on his shoulder.

"How long was I out?" he asked, rubbing his eyes.

"Six hours," she replied.

It felt like too long, and it felt like nowhere near enough. He yawned and rubbed at his eyes as he got up, Jennifer doing much of the same.

"Your turn," he said as he got up.

Green and Stratton laid down and immediately fell asleep. As they watched over them, sitting in some only somewhat comfortable chairs, Jack couldn't help but think about all the people they'd lost getting here. He'd pretty much gotten Stanmore killed, and then having to watch his team die one by one to the unrelenting hordes of hell. Blackmore, Baker, Peterson, Thompson, McGee...and now Jenkins. He and Jennifer were the only two left of their squad now. And now, they were the only four people left on this whole moon.

He wondered if there were any survivors in Hell.

He and Jennifer said little as they waited for the six hours to pass. They both took the time to strip down their weapons, clean them, and put them back together. They also did what they could to patch up their armor…thought it was in pretty bad shape after all that had happened. Even Combat Armor could only stand up to so much abuse and punishment. Jack and Jennifer would start up conversation every now and then, but it often trailed off, as they both had too much on their minds. When the six hours were up, they woke the others.

Once they were up and back in their armor, the quartet of hell-stricken survivors got onboard the troop transport and fired it up.

The airlock doors opened onto a landscape of hell-lit horror.

And they began their descent into Hell.