Jack was beginning to wonder if he was actually approaching his limit.
When he'd been going through Basic training, he had reached it. More than once. That was kind of the point. You get to know yourself, how far is too far, where your threshold lies, so that you can push yourself, move beyond it. And that taught you to keep pushing yourself, to keep expanding your limit, so that you could triumph in crazier and crazier situations. And God knew that the world had enough of those nowadays.
But this…
This was beyond the pale of anything anyone had ever realistically expected. This was beyond the lunatic fringe.
But Jack did have a hard limit, a point at which his body or his mind would just...give out. Either one of them or both of them would simply have enough. Honestly, he was amazed that he was still going as strong and as focused as he was. But his hands were shaking from time to time, his vision was going blurry every now and then, and his mind was starting to wander. These were all signs that he was headed towards a death sentence, because a split second often made all the difference in life or death situations.
And that went like...quadruple here.
He needed another break, his body was breaking down, but there was just no time. He never thought he'd find himself missing the boring routine his life was settling into when he'd first arrived at Mars City. Hell, even Phobos seemed fairly decent compared to everything that had come after it. But at least he still had Jennifer, he thought, looking over at her as they stalked through the bloody, chromed corridors of the ruined city. And he had backup. Real Marines. They had a fighting chance to put an end to this.
Well, sort of.
More like, they had a half-assed maybe that might work.
"Hey McNeil, where did you see action?" Jack asked suddenly, wanting to be talking about something, anything really.
"All over," the Corporal replied. "Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Estonia. Fought briefly in that campaign for Antarctica."
"Oh shit, you were down there?" Jennifer asked. "I remember hearing about that. It was like a media frenzy for about two months. I never actually figured out what the hell was going on with all that," she added.
"There was this treaty signed back in the nineteen fifties basically stating that Antarctica would only ever be used for scientific research. Slowly, more and more countries signed the treaty, and those that didn't basically adhered to it anyway. By twenty one ten, pretty much everyone had signed. The thing is, there's a lot of oil under Antarctica. That scientific treaty stopped anyone from drilling. Well...some countries started getting desperate. And then there were talks about revising the treaty, as there were still some countries that really relied on oil and natural gas and such. And in the midst of these treaties, basically, a small army was discovered trying to set up a quick and dirty mining operation and everything kind of went crazy for a little bit. The conflict lasted like three months, I was only there for a week before I got rotated out, but man it was so fucking cold down there. Crazy fighting, too. Miserable place to fight," he replied.
"It really sounds like it," Jack said.
"Doesn't hold a fucking candle to this place, though," McNeil muttered. "What about you, Pavel? Where'd you fight?"
"Russia, a lot. Syberia, mostly. Japan, during that two week conflict with the Brazilian transplants. Bosnia. Did a quick stint in Ecuador on loan from the Russian government," he replied.
"Oh shit. Russia. How's that civil war going?" Jennifer asked.
"Dunno, really. Stopped keeping up with it. Last I'd heard, and this was a year ago, the new government was winning. But it changed all the time." He shrugged.
Something growled up ahead, the sound echoing to them down the battered length of the corridor stretched out before them. Jack tightened his grip on the shotgun and felt that familiar adrenaline surge. Battle was near. They weren't too far from that first generator now. He hoped the other team was having good luck. The quartet reached the end of the corridor, which opened into a transition room with several doors.
"Through there," Jack said, indicating the first door on the right.
There was another growl, this one deeper, closer. As Jack stepped into the next room, he froze, listened, waited. The room was long, low, and dark. The central space was a natural alcove created between large pieces of dark-metaled machinery. Steam hissed from overhead pipes. Jack sighed quietly.
What a lovely fucking place to spend his time.
"It's here?" Jennifer groaned.
"Yeah. Should be in the back of the room," Jack replied.
He took point, moving very slowly, taking care to check the niches all around him: both sides and even the ceiling. He had the flashlight mounted on his shotgun activated, the pale beam illuminated the nest of shadows surrounding them. Bit by bit, they revealed nothing but dark metal niches between the machinery, and occasionally a chewed corpse surrounded by a lot of blood. Jack could no longer hear any other sounds beyond that of himself and his own team, and the machinery surrounding him. Definitely not a good sign.
They inched down the corridor, seconds ticking by, becoming minutes, until finally they reached the end of it, coming to a T-junction. The right had a door and the left terminated in a wall. They continued down the right side and finally found their auxiliary generator, through the door, in its own room.
Jack started to head forward. "Okay-"
The floor abruptly gave out beneath him and he screamed in shock as he free fell for a split second and crashed onto something hard and twitching. He heard a wild shriek and several surprised hisses and was violently thrown off of the Imp he was sure he'd landed on. "Fuck!" he snapped as he raised his shotgun and fired almost blindly. The shell clipped the Imp nearest to him as it tried to get back on its feet, hitting its neck and sending it stumbling in a spray of blood. He adjusted the barrel, cocked the gun, fired again.
This one blew a good portion of its skull off.
All around him, the area began to light up with a hellish orange-red glow. He could just barely make out the inhuman faces of perhaps a dozen Imps surrounding him, and started firing while simultaneously trying to get back to his feet.
"Hold on!" He heard a heavy clang and suddenly a shaft of light appeared, further illuminating the area. Jack opened fire, putting a shell squarely into the open mouth of an Imp across the room as they all began hurling their fireballs. He managed to dodge most of them, firing back, but a few smacked painfully into his armor, the heat transferring through the thick material. Though it was nowhere near as bad as the Baron of Hell attacks. He emptied the shotgun as someone overhead rained down death from above, and together, they killed the Imps.
"You okay down there, babe?" Jennifer asked.
"Just fine," he replied, then groaned quietly as a wave of hurt rolled through him. The armor was tough enough that a ten foot drop like this shouldn't've done much more than rattle him. But his body had already been put through the wringer. "Get the generator working," he said, popping his neck slowly. "I'll make sure there's nothing else down here."
"Let me know if you need any help," Jennifer replied.
"Believe me, I will."
The lower section, really just an extension of the area above, housing more mysterious machinery doing whatever it did to keep Mars City on life support, wasn't all that big. He checked out all the shadowy niches and natural alcoves between the darkly humming equipment, and found nothing. Finally, he located a ladder that led to a hatch. Opening it, he found it let out in the generator room. By the time he was up and out, they had it on.
"It's working?" Jack asked.
"Yep, fully powered and switched on. We're solid," McNeil replied.
"Okay, see how the other team's doing," he said as they began backtracking. Jack had taken some time to study the information Fielding had passed to them. He had a rough idea of how to get to both the other generator, in case of emergency, and the mainframe room where the coordinates to the Warrens were being kept. As they made their way back across the area, he heard McNeil curse and stopped, turning around.
"What?" he asked.
"They're under attack, need help at the second generator," he replied.
"Shit," Jack snapped, turning on his heel and taking off in another direction. "Let's go!"
The four of them raced down a large corridor littered with crates and bodies and more of those damned toxic waste barrels. A few of them had tipped and spilled, and he had to jump over those, not wanting to step in the awful, glowing green crap. He thought he'd left all those things back up on the moons, but evidently not.
A Z-Sec zombie raced around the corner at the end of the hallway. Cursing sharply, Jack raised the shotgun and fired, putting a slug shell through its black visor and putting it down. He sprinted on, not even stopping, knowing that every second he wasted here, it put someone else's life at risk. Another Z-Sec stepped out and he didn't even get a chance to put it down, as a spray of SMG fire came from behind him and took the thing in the helmet, killing it. Jack jumped over the body, hit a crossroads, and broke left.
A Demon was waiting for him at the other end, and as soon as it caught sight of him the big, stupid monster began stomping towards him, roaring hungrily. Jack fed it three shells and watched the back of its head blow out in a spray of dark, pulpy gore. He blew past it before it even hit the deckplates. Jack began to hear gunfire and shouting, and knew they were close. Those two sounds were ones that he was intimately familiar with, but they'd been seemingly nonstop since he hit Phobos. At last, they came to the second generator room.
This one was a bit more open and better lit, a large, low rectangle of a room with several points of entry. Jack spied a few things as he blew away a pair of zombies on the way: there were two survivors, duking it out with a living wave of Demons, Imps, and zombies, and there was a fresh corpse on the floor. Another casualty on their side.
"On your six!" he roared, emptying his shotgun once again, taking down two more Imps with a neck shot and a chest shot, then he was letting the weapon hang and grabbing his SMG. He took up position next to one of the Space Marines, who looked just the same as they all did in that moment: a grim, bloodied figure cast in heavy green enviro-armor. That's what they all were, right now. Probably what they would be for some time to come.
Jack wondered if he could ever hope to have any kind of normal life after this.
He very much doubted it.
The sound of gunfire, of SMGs rattling and shotguns booming, filled the air, fighting for dominance with the hissing shrieks of the Imps, the groans and shouts of the zombies, and the roaring of the Demons as they pressed into the room and were met with red hot lead. Jack emptied his SMG, slapped a fresh magazine in, emptied it again. As he reloaded a second time, the last Demon fell and there was silence.
One of the other Marines that they had rescued was the first to speak. "Fisk is dead." A woman's voice, numb and miserable.
"Fuckin' Christ. Fucking demon shits," the other Marine snarled. He walked over to a relatively intact Imp corpse and fired a slug shell directly into its head, obliterating it. "You want some more!?" he roared, then kicked the corpse.
"Quit wasting ammo, Williams!" McNeil snapped. "Get your head in the game." He turned to look at the other Marine, the woman. Her nametag read PFC Miller, G. "Miller, are you or Williams injured?" he asked.
"Negative," Miller replied quietly.
"I'm fine," Williams groused.
"Fine. Ward, let's find the generator. Everyone else, field search, gather up whatever ammo you can from these dicks," McNeil said.
There was a general round of affirmative responses, and they got to work. Five minutes passed in relative silence. Jack and McNeil managed to track down the generator. It was intact and functional, and they had it fired up immediately. They then locked the door to the small room it was in, hoping to keep it safe for long enough to do their thing. Jack suddenly wondered if they would be able to get back.
Well...there was a good chance this was a one-way trip anyway.
Jack reloaded his shotgun and took another eight shells for it and another two for the SMG, basically making the battle a zero sum game.
"Master Sergeant Kelly," he said, "we've turned on the two generators. Fisk is KIA. We're heading for the mainframe room. Over."
"Shit. We've been getting hit here again kind of hard. I'm going to need some backup if I'm going to keep this place secure. Over." He sounded on edge.
"Affirmative, Master Sergeant," McNeil said, glancing briefly at Jack, as though asking for permission to take over this particular part of the mission. Jack nodded his assent. McNeil knew these people better than he did. "I'm sending Miller and Pavel back to reinforce you. Ward, Taylor, Williams, and I will continue on. Over."
"Good. Thanks." A shotgun blast. "Out."
"Double time back to Marine HQ," McNeil said to Miller and Pavel.
"On it," Pavel replied. Miller just nodded tightly. The two of them hurried out of the room, back the way they'd come.
"Let's go," Jack said. And they headed off yet again into the chaos of Mars City.
"Okay, Fielding, we're at the mainframe room. What now? Over," Jack reported, looking around the large, messy, office-like area. There hadn't been too many demonic jerks on the way over, and he'd been grateful for that.
"You're going to want Mainframe B Seven. It should be in the far left corner. Find it, tell me its condition," Fielding replied.
Jack sighed and headed that way. There was something about the doctor that grated on him, but it was probably just his nerves, already rubbed raw and painful by everything else. And probably the fact that he would find it hard to trust scientists ever again after this. But that was stupid, even in his current state he could see that, one major fuck-up didn't mean they were all evil or incompetent. Really, it was the UAC's stupid-ass greed and impatience that had no doubt caused this catastrophe. Jack found the mainframe he was looking for.
"It's intact," he said. "No power, though."
He sighed. "Of course not...Corporal McNeil, would you head for the nearest terminal and grant me executive access to this room? This will go much smoother if I can handle this part of the operation," Fielding replied.
"Fine," McNeil replied, crossing the room and firing up one of the workstations. He spent a silent minute doing as requested. "Done."
"Perfect. Okay...shunting power to the mainframe...good, it's on and functional. Now I'm hooking into the internal communications network. Hmm. Okay, good. Damn, the network's in pretty shoddy condition. This might take a few minutes. I need you all to stay there and make sure nothing happens to that mainframe for the next...five minutes," Fielding reported.
"Fine," Jack replied.
He just fucking knew that meant that there was going to be a firefight. And, of course, he was right. Hardly sixty seconds later, there was a tremendous bang on a large silver door across the room. The squad quickly moved into position, taking cover behind some of the sturdier pieces of equipment in the room, though there wasn't a lot to work with. Another bang sounded, then a third. The door jumped off its tracks.
An enormous fist punched straight through the metal, then retreated. A pause, then a large, hideous, bloodshot eye stared through the hole. It disappeared, and whatever it was, (Jack figured it had to be a Baron), roared furiously. That's what the door basically flew open, physically detaching from the wall and landing heavily on the floor, crushing a few desks in the process. Indeed, a Baron of Hell stormed into the room.
And it had brought friends.
Behind it was a small army of Imps, backed up by some Lost Souls. Jack's stomach went cold. They hadn't dealt with Lost Souls in awhile. Fuck, his chaingun was dead, too. "Take down that big bastard!" Four barrages of bullets converged on the Baron of Hell as it roared and began hurling green balls of energy at them. Jack narrowly dodged one and then finished emptying his SMG into the thing, rattling through the rounds as fast as his gun would allow. The Baron of Hell began to look bloody and torn up within seconds.
He reloaded and put another half-magazine into it, and that toppled it. In fact, it crushed an Imp as it fell backwards. That was the good news. The bad news was that now the room was flooding with Imps and Lost Souls.
"Take out the flying skulls!" he called, and aimed for the little floating bastards. They were creepy as hell, that weird hissing shriek they made when they came for you. One was coming right at him. He aimed and fired, putting a slew of rounds into it and reducing it to so many free-flying bits of bleached bone. He ducked a fireball, finished off his magazine by putting down another Imp. He abandoned the SMG and pulled out the shotgun, since it was honestly tailored for this kind of work. He aimed, fired, aimed and fired.
Two more Lost Souls went down. Three. Four. An Imp that got too close for comfort. The demons had numbers, but the Marines had speed, training, and tenacity. Jack was almost positive that they were going to make it without a problem.
And then a Lost Soul slipped by them as his shotgun ran dry for the second time. No time to reload, he pulled out his pistol, turned, tracking it, and then screamed a warning. The Lost Soul was dive-bombing straight for Williams.
The poor bastard never stood a chance.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. Williams had been firing into an Imp, turned slowly at Jack's shouted warning, his helmet coming into direct line-of-sight with the screaming skull as it dove straight for him, and he began to scream, to move, but there was no time, and the Lost Soul went straight through his visor without so much as a crack. The man dropped his weapon, grabbed his helmet, ripped it off and threw it against the wall hard enough to shatter the glass faceplate. Began screaming. He dropped to his knees, hands on his head.
Jack began to steel himself to do what needed to be done as he watched blood begin to well up from beneath the man's squeezed-shut eyelids, begin to come out of his nose, his ears, his mouth. But a shotgun blast sounded and Williams's screams were ended abruptly, clipped off brutally by a slug shell that took half his head off. Jack turned to see McNeil's flat, flinty gaze on Williams's corpse, then he turned and fired again, popping an Imp's head. There was more work to be done, but not much. Jack helped McNeil and Jennifer mop up the rest.
"Okay, I've got it," Fielding said suddenly, after the curtain of silence that always seemed to descend after a frenzied battle fell. "Hello?"
"Fine, doc," Jack replied quietly. "What next?"
McNeil silently began to move forward, coming to Williams's body and crouching there. Started patting him down for ammo.
"The teleportation device is working. You're going to need to gather up whatever you can carry. I'm forwarding you the coordinates on the device. And one more thing: I've found a note here. The UAC had apparently feared something like this might happen, and about just a week ago, they secured a top-secret, experimental, ultimately powerful weapon in Hell. In the Halls of the Damned. I'm forwarding you the intel on that as well. They thought it might be useful against whatever mega-creature might be masterminding this invasion."
"Good. Great. Fine." He paused, called up Kelly. "Master Sergeant. We're ready to go. Williams is KIA. Over," he reported morosely.
"Aw, shit." Kelly heaved a long, lethargy-laced sigh. "Well, I guess this is it. All cards on the table time. It's obvious that it's this or nothing, so I'm sending everyone with you. Doctor Fielding and I will remain behind to try and coordinate with anyone that shows up, and wait for you to return, and maybe try to figure out some way to stop this if you fail. I'm loading up Lynch, Miller, Bennet, Pavel, and Jackson, and sending them all to meet you at the teleporter." Kelly paused for a long moment. "Get it done. And come back alive. Out."
Jack looked at Jennifer, at McNeil. They stared grimly back, their faces pale and gaunt, their eyes bloodshot, darkened, haunted.
Silently, the three of them began to head for the teleporter.
They didn't run into much trouble on the way to the teleporter. It seemed that the local forces of Hell had exhausted their immediate supply of living nightmares, which was fine by Jack. He felt like he could sleep for a thousand years.
The teleporter looked smaller, and much more...human, than either of the Anomalies or anything else they'd run into in Hell. Just a simple half-circle of metal sticking upright out of a silvery disc about twelve feet wide.
A flat, shifting curtain of some strange black energy gathered in its center.
Jack stared at each of the survivors, at Jennifer, at the remnants of Bravo Team. Mars City's, and possibly even humanity's, last line of defense. He wanted to say something, and they looked like they expected him to.
He couldn't think of anything.
In the end, he said, "See you on the other side," and stepped through the glowing portal, disappearing into a wall of seething darkness.