Kyra felt an intense wave of dread settle over her, nearly crushing in its enormity, as the tram settled into place. The airlock hummed and hissed, faintly audible beyond the glass-and-steel of the tram cart. She swallowed and tried to push the fear back down, running her hand down the barrel of the assault rifle she'd snagged. She wasn't sure what it was. The fact that she now felt confident that she was alone here, on this wretched place? Maybe. Garret, White, Banks...everyone from the Icarus was very likely dead.
And she was the last one standing.
Last human standing, that was. The airlock finished its cycle. The large doors in front of her opened up, revealing a sleeker, and bigger, receiving bay. This one looked more like it was meant to handle human cargo rather than the regular kind, and had the look of the place where all the money had gone. The lighting was better, anyway, although several of the bulbs were flickering. There was no reception committee waiting for her at least. Kyra kept sitting there in the driver's chamber even after the tram had settled into place and a maddeningly polite voice had informed her that she could depart whenever she liked.
She didn't want to leave the tram.
She didn't want to go into Research.
Kyra liked to think that she was brave. She wasn't fearless. Only morons were truly fearless, or people who honestly didn't care whether they lived or died. But she had spent a long time conquering her fear, dealing with it in its many forms. But this was something different. It was that same, pervasive feeling that had been with her, settled over her like an icy fog, from the moment she woke up on this godforsaken rock. It was at its most powerful here, in Research. She supposed the real problem was that she couldn't stop thinking about Henderson's last words.
"You're going to have to go through hell to get there..."
There was something just...wrong with what he had said. No, the way he had said it. Kyra could be a stickler about certain things: reading body language, reading between the lines, picking up on certain tones, the way people emphasized specific words.
Going through hell was a phrase people tended to use, and phrases were said a certain way. But Henderson hadn't been just using a phrase. He wasn't just telling her that she was going to have to endure a lot of suffering and hardship to get to her next destination. From the tone of his voice, the emphasis he'd placed on certain words…
It was like he was, as a matter of fact, telling her that she would have to actually go through Hell to get to where she needed to go.
As in, physically make a journey through Hell.
But what did that mean? Surely he couldn't be literally saying that. It was impossible. She'd looked through the dead man's PDA on the tram ride here, but most of it had been scrambled or erased in some kind of malfunction. Was Henderson cracking at the end? Lying maybe? But it didn't feel like a lie, nor did it seem like he was losing his mind. For the most part. Kyra wanted to keep sitting here in this tram, keep poking and prodding this conundrum she found herself in, because it was safe. Well, safer than leaving.
Probably.
Okay, it appeared to be safer than leaving the tram.
But none of that mattered. The only way Kyra was ever going to get back to anything approaching normal ever again was to keep going. Even if 'normal' was days away. Weeks. Months. Somehow, someway, she intended to get off this rock, get back to Earth. Right now, even the hellscape of a bloody battlefield in some third world, wartorn country seemed like a vacation compared to this. She'd take prison over this.
And so, finally, Kyra checked over her small arsenal one more time. Pistol. Shotgun. Taskmaster assault rifle. All in working order, all locked, loaded, and ready to kill. She pocketed the PDA, checked over her armor once more, then forced herself to walk back to the doors that would let her out. She stood before them, staring out onto the platform. Still nothing out there. Taking a deep breath and letting it out in a long sigh, she hit the access button and raised the assault rifle. It was time to do this. Time to take the next steps.
She made her way out onto the platform. This one didn't have black metal grating for a floor. It had real carpet, and the walls weren't riddled with the exposed guts of circuitry and motherboards, or access points to tucked away maintenance holes or little storage areas. No, this looked like an actual reception area.
Only the effect was lost by the death and destruction that had taken place here. There was blood, an excessive amount. The walls and terminals had been chewed by gunfire, what looked like a full-on assault of pistols and shotguns and rifles, maybe even a chaingun in there. And something had exploded in here at some point, one corner covered in soot and ash. At least security was taken more seriously here. There was a little kiosk in one corner. She checked it out, finding a handful of shells and another magazine for her rifle.
For once, she was feeling fully stocked. Her pockets bulged with shells and magazines. Like everywhere else, the workstation inside the security checkpoint had been gutted and butchered. She left it and wasted a few moments checking out the other doors in the area. One led to a storage room, two led to bathrooms. All empty. Kyra eventually found herself standing before the main entryway into the Research building.
It was now or never.
She had to walk into ground zero.
Kyra got the door that led into the next section open. She walked in with the assault rifle in hand, set to three-round burst, ready to go.
"All right fuckers, let's rock and roll," she growled.
Typhon Station accommodated her. She took in the room she'd come into with sweep of her gaze. It was good sized, with three more security centers, one to either side of her, tucked away into the corners, and a third in the exact middle of the room, almost like an info kiosk. Except in this case it was a kiosk that could kill you. There were big, sealed doors, bigger than bank vault doors, further in to either side of her, and from around the central kiosk she could make out a third door that was bigger than those two.
That had to be where she wanted to go.
There were a good dozen zombies milling around, and most of these had actual weapons. Two held shotguns and four more held pistols. Just what she needed. Kyra got things started off by popping one of the ugly fucker's heads with a three-round burst that split it in two. Old blood and brain matter sprayed on the air as the body dropped and the shotgun fell from its hands, hitting the floor and discharging, taking out the kneecap of another one.
A general roar went up as the other zombie bastards became aware of her presence. Fine by her. Kyra adjusted her aim, squeezed the trigger. Adjusted her aim, squeezed the trigger. Zombie heads snapped back in sprays of coagulated blood and skull fragments and brain matter, and they all crashed to the floor like puppets with their strings cut. Two of them returned fire on her. The first missed by a mile but the other came close. Too close. She took two steps forward, stuck the barrel of the rifle into its mouth and blew the back of its head open in fresh spray of pulpy gore. She planted her boot against its chest and sent its rotten corpse flying backwards into two others. They staggered, stumbled, hit the floor.
And stayed there when she put them down like the filthy freaks they were.
Breathing a bit faster now, Kyra quickly scoured the area for more bullets after ejecting the spent magazine and slapping a fresh one in. The zombies were ill-equipped. No surprise there. The security kiosks were emptied out. No surprises there, either. Nothing but bullet-scarred and blood splattered walls, and corpses, and broken screens. But the central kiosk still had a working terminal, and she fired it up and got in with Staff Sergeant's Burns's cracked PDA. Still not much in the scrambled databases, but there was enough left to give her what she wanted.
The way ahead, sure enough, led to Delta Lab.
That was the secret core of Typhon Station. The dark heart.
But it was locked down tight, and the only way to get it unlocked was to get into the hearts of the other two labs and hit the releases. Of course. Nothing was ever easy. But Kyra was in a mood to kill. To eliminate. To end. The first lab, to the right, Alpha Lab, was the way to go. Fine. She left the kiosk and jogged over to the big vault-like door, then punched the open button after unlocking it with the PDA. The door began a slow rise into the ceiling and Kyra stood before it, rifle in hand, ready to go. As the door finished raising up, she found herself staring at a small army of zombies and fiends. Perfect. She flipped the rifle to full auto, shouldered it, and began opening up on the bastards. She emptied the magazine, hosing them down, and listened to them scream.
The gun clicked empty at some point.
Without thinking, going on autopilot, she replaced the mag and emptied it, too. When that one was rattled clean through, there wasn't a single thing left standing in the broad, open area beyond the entryway. Kyra laughed and slapped another magazine in. Fiends and zombies littered the deckplates, awash in a pool of blood. It felt pretty good. These sick fucks had built up quite the tab, tearing ass through this place, killing everyone here, killing all her friends and comrades in arms. She fully intended to collect on that tab in blood.
Call it asshole tax.
Kyra strode through the big room, taking it all in. Most of the stuff she couldn't or didn't bother figuring out. A bunch of workstations, big pieces of equipment, glass chambers. But in the next room, she saw something that did register, and interested her greatly: a shooting range. She recognized that. What in the hell were they building over in Alpha Labs? Kyra paused in her hunt for that unlock switch and instead began looking around for whatever gun they were building here, because obviously this was no military area.
But she knew that the UAC was supposed to be cooking up some new guns for the United Marine Corps, part of their big contract. Maybe something good could come out of all this insane research. She hunted among the corpses of over a dozen maimed, dismembered, and bullet-riddled scientists, their white labcoats smeared red with blood, ripped and torn and burned. A few fiends were thrown in there as well, and even a pinky corpse in the corner. She finally found what she was looking for sealed away in a glass cylinder.
"What the fuck is this?" she whispered.
It was a gun, but the barrel was some kind of weird brightly polished accordion of metal, topped by a black square tip with a big bore. The handle was big and bulky, the whole thing was, actually. But what was it?
Well, only one way to find out.
Burns's PDA didn't break the seal, but Henderson's did.
The top half of the glass case rose up with a soft hiss. She let her rifle hang by its shoulder strap as she reached slowly into the case and laid her hands on the gun. She pulled it free of its mount and studied it.
There, stenciled on the side of the weapon, in tiny white lettering:
UAC-1
"PLASMA RIFLE"
Experimental
Iteration 3.1
"Plasma Rifle," she muttered. "Well, sure, why not?"
Kyra hefted the rifle. It was lighter than she thought it would be, but still pretty solid and sturdy. She spent a moment checking it over, trying to figure out if there was anything she should worry about. The safety was in the right place at least. She turned it off, twisted her lips in consideration, then finally turned and aimed the gun at a nearby fiend corpse. She gave the trigger a quick squeeze. The gun made a quick humming sound and a burst of blue-white light flashed into being as a ball of blue-white energy shot out and hit the corpse.
It burned a decent hole into the thing's back and left a nice scorch mark.
"Wow," she whispered. She was tempted to do it again, but who knew how much ammo this thing had, or how stable it was? Best to use it under more desperate circumstances, 'cause that made sense. Did anything on this fucking moon make sense? Although it didn't come with a shoulder strap, it had attachments for one, and after a bit of searching, she managed to find a discarded (and empty) shotgun that had one, so she make the necessary adjustments, then let the plasma rifle hang from her shoulder, keeping the assault rifle at the ready.
After checking over the rest of the lab to make sure she didn't miss anything else that might be particularly useful in her goal of escaping this place and murdering everything that wasn't human, (and maybe a few humans, if she ran into the monsters that let this happen), she found the release and punched it. The console turned green and offered up a happy chime, indicating that half the stupid lockdown on Delta Lab was raised. About facing, she marched back into the main room and undid the lock on Beta Lab.
As soon as the door slid open, Kyra felt a wave of absolute frozen dread roll through her. Definitely something wrong here. Something about the long corridor of austere white tiling that set her on edge. It probably didn't help that there was a lot of blood smeared on the walls. It reminded her of a hospital or infirmary, and those were never good in her mind. Nonetheless, she pressed on, slowly traversing the lengthy white-tiled tunnel. There were several doors placed at mathematically precise intervals to either side of her.
Most of these were closed, and they all had windows.
She peered in the first one and knew very suddenly why she hated this place. Beyond the window was a room. The periphery of the room was lined with all manner of medical instrumentation and equipment, and all of it seemed to be in orbit around the central piece: a stainless steel table affixed to the white-tile floor. There were straps on that table, sturdy ones. Her heart began to beat harder, thumping low and dreadful in her chest, as she checked out a few other doors. Finally, she saw one of those tables was occupied.
By a human.
She swallowed. That was…
No.
From the way the face was deformed, the skin pallid and ugly, she could tell that it was a zombie. But...something was wrong. If they had a zombie strapped down to the table, that would have to mean that they'd encountered one before the incident or outbreak or whatever it was had happened, because there wasn't really time for precise and taxing medical procedures while monsters were running rampant, killing everything they saw.
But how had they gotten access to those skulls that turned people into zombies?
What did any of this mean?
Frustrated and frightened and angry, she pressed on, stopping to check each of the rooms. Occasionally she'd find a zombie roaming around, a doctor or a Space Marine that had been zombified and locked away. She fired off a single shot each time, putting them down and spraying the walls with their old blood and rotted brains. Finally, the corridor came to an end. Beyond the next door, which was an airlock and had been violently ripped open by brute force, was a larger laboratory. A handful of fiends were moving about, poking through the remains of the personnel who had been caught there. Kyra sneered as she raised her rifle, flipped to single-shot, and fired. The first shot was good, taking one of the ugly brown-red things through the temple and snapping its big, ugly, bulbous head to the side in a spray of monster gore.
The others offered up shrieks of surprise and fury as they became aware of her presence and began hurling fireballs her way. She strafed, making sure to keep up with what was in her path so she didn't trip into or over anything, and put two rounds through the chest of a second fiend. A third shot through the neck put that ugly monster down. A fireball came painfully close and she could feel the heat searing through her environmental suit. Kyra almost snarled as she squeezed off another four rounds, two missing but two connecting, one of them turning the final fiend's right eye into a pulpy geyser of dark red gore.
As it hit the deckplates, she waited, listening, ready for more. But there didn't appear to be anything else lurking in the labs. Kyra checked out her environment as she hunted for the lockdown switch. This seemed to be the place where they studied the results of all the cold, calculating, detached autopsies they committed here. Although was autopsy the right word? Wasn't that something you did to the dead?
She had come across a few more zombies, and two fiends, and although the zombies were, in her mind at least, undead, she doubted that the scientists and doctors would balk at the opportunity to conduct a real-time vivisection of a live specimen. It was places like these that truly terrified her, places were inhuman things were done by humans with an utterly detached, almost machine-like autonomy. It wasn't so much that her heart was bleeding for the zombies or the fiends, they were fuckers that deserved to die.
Well, the fiends did, the zombies were just...innocent bystanders really.
No one asked to be a zombie.
It more reminded her that this kind of thing had been done to fellow humans, and not really ones that deserved it often times. How many inhuman experiments had been carried out? How much pain? How much suffering had been endured under the cold steel of medical instruments wielded by men and women who somehow brought themselves to do this. And it was the detachment that turned her stomach.
As much as she condemned it, tried to fight it...she got brutally viscous violence. She understood what it was to feel the blood rage, the battle lust. She understood what it felt like to murder, to want to kill someone with your bare hands, and it wasn't even that she was a bloodthirsty person. It was more that she found herself placed in situations and in a line of work where you were far more likely to have that bad old aspect of yourself brought out again and again. It was ugly, and it was dangerous, but, much as some people didn't want to or would never admit it, it was human. She didn't excuse violence because of this, but she at least understood it.
This, however?
This cold, clinical, sociopathic disconnection from humanity required to sit there and slice into a living, screaming person?
That was horror.
Kyra tried to shake the bad thoughts and ugly vibes from her mind as she kept up her search. There were a few more offshoots, one hallway similar to the one she'd first come in through, another area that was home to larger actual surgical bays with observation rooms, and one room that held racks and rows of reinforced glass-and-steel cages. Some of which were still occupied by fiends or zombies, even a pinky.
Hell, in one of them a trio of flying skulls floated around, bumping into the glass every now and then. She tried not to let the implications of this room overwhelm her as she located the release, hit it, then headed back to the main room.
So, obviously, they had known about this situation for a long time. Long enough to build a fucking specimen storage facility. Obviously Henderson hadn't been telling the whole truth, but why had he bothered hiding this fact? He made it sound like they'd accidentally found the other dimension, then gotten overrun by the demons. Clearly that was not the case. How long had they known? How long had they been doing their experiments?
How long before the demons got fed up or got their shit together and invaded Typhon Station? And...Obsidian Station. She thought about that as she came to Delta Lab. He'd mentioned Obsidian Station, over on Io. She was willing to bet that it was in just as bad condition as this place, but that did raise a rather serious question…
How many other facilities might be overrun?
She knew that the UAC had a number of outposts in space. There was Mars City on Mars, and the two stations up on Phobos and Deimos. There was supposed to be one out on Triton, Neptune's biggest moon. There were more, she knew, but none off the top of her head. How many of them were experimenting with this damned teleportation technology? How many were dead right now? She shook off these thoughts with some difficulty and forced herself to focus as she opened up Delta Lab. The door began to slowly rise.
She was given a view of another security checkpoint that had been utterly wrecked. As soon as she saw that the way was clear, she took a moment to check out the area, managing to get her hands on a few spare magazines for the assault rifle and pistol, then pressed on through to the area beyond. It turned out to be another antechamber, like the initial area in the Research building, doors to the left, right, and dead ahead.
The doors to either side of her were closed off, and they didn't seem to be what she wanted, at least not right away. The way ahead was pitch black, the door open, as though inviting her inside. She had to clear this place out first. Kyra flicked on her flashlight and moved slowly into the room beyond. She played the pale beam of light across the laboratory, finding a fairly large room awaiting her inspection. She got an idea of a lot of workstations and consoles built around a centerpiece that looked...somehow wrong in the wan light.
Sighing in frustration, Kyra began to look around for some kind of light switch. She listened intently for signs of life, or undeath, but heard nothing. All she could hear was her own breathing, and her heart beating in her chest. She finally located a control panel not far from the main entrance and brought it to life. After navigating the simple menu for a bit, she finally found the controls she wanted and hit the lights.
All around her, the lab came to life, brilliant white lights snapping on overhead. She cursed softly, squinting, trying to get used to the change. Turning, she surveyed the laboratory again, then froze, aiming her rifle. Something moved, beyond that big piece of equipment across the room…
She waited, swallowing. Whatever it was, it didn't seem similar to anything else she'd faced so far. It was too tall. She'd seen movement beyond the top of the console, which had to be at least seven feet tall, maybe seven and a half. Finally, a sound ripped through the air, one that instilled inside of her a tremendous frozen black fear.
Someone pulling the ripcord of a chainsaw.
It was coming from behind that console. The sound came to her again as the chainsaw failed to catch. She was breathing heavily now, sweating badly, eyes wide and unblinking in anticipatory horror. The sound came one more time and the chainsaw kicked to life with a roar. Kyra had just resolved to open fire on the console when it was suddenly and violently knocked over, and what had been hidden was now visible.
She stared in open horror and revulsion.
It was definitely different from the other beasts she'd seen so far. It had to be a good seven and a half feet tall and was cast in mottled green skin. It stared at her with wide, glowing yellow eyes and was panting, not that she could hear it over the roar of the chainsaw that was apparently growing directly out of one wrist, its right wrist to be specific, completely replacing its hand. It rippled with raw muscular power.
A word snapped into her mind as suddenly as the beast had appeared before her.
Sawcubus.
It felt right. The beast, the Sawcubus, let out a shriek of battle lust and came at her at a dead sprint. Kyra screamed and opened fire, hosing it down with gunfire as fast as she could, but it was fast, and those shots that were connecting didn't seem to be doing much good. And then the thing was right there in front of her and it got too late to dodge very fast. She raised her assault rifle over her head in a mindless act of self defense as it brought the chainsaw down and sparks flew as she felt an impossible force begin to press against her arms.
The rifle was cut in half.
Kyra's body reacted faster than her mind and she dropped suddenly into a crouch, then dove in between the thing's legs. It let out a scream of frustration as its chainsaw hit the deckplates and the painfully loud squealing rending sound of those two things meeting overrode everything else for a few seconds. Kyra scrambled to her feet, stumbling away, groping blindly for the plasma rifle. Had to kill this bastard very fast or she was going to be chopped into many pieces, and probably eaten for breakfast by the zombies or the fiends.
She got the plasma rifle up and into play just about the time the Sawcubus spun around to face her again. She squeezed the trigger the second she had a shot lined up and the lab lit up with a brilliant blue-white, pulsing light. The Sawcubus howled its maddened fury as the balls of energy slammed into its flesh, charring and burning wherever it touched. The thing lost its footing for just a second, then leaped to the side. Kyra cursed, trying to follow it, spraying the area with wild plasma fire. This fucker was fast.
She managed to catch it a few more times before it picked up and threw an entire shelf at her. Kyra dodge-rolled out of the way, barely avoiding getting crushed by the metal shelving, and then the Sawcubus was upon her again. She rolled away from it, then got the rifle up once more and squeezed the trigger. This time she had the bastard dead to rights. It stumbled, then stumbled again as its body took the full brunt of the assault.
But it wouldn't go down.
The plasma rifle began to beep rapidly and she felt it getting too hot too fast, but she had to put this thing down. She kept the trigger pulled down, hitting the Sawcubus over and over again with overlapping waves of plasma fire. Its mottled green flesh blacked all across it and abruptly it fell to one knee, then crashed to the metal floor. And then the sound of the chainsaw running died away, as did its pained, enraged shrieks.
The only sound now was the rapid beeping of the plasma rifle, which had become a steady tone now. Kyra surged to her feet and then threw the thing away as hard as she could, back out the way she'd come, into the antechamber.
The rifle exploded in a brilliant blue-white flash right before it hit the floor.
Kyra waited for the sound to die away, drawing her shotgun, and looked around, to see if anything else was going to come running. But she seemed to be alone. Kyra let out a long, long sigh of relief, then began walking slowly back into the antechamber, which was now partially covered in char from the explosion. She checked out the first room she'd initially passed, what was basically a glorified break area with a lounge, bathroom, and galley. She wondered how anyone could relax in a place like this.
Finding it empty, she moved on to the second area, which was the one she really wanted. It was a kind of secondary command and control center. She spent half an hour going through whatever logs she could find, whatever data had survived the chaos of the outbreak. She didn't find much really, just a bit more evidence that they had been conducting research on the creatures from the other realm at least for a month or longer. Probably a lot longer than that. She also learned that comms were indeed totally fragged, as she'd initially surmised.
But what she really wanted was access to the LifeScan.
And she got it. This time, it wasn't broken. It worked exactly as intended. She set it to maximum range, which would scan for ten miles, and let it run, hunting for survivors or any signs of life. She wondered if the zombies or the monsters would show up. Finally, the computer chimed to her that it had finished, and she wasn't sure how to feel about what it showed her.
ONE LIFE SIGN DETECTED.
In a way, it was kind of comforting. Now she knew. It was unlikely anyone was outside of the ten mile radius and still alive. She was the sole survivor of the Icarus. And now the sole survivor of Typhon Station.
With that morbid bit of curiosity satisfied, Kyra returned to the primary lab, the teleportation chamber, the dark core of Delta Lab, of the station itself really. And now she took a good look at the thing in the middle of the room. She didn't want to, but she made herself. It was a very odd device, and the whole room was built around it. It was essentially three metallic rings, one inside of another, and a third inside of that one, each smaller than the last. It was a very strange design of shiny silver metal, built onto a complex looking platform. Kyra moved slowly up to it. The thing thrummed with dormant power.
This must be the teleportation device.
"So how do I work you?" she muttered, looking it over.
She sat down at a nearby workstation and began hunting. It took twenty minutes of searching both the local database and Henderson's PDA, but finally she had the activation procedure. It was surprisingly simple. But that was how technology worked: you made insanely intricate and complex things easy to utilize.
Finally, she had an interface on the screen that showed her two black circles against a white background. The one on the left, in pristine white text in the center of the circle, was labeled: Typhon Station. The other was labeled Obsidian Station. Kyra suddenly wondered if it could link to anywhere else, but put the thought aside. For now, she just wanted out of here, and Obsidian Station was the next step on that particular journey.
She activated the gate.
A low hum immediately began to fill the air. The rings started to move, to spin slowly. Kyra raised her shotgun and backed away, an instinctive reaction to danger. The hum continued to grow and it seemed to rattle her bones. The rings spun faster. Darkness began to creep out from the core of the gateway and Kyra seriously began to wonder if she'd made a mistake. Was it fucking supposed to do this!? If it was, how had anyone continued working on this project?! One look at this thing should've tipped off like...everyone that this thing was fucking evil. Like, straight up evil. Kyra realized that something was flickering at the core of the rings, which were spinning quite quickly now, turning into an almost silver blur.
She couldn't figure out what it was she was looking at...some kind of energy. Only it looked like no energy she had ever seen before. It looked like no thing she had ever seen before. It hurt her eyes to look at it, but she couldn't look away. It was growing in intensity, pulsing madly, filling the whole area with flickering black light.
When the intensity reached a climax, there was a powerful pulse, and Kyra had to look away. When she looked back, she saw that the rings were now locked back into place, and within them...a seething mass of darkness.
She shook her head in wonder. "Seriously," she whispered, "who in the fuck looked at this and thought, 'Yeah! That looks like a great idea! Let's send someone in there!'?! Who!?" she demanded of the desolate, bloody station around her.
Only the pulsing, seething blackness was her answer.
Kyra sighed and moved over to the screen again. Both circles were now gently pulsing, shrinking and swelling in sync with each other. Did that mean they were connected? Probably. Well...this was probably about as good as the situation was going to get. It was time to get a move on. Kyra stepped up onto the metal platform and stared into the darkness.
Fuck, she did not want to do this.
But she had to. Typhon Station was a dead end.
The only way forward was through.
Kyra stepped into the blackness.