EPISODE TWO
–THE SHORES OF HELL–

Staff Sergeant Kyra Morgan opened her eyes to a world of bleak gray pain.

For several seconds, she felt nothing but that pain. She knew nothing but pain. She had absolutely no idea where she was and icy black fear infected her body like a toxin. She blinked several times. Something was wrong, that much was obvious. But...where the fuck was she? She tried to move and fear began to morph into panic as she realized she was in a confined space with hardly any real room for movement.

Kyra jerked violently, then did so again, and pain flared as she hit her forearm against something hard and unyielding. That made her at least stop moving for a few seconds, which was enough time for training to kick down her mental doors and at least temporarily subdue her fear and confusion. It made room for logic and rationality.

Reason the situation out.

Closing her eyes, Kyra took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

When she opened her eyes again, everything seemed to be sharper, the world coming to her with a hard clarity.

She was behind glass.

No, she realized, she was behind two panes of glass. One was in front of her face, a faceplate, a helmet. The second was about a foot and a half ahead of her. It was cracked, though the crack didn't look terribly bad. Beyond that...what appeared to be miles and miles of ashy gray rock. Though in the distance she thought she could see maybe some kind of reddish-brown mountains. Where the hell was she? Where had she been?

Where was the ship for that matter!?

That thought knocked loose several others. Realization came down hard on her: she was inside of an escape pod. Kyra blinked a few more times and slowly looked around the interior of the small thing she was in, confirming that it was, in fact, an escape pod. Okay, so, something had gone wrong. A fresh burst of pain assaulted her skull and Kyra winced. She wanted to reach up and gently probe the place that hurt, sure that she was bleeding, but she was in a fully contained atmospheric suit. Why didn't she remember putting that on?

Her memories were foggy at best, and for now, she put her attempts to excavate them aside. Right now, she was in an escape pod with limited power and oxygen. Unsurprisingly, the UAC had skimped on the pods. So that meant she had to pray that somehow, someway, she had landed somewhere not far from a place with heat and power and atmosphere. This place looked pretty grim, wherever it was. She shifted around and managed to get the straps holding her in place undone with some careful maneuvering.

Now somewhat more free to move about, she twisted to the right and found a small screen mounted on the wall. It was intact. Working as fast as she could, she used the pod's limited abilities to scan the immediate area, looking for signs of life and power signatures. While that was running, she typed at the little wristpad mounted on her suit and ran a check of it. Obviously, she was going to have to leave this pod at some point and there didn't seem to be very much of an atmosphere out there. What sky there was looked very thin.

Both checks came back at about the same time and delivered a little bit of good news. The suit itself was intact and she had about an hours' worth of oxygen. The scan from the pod confirmed that the area was totally lifeless for a quarter mile, which was the pod's maximum scanning range. However, it did bring back a single hit: there was a weak energy signature a little less than a quarter mile behind her.

"Well, great," she whispered, then winced as another bolt of pain hit her.

It was time to get moving.

Before cracking the seal, Kyra took a moment to, as thoroughly as she could, search the escape pod. It didn't have anything of any real value in it. Weren't these things at least supposed to come with a damned Medikit? At least a StimPack? Kyra sighed and, pushing aside her mounting frustration with the situation, broke the seals.

The front door of the pod cracked open, and immediately the atmosphere inside of it vented and bled away into the significantly lighter atmosphere beyond. As she stepped out, Kyra's hand fell automatically to her hip, where her pistol should have been. Except it wasn't there. Sighing, she took a moment to check all her pockets, but there was nothing. All she had was her uniform and this suit. A nice start, she supposed.

But she felt naked without a weapon.

Kyra turned around and suddenly had an answer.

"Oh," she said quietly, staring up into the sky.

Jupiter hung there before her. She could even see the Great Red Spot. "Well, that answers that question," she muttered, then frowned. Well, sort of. She was on a moon of Jupiter. If she had to guess, either Europa or Io. Well, that was a half-decent start, she supposed, and then refocused her efforts. Had to get to that energy source. It was probably another pod. Maybe it had someone inside of it that knew more than she did.

As she set off, marching across the grim surface of the moon, Kyra began to remember.

Kyra Morgan was a Marine, and damned proud to be one.

Which was why it was so humiliating that she was a Space Marine, little more than a rent-a-cop for the goddamned Union Aerospace Corporation. But it was the only way she had been able to not only stay a Marine, but maintain her rank. After what had happened...well, she was honestly lucky that they hadn't court-martialed her ass.

But that was all behind her now. Or so she kept telling herself. No, her lot in life was the UAC and working these crap jobs they gave her until she asked enough times to be part of the real goddamned Corps again and get rotated back to Earth. She supposed, Kyra figured miserably as she stalked across the dead surface of wherever the hell she was, that she should be happy. It could be a lot worse. Okay, well, right now was pretty bad, but in a big-picture kind of way. She could be out fighting the enemies of her corporate masters…

Instead of the enemies of her political masters.

At least the politicians still pretended like they cared.

Kyra sighed. No, they really didn't. Not anymore. If they ever had. What was that quote she'd heard about war? War is the young and stupid killing each other at the bidding of the old and bitter, or something like that. How miserably true, and it was only getting worse. That was part of the appeal of her job out here, though.

It was...peaceful.

As much as Kyra wasn't a peaceful woman and preferred to be knee-deep in the shit with the other grunts, there was a certain aspect to the peace and quiet of outer space that she hadn't expected to find. Up ahead, a shape began to resolve. She paused, studying it, and realized that she was looking at a land rover of some kind.

Okay, so...that was a good sign, right?

It was a sign of life. A land rover wouldn't be out here if there wasn't some kind of outpost or structure. They weren't carrying any kind of vehicles like this on the ship she'd been serving on. The...the...the fact that she couldn't recall its name freaked her out. Kyra struggled to recall it for a few more seconds, then gave it up in a frustrated burst of anger. She let out an annoyed huff and her visor fogged up briefly.

As she stalked across the surface of whatever moon she was on, the name suddenly came back to her. The UAC Icarus.

Of course.

What a fine name for a ship.

It wasn't like it was asking for trouble or anything. Kyra didn't think of herself as a particularly spiritual or superstitious person, but she learned you ignored your instincts at your own peril. Especially as a warrior on a battlefield. She might have left the battlefield, but her instincts hadn't left her. Something had felt off ever since signing up with the UAC. At first she'd chalked it up to just hating having a corporate overlord, but as time wore on, she thought it was something else. As if some dark shadow hung over everything the UAC did.

She'd sure heard enough shady rumors in her time.

Kyra's instincts immediately jerked, like a seismograph sensing a powerful but unseen tremor deep in the earth, as she made the final approach on the land rover and got a good look at the driver's side window. It was cracked, and there was definitely blood all along the interior. Not a good sign. She hurried forward and almost yanked the door open, but that would depressurize the cabin. It was standard protocol to be wearing a suit inside of a vehicle like this, but she didn't know the situation, the circumstances.

She spied a dark figure beyond the bloodied glass and knocked on the window, and almost called out to them.

But they probably wouldn't hear her, not with this thin an atmosphere and this much glass between them. She knocked again, harder, but the dark figure remained unmoving. Sighing, she moved around to the front of the vehicle, to look in through the windshield. As soon as she did, she knew why the figure wasn't responding or moving, and knew that whoever he'd been, the guy never would be moving again.

He was dead.

He didn't have a helmet on, though he had on a suit. There was a gunshot wound in his head, a bloody crater. Yes, this was definitely a very bad situation. Kyra looked around, wincing slightly as a roll of pain began through her own head once again. She remained alone, for now. Moving over to the driver's side door, she yanked on it. It opened up and the body tumbled out. There was a pistol still clutched in the dead man's hand. Kyra glanced inside the cabin and saw that it was otherwise unoccupied.

"What the fuck is going on here?" she whispered as she knelt and pried the pistol out of the death grip. In the end, she had to snap two of the man's fingers. She checked the magazine quickly and saw that it was nearly topped off. Apparently he'd just spent the one bullet capping himself. What in the hell for? She was tempted to write it off as a simple suicide, it was known to happen. Not something that the UAC or anyone who had interests out in space liked to talk about, but stir crazy and cabin fever took on a whole new meaning when you were forced to stay inside of a vessel or station or outpost and there was nothing but death waiting for you outside of every airlock, beyond every window and every bulkhead.

But as she began to pat him down for supplies, (an automatic reaction to seeing corpses in unknown or combat situations at this point), she started to see telltales of some kind of combat. She recognized his suit, the blue jumpsuit of a technician, and a UAC technician at that, given the emblem on his chest. The suit was ripped in a few places, and burned in a few others, and it looked like someone had taken a shot at him and had a near miss with his shoulder. What in the fuck had happened?

She managed to find another magazine for the pistol in his pockets, but nothing else. With a sigh, she stepped over his corpse and got into the rover, then slammed the door shut and studied the interior, hunting for anything useful. Her mind kept trying to reboot, like an old engine trying to turn over, as she hunted through the compartments, the dashboard, under and behind the seat, but it just couldn't seem to catch.

Her brain felt like pulling the trigger on a gun that was out of ammo.

After her search turned up nothing worthwhile, she turned her attention to the dashboard. It was sprayed with a bit of blood, but intact. There was a screen built into it and it displayed what little information was currently available. The first thing she noticed was that the rover was on reserve power now, and it wouldn't last much longer. Whatever she did, it would have to be fast. She set to work, first pushing the rover's scanners as far as they could go, again hunting for signs of life or power signals.

As it was completing this task, she saw a radio beside the screen and a bolt of fear shot through her. Communications. Why hadn't she thought of that? That should have been right there at the forefront of her brain from the second she woke up. Had that knock to the head done some serious damage?

How was that for fucking terrifying?

The situation itself was already bad enough, but if she couldn't trust herself? Her own damned head? She grabbed the radio and took a moment to turn it on, then patch it into her suit, since it came with a basic comms suite.

"This is Staff Sergeant Kyra Morgan of the United Marine Corps to anyone, over," she said, and waited, listened.

There was nothing.

"I repeat, this is Staff Sergeant Kyra Morgan of the United Marine Corps to anyone. If you are receiving this transmission, respond immediately, over."

Still nothing but dead air.

"Shit," she whispered, putting it back.

A flash of light from the screen made her jump. She realized that her scan had come back. This time there were still no life signs, but there were three more energy signatures. Two of them were very faint, but one was a lot stronger. It had to be a structure, though probably not a very big one. "Perfect," she whispered.

Just as she was beginning to even consider starting up the rover and maybe seeing how far she could drive it, the lights suddenly died and everything went dark. "Yeah, perfect," she muttered and left the rover.

She stared down at the body she'd pulled from the cabin for a moment. No nametag. Reaching down after a bit of deliberation, Kyra picked him up, put him back in the front seat, and then slammed the door shut.

It was as close as she was going to get to a funeral. She took a moment to check the rear of the rover, where she found a small cargo compartment. There was supposed to be emergency supplies stashed back there, chief among them oxygen tanks, but there was nothing, and whatever oxygen might have been in the cabin had vented, and she didn't have the time or the tools to tap into whatever reserves might possibly be left, hidden somewhere in the frame of the vehicle. So she left the rover behind.

The way the power signals were coming from had a rise in the land between her and them.

She walked up it, continuing to try and piece together how she'd ended up here.

Then she crested the rise, and stopped for a few seconds, simply staring. There was a vast expanse, a huge plain waiting for her. She saw the two power signatures: escape pods, like hers. She saw the larger power signal: a building, as she'd suspected, and not a very big one. But it was what lay beyond that that caught her attention.

More structures, bigger ones, in the far distance.

And, much farther than that: the wrecked, smoldering remains of the Icarus.

"Fuck today," she growled, then set off down the other side of the rise.