Kyra Morgan marched across Hell, and felt…
She wasn't sure what she was feeling, only that it didn't seem right. She was in Hell. She should be feeling abysmal, mind-numbing, hitherto unexplored realms of blind terror. But she wasn't afraid. Okay, that wasn't true. She was pretty scared. But she wasn't panicking, she wasn't freaking out, at least not from fear anyway. Maybe from stress. Fuck, this was stressful. But more she felt...angry. And kind of curious.
Maybe it was because she didn't believe this was Hell.
It sure looked like Hell, and the things she'd been fighting could be called demons. But demons didn't die, right? Maybe in the real world, but in their own realm, on their home turf, she thought they were immortal. Demons were supposed to be fallen angels, and angels didn't die. Where would angels or demons go if they died? Would they cease to exist? That wouldn't be so bad. But she was getting off track. In Hell, you were supposed to be immortal, your immortal soul was being tortured. But she'd seen dead on both sides of the line now.
No, Kyra was far more ready to believe that the UAC had accidentally opened a door that led to an alternate reality, another dimension, and that dimension simply resembled Hell, and its occupants simply resembled demons. Sure, they looked demonic and threw fireballs, about what you'd expect, but otherwise...well, that's where the resemblance ended. Plus, that whole dying thing. If this was Hell, then Kyra had to admit, she was a little disappointed. Not that she was really trying to invite yet more difficulty into her life.
But above all that, or perhaps below it, in her core, she was pissed.
Mad at the UAC, mad at life in general, and mainly mad at these fucking abominations that so gleefully slaughtered and tortured her fellow humans. She was sure there were probably some people in Typhon and Obsidian Stations that deserved death, maybe not torture...well, maybe. The money-grubbing fucks who had let this happen, who had probably pressed on regardless of the risk. The cold, calculating scientists who'd enabled it to happen. And maybe some of her fellow Space Marines. Not everyone who was a Space Marine was there because they'd questioned orders once too often, or scored too low on a test.
Some were rapists that the United Marine Corps wanted to just sweep under the rug. Some had been caught (by someone willing to hush it up) maybe doing some sick shit to the locals of whatever wartorn country they were fighting in.
Yeah, there were some pretty sick bastards that had gotten thrown out into space. Kyra would've liked to do the same, only in a more literal sense, out an airlock, without a suit on. She had no patience or stomach for rapists and would just as easily castrated them with a rusty knife as toss them out an airlock.
But there were certainly innocents, people who were just trying to earn a living. Techs or chefs or custodial personnel maintaining the stations, or, fuck, families. God, had there been kids there on Typhon Station?
She didn't want to think about that.
Just about the time she was beginning to worry that maybe she might not find this underground complex, she spied what appeared to be ruins, and hurried towards them. So far, she'd only had to contend with a handful of the flying skulls, popping them to bleached bone bits with her pistol, having to kill a magazine to do it. She still had half a dozen, one in the pistol, five in her pockets, but she needed something with some real stopping power, and couldn't help but feel that she was going to run into something worse soon.
The ruins looked very old and she had no idea what must have destroyed them, only that there were just a handful of wrecked walls made of that same gray-green stonework as the previous structure. She moved slowly among the ruins, and this time found yet more evidence of a human presence. A few discarded food wrappers, an empty water bottle, some spent shell casings, a few dead fiends. She finally found what she was looking for near the center of the ruins: a hole in the ground, with stairs cut into the rock descending into torch-lit gloom.
"Great," she muttered, staring down it, wishing for a flashlight.
With nothing else to do, trying to use her anger to snuff out her fear, Kyra set off down the stairs. Her boot-clad feet echoed loud and lonely down the stairwell. For some reason the place made her think of graveyards and mausoleums. The walls started out as gray-green brick, but soon faded away into a bizarre white-black rock that looked like a mixture of obsidian and marble randomly mixed together.
The stairwell went on for a long time, lit at irregular intervals by old brass candle-holders. At least the light they were burning was orange-yellow. Thoughts came to her as she descended. Who had built this? Who maintained these candles? Who re-lit them if they went out? It was really hard to imagine a fiend studiously checking to make sure none of the candles were out. Honestly, it was hard to imagine them doing anything but shrieking and throwing fireballs, or maybe eating a corpse. There were so many questions about this place.
It made such little sense.
This whole place struck her as utterly insane. Then again, so did everything since her world got completely fucked and she'd crash-landed on a moon. Finally, there was a light at the end of the long, lonely stairwell. It was fairly bright and didn't seem to be torchlight. Well, that was an...improvement? She guessed she'd rather be somewhere bright than dark. At least then she could see exactly what it was she facing.
Although what she turned out to be facing was scarier than taking on a group of pinkies. Well, maybe not that scary, but pretty bad. The stairwell came to an end and opened into a huge room. The area immediately beyond the stairwell was a bit like a platform that extended ahead for maybe another ten feet before stopping abruptly. Kyra took everything she saw in as she slowly, carefully moved onto that platform.
It was made of gritty but basically flat, dark gray rock. To either side of her, boxing her in, were walls made of wood and rusted iron girders, and the ceiling above her was wooden as well. The platform was overlooking a drop of about twenty feet, a drop that led straight into another big pool of that bubbling green toxic sludge. And further on, there were islands. Well, more like pillars, rising up out of the sludge. Pillars of old metal placed at seemingly random intervals, at different heights, and sometimes connected by flat metal blocks that also rose up out of the toxic waste, meant to serve, presumably, as walkways.
The walls spread out away from her, all with that strange old wood and rusted iron girder motif. Strangest of all, to her at least, was the fact that there were racked rows of electric lights above the platforms and pillars, shining down brilliantly on them and providing all the light in the area. Had the UAC installed it? She looked around again, seeing how she could progress. Her eyes fell on a door-shaped hole cut into the wall over to the left.
She moved slowly across the rock shelf, pistol in hand.
And she almost took a tumble down into the acid. There was a gap between the platform and the doorway! It was about a foot across, and it didn't look like anything had ever been there. Who had built this?! Why in the fuck would anyone build something like this!? Trying to set aside her rising anger, Kyra waited, listening. There didn't seem to be anything in the huge room with her, nothing on any of those pillars or walkways, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something was lurking around, just out of sight.
Maybe watching her.
Mustering her courage, Kyra jumped the gap, then came to a rigid halt as she landed on the other side, which was just a two foot wide wooden walkway. Dead ahead of her was another pool of, this time, bubbling lava. Lava? No time to rage at the insanity of this place. It just wasn't going to make sense, she was just going to have to accept that. The room she'd come to was much smaller than the cavern she'd been in before, the walls made of bare rock again. The wooden walkway, which was actually mostly stone beneath the wood, she could see, ran along the periphery of the room, leading to another doorway that was just a few feet to her left. Unfortunately, the walkway wasn't a complete circle, there was a gap between her and the other door. With a sigh, she began moving along the path, keeping a sharp eye out for hostiles.
She wanted out of this place, wanted back to somewhere familiar, somewhere sane.
Still nothing presented itself and assaulted her as she reached the next doorway. She found herself staring down a hallway of more of that gray-green brickwork. There were bullet holes in the walls and a few pools of blood in the hallway. Spent shell casings on the stone floor. She moved carefully down it. About halfway down was a red platform built right into the floor. She hesitated as she reached it. Something weird about it.
It seemed to glow with a faint, red light and hummed gently with power.
Hesitantly, Kyra placed her foot on it.
There was a flash-pop and suddenly she was somewhere different. She jerked in surprise, looking around the room she abruptly found herself in, but she was still alive. If this was a trap, it was a poor one, she thought to herself as she studied the area. The room she'd come to was paneled in wood hammered with rows of rusty nails. Besides that, two things immediately leaped out at her: the first was that there was a big gap in the wall, the second was that there was more evidence of humanity in this godforsaken place.
Three crates, two of them closed, a foldout table with a smashed laptop on it, and…
"Oh yes," she whispered. Glancing behind her, making sure she was still alone, Kyra holstered the pistol and quickly snatched up the assault rifle leaned against the wall. She checked it out: fully loaded, looked to be in good condition. And, what was this? Under the table, a scattering of magazines. She quickly snatched them up as well, checked them over, and pocketed them. After that she took a moment to pry open one of the crates. The opened one was cleared out, and unfortunately the one she opened had nothing but tech parts in it.
A hissing sound suddenly filled the room and Kyra's heart leaped into her throat as she grabbed the rifle and whirled around, already sidestepping automatically. And thank fucking God for that, because the thing that had so successfully snuck up on her was apparently another one that launched goddamned projectiles.
It was an evil flying pumpkin.
That was the first thing that popped into her head. A goddamned flying pumpkin with a giant, madly grinning mouth and a big cyclopean eye. It opened its mouth and belched a ball of...plasma? Lightning? right at her. She barely managed to avoid it and, tucking the rifle to her shoulder, hit full automatic and cut loose. Kyra emptied the entire magazine into that fucking monster. Before she turned it into shredded gory pulp, she managed to get a decent view of what in the actual fuck she was facing this time around. And it freaked her the fuck out.
It was like a Halloween pumpkin carved by a madman in Hell.
It was the size of a beach ball, covered in knotted, leathery red flesh. It was a little like a disembodied head, and its face was roughly ninety percent mouth. It was like the mouth of a fucking Great White, lined with saw teeth. A single burning eye was set above that mouth, a sickly yellow-green in color. It seemed to grin with a gleeful maddened malignancy as it tried to murder her. Six big, ugly spikes of bone crowned its skull.
Before it died the nastiest death she'd probably ever seen, it managed to fire another ball of blue-white energy that she barely ended up avoiding, though she could feel the raw energy coming off of it crackling along her flesh. Then the thing popped and splattered the whole area with its pulpy guts. She groaned as some of it got onto her uniform.
"What in the actual fuck was that?!" she cried, moving forward to stand at the edge of the opening. As she looked for its remains, Kyra realized that she was actually up and to the right of where she'd initially come in, and she had a good view of the huge room with the acid floor and the platforms and pillars. And there were the shredded remains of the popped pumpkin some twenty five feet down, sizzling and dissolving away in the sludge.
"Where did you even come from?" she whispered, looking around.
As she did, her eyes widened, zeroing in on another one floating out from behind a pillar. It released another one of those hackle-raising hisses and loosed another ball of energy at her. Kyra sidestepped and returned fire, this time switching it to three-round burst and trying to conserve ammo, figure out these thing's tolerances, because obviously there were going to be more. She threw several volleys at it, landing almost all of it them in its big awful mouth. After a quartet of three-round bursts, the thing finally gave up the ghost and the back of it popped, spraying dark red gore all over the area before collapsing into the toxic waste below with a loud, angry bellow. As its remains finished splashing, Kyra waited and listened.
Nothing more. At least, nothing more that was obvious.
Then again, there wasn't much that was particularly subtle about this cavalcade of horror. Although...she shuddered. That thing had snuck right up on her ass! The hovering fuck was dead silent until it had hissed at her. Kyra sighed. Always something new going on ever since she'd hit dirt on Europa. She scoped out the situation as best she could, determined that she was indeed alone again, then finished her search of the room she'd been teleported to, finding nothing but more tech parts in the final metal crate as well. As she looked back at the red square in the center of the room, she frowned deeply.
A concept that had bugged her for a long time growing up came from an old, old show called Star Trek. Well, it had a lot of different names and different series, but there was one sci-fi concept prevalent in all of them: teleportation. If she remembered right, the basic idea was that a computer scanned you in one place, all the way down to every last molecule, copied that data, then reassembled you from that copy in another place.
The obvious question was: was this actually you anymore? Or was it just a flash-clone that had all of your memories up to that point? Or was there something like a soul, some objectively provable form of consciousness that couldn't be replicated? When she'd gone through the gateway, she had more of an idea of traveling through like...a wormhole, maybe. That wasn't the same as teleportation. But this pad here…
This was instant teleportation.
How did it achieve this? Was it the same principle, just experienced differently? Or was it closer to being reassembled? Was it some form of teleportation that scientists or even sci-fi authors hadn't theorized about yet?
Was she still Kyra Morgan?
Or was she just a clone?
Did it matter? In a bigger sense, she thought it did, but functionally speaking? Right now and right here? Well...no. She felt the same, and that was going to have to be good enough. With a sigh, she stepped back onto the rusted red pad and reappeared in the original hallway in a flash of light. As she moved slowly down it, checking out a few open doors that led to a few other bare, stonework rooms, Kyra again found herself wondering what the fuck this place was for. What any of it was for. Who had built it? Why?
Inevitably she kept coming back to the same conclusion: there was no rhyme or reason to this godforsaken nightmare. But was that true? Either there was no reason, or the reason was lost to the ages (how old was this dimension?) or alien and incomprehensible to her. So it didn't matter. But her brain kept picking at it nonetheless.
Finally, she found a doorway that led to one of the walkways that cut across the acid bath below and she moved carefully across it, keeping a sharp eye out for anymore of the damned floating pumpkins. How did they fit into this anyway? What the fuck was the hierarchy of this place? How did floating, energy-ball-spitting, one-eyed pumpkins fit together with those awful fiends? Or the zombies? Or the pig pinkies?
Probably the same answer as the architecture.
About fifteen minutes of careful navigation brought her to the end of the poorly constructed maze of pillars and walkways, and back onto solid ground. Solid ground being more of that ugly rock. She found her way to a room tucked away at the back of the area that held only a somewhat more intricate looking teleportation platform.
Resisting the urge to say a small prayer, Kyra stepped onto the platform, hoped for the best, and disappeared in a flash of light.