She reappeared in a stink of brimstone and a flash of black light and a jolt of pain that crackled through her entire body.
Kyra barely managed to get the visor up as she crashed to the metal deckplates and vomited. Only it was really mostly a waste because there wasn't enough left in her stomach to come up, just a bit of bile and spit that fell out of her mouth as the dry-heaves wracked her body. She groaned sickly, absolutely loathing the feeling of vomiting, and something groaned in response. Kyra looked up, her vision blurry, and saw a dim room around her. An uncertain feature was lurching slowly towards her. She groped for her pistol, her hand unsteady, and finally pulled it free of her holster. She aimed up, still crouching down, trembling in agony, and squeezed the trigger. Lucky shot: went right through the zombie's skull and dropped it.
When she didn't hear anything else, Kyra sighed softly and stayed crouched there, hugging herself. The other teleports had not felt this bad. About five seconds later, it occurred to her that she had pulled her pistol from its holster.
That she still had a holster.
That she had been forced to raise her visor to avoid vomiting on it.
She'd come through the portal with everything intact.
"Worth it," she groaned weakly, then hawked and spat a few more times. She needed to get a drink of something. Preferably some goddamned vodka. After allowing herself weakness for another twenty seconds, Kyra finally forced herself back up to her feet. She wasn't done yet, not by a long shot, probably.
There was always more fucking work to do.
"Where the fuck am I?" she whispered, spitting one more time before lowering the visor back into place. She hit the light amp function and surveyed her new surroundings. They looked vaguely familiar, and she realized that the place she was in resembled the place she'd initially left on Typhon Station. Oh hell, she wasn't back there, was she? Well, that seemed like something worth knowing, so she began moving slowly around the room.
It took close to ten minutes, but she cleared the lab, managing to find the lights and another magazine for her rifle, which she promptly reloaded. She also made a very unhappy discovery, something that disturbed her on a deep level: the lab was changing. One section of the far right wall had been replaced by ugly green brick. It looked completely unnatural and incongruous alongside the high-tech polished metal of the lab. The floor around it had been partially replaced with more of that ugly wood she'd seen so much of just recently.
"Who did this?" she whispered. Why would anyone do this? Did the monsters do it? How? What the fuck was happening here?
She heard a deep growl coming from somewhere else in the complex she'd come to and put those thoughts aside again. They always seemed to intrude. After a complete sweep of the lab, including a few smaller storage rooms that held nothing but technical spare parts and one work area meant for repair of the no doubt dozens of intricate pieces of technology that helped this particular room run, Kyra approached the exit.
Why had she come through this particular portal with all her things intact? Not that she was complaining, but it didn't make sense. She at least had the vague notion that there was a fundamental difference between the portals between dimensions, and the portals between areas within the same dimension that she had used. It, for whatever reason, made more sense that those simpler portals would leave her things intact, but maybe the inter-dimensional portals were more complex. Maybe that first one had gone wrong in that fashion?
Obviously there had to be some way to get stuff through the portals beyond just flesh, because there existed UAC technology and gear on the other side. Well, she supposed it made enough sense that that first portal had simply malfunctioned, since she'd appeared somewhere where there had been no other portal to receive her, and obviously she hadn't made it here, where she was supposed to have gone in the first place.
Despite everything, Kyra did feel somewhat better to be in a human installation, to be back in her own reality. At least, as far as she knew she was. If this was Obsidian Station, (still had to figure that out), then this should be Io. While that was pretty far out there from Earth, it was still in her own universe.
That was illogically comforting.
Maybe because she knew that if she at least found some kind of vessel, she could figure out how to get back to the rest of her own civilization. Even if that civilization sucked most the time. Her stomach growled as she stood by the door, staring at the control panel that would open it. She needed food, and water, and a rest. Her whole body ached, especially her head, and she'd kill for the chance to just sit down for a little while.
But not yet.
She hit the button. The door slid open to reveal...a long hallway that was half wood, half metal stamped with the UAC logo. Rows of what appeared to be red pots with bubbling, boiling liquid inside of them flanked her to either side, stretching the length of the corridor. Corpses had been crucified to the walls with what appeared to be an industrial strength nail gun. Dried blood snaked away from their wrists and feet.
There had to be about twenty or so of them, all of them stripped nude. She imagined they were a collection of personnel from the station: scientists, Marines, technicians. She walked briskly down the corridor, not wanting to be here any longer than possible, her own anger rising. More defiling of corpses, more tragedy, more senseless slaughter. She reached the far door and opened it, too. An antechamber awaited her, along with three other doors, one in each wall. There was good lighting in this part, at least.
One door led to a Security Station, which seemed a bit more complex than just a checkpoint, another led to the tram area, and the third led to dormitories for the scientists. She ignored that for the moment and headed straight into security. Security centers were like oases for her at this point. The door was partially open and spit sparks when she hit the button. It gave another inch, then the motor inside died. Sighing, she forced it open a little further, using her suit-enhanced strength, and then squeezed in through the opening.
As she had come to expect, the place was a wreck, but at least it was bigger, so there were more likely places for someone to have hidden supplies. She checked it out for hostiles first, finding a huge bank of security monitors that showed nothing worthwhile, a trio of workstations that probably helped run the whole area, a break room and a bathroom at the back, and finally an armory. That room was the most trashed of all, but she performed a thorough search of it anyway. Her mind stumbled to and fro as her hands and eyes worked to clear the room and spot any possible supplies. She seemed to have gone back to that glazed disbelief.
This still felt so impossible, even though she was literally living it at present. The mind was such a weird thing. It could be ticking along fine for months or years so long as there was a routine. Then something breaks that routine and it's like a fighter pilot getting jettisoned from her plane or a sailor being thrown out to sea. It felt like you had very little control over your brain in those circumstances. But being a soldier in today's battlefields meant routine was often broken, shattered even, and you had to fight for your life.
Kyra had assumed that she'd gotten used to having her routine shattered, that she couldn't be surprised anymore. But this was, she realized now, a lie. It wasn't that she had gotten used to the basic notion of broken routine, it was that the way her routine was broken had itself become routine. This situation was so fucked that she apparently wasn't entirely sure how to cope with it. Sometimes she felt like she had a good handle on things and killing monsters sure focused her well, but during the downtime where nothing was screaming at her, emotions and thoughts began to assault her from a dozen different directions.
It was a mess.
Her search of the armory at least yielded a few results. The first, and maybe most useful, was a rucksack. Being able to carry more supplies would help, provided she could find more goddamned supplies to carry. She found some suit repair kits and stored them away in the pack, as well as an emergency full-on Medikit that had somehow survived the chaos. She also managed to secure enough shotgun shells to top it off, and four more magazines for the assault rifle. Not a great haul but not a terrible one, she supposed.
Kyra left the armory and moved back into the control room, then began the process of trying to boot up the biggest, most important-looking workstation. There were a few things she wanted to check out. She needed a map, maybe to see if any logs had survived, and, primarily, another search for signs of human life. The minutes slipped by in bloody quietude as she worked the console. Like basically every other one she'd come to, it had suffered damage, and it was clear that the internal network was an absolute wreck.
She at least confirmed that she was indeed on Obsidian Station.
The only map she could find was one of the building she was in, what was referred to as Site Alpha. All it showed was that, with the exception of the tram station and the dormitories, she'd seen all there was to see. And then, finally, a bit of luck: the LifeScan was functional. She set it to its maximum range and then had it begin the scan, looking for other survivors. She knew that it was entirely possible that she was alone on this other moon.
While the scan did its thing, she moved to the security monitors and checked through them. Those that still worked mostly showed things she didn't want to see, but stuff she had already seen. Mainly corpses and blood-splashed and bullet-riddled corridors. But in some of them, she saw more of that seemingly impossible morphing some of the environment was undergoing. She saw more of that weird wood, and in some places there were old brass torches mounted on the walls, burning with a strange green fire.
One section of wall in presumably one of the dormitories corridors looked like it had veins growing along it now, veins of black blood that grew up the side of the metallic wall like some kind of malignant creeping plant. Where could it possibly be coming from? Was it some kind of side effect of the demonic presence? Was it something they were doing intentionally? She didn't like it, and not just because it freaked her out, but more so because it seemed that this effect was going to cause some kind of blowout in the hull.
Wood didn't hold up so well in space.
She saw some more zombies wandering around, except...they didn't seem to be wandering the dormitories complex. They seemed almost to be searching, or patrolling. It was eerie. They weren't entirely just stumbling, drooling, mindless things anymore. They might actually be shaping up to be a real threat. Well, shit. There were some fiends there, too, but just a few. She'd have to go clear that place out.
She was for some reason itching for a fight. Maybe it was because it would take her mind off of things, or maybe it was just because it was familiar at this point. A soft chime got her attention and Kyra turned back to the LifeScan.
It came back with two hits.
One was her, the other was...in Command Control, in another structure.
"Oh finally," she whispered, and grabbed her assault rifle. She took another moment to study what she could see from the scan. It was somewhat helpful. Only two of the other buildings interested her: Site Bravo and Site Echo. Bravo had Command Control and the Military HQ. Echo had another teleportation complex. Site Charlie had a hangar, but somehow she didn't trust that there were any ships there, let alone any that might have engines powerful enough to get her to civilization. But she would make sure to check it out at least.
Once Kyra had committed as much of the rudimentary map as she could to memory, she left the security complex and made her way over to the dormitories wing. She settled into a tactical mindset as she slipped into the network of corridors and began making her way slowly through it, checking the corners, carefully maneuvering into new corridors, doing a standard sweep and clear of any open doors she came across. It was slow going, made all the worse by sounds she kept hearing. Kyra ran into her first hostile in the area about a minute in. She crept towards another break in the corridor, a cross-section, and then froze.
Something muttered quietly from somewhere ahead, either to the left or right. She came closer, then waited, listening closely. Another sound, like someone shifting, and then she had it. Right. She prepared herself, then peered around the corner. It was a good thing she had her rifle ready to go, because there was a zombie wielding a pistol maybe five feet away. If it was another human, she might not have survived the encounter, but as it was, even a zombie capable of holding and firing a firearm still had slow reflexes.
She put a shot through its forehead and dropped it. From behind her something else let out a roar and a shotgun sounded, hitting the wall next to her. She spun around, dropped to one knee, and lined up the next shot. Squeezing the trigger twice more, she caught another zombie once in the neck, then turned its right eye to free-flying gore with the second well-placed shot. More roars sounded and she heard a few shrieks from elsewhere in the complex. Great. Kyra prepared herself. She decided to go to them, to keep them guessing.
She worked her way through the network of corridors, dropping one, then two, then half a dozen zombies, followed by a pair of fiends that hurled fireballs her way as fast and as hard as they could. One of them punched her in the chestplate and made her lose her breath, but she put three shots into the bastard's big open mouth and sprayed the walls with its brains. Or what passed for brains in these stupid, spiny fuckers. In the end, she traded a pair of magazines for her rifle for another three shotgun shells, a magazine for the pistol, and a baker's dozen dead bad guys. Not a bad trade altogether. As she finished clearing out the scientist's dormitories and began making for the tramway, she found herself more grateful than ever for the suit of armor.
It had deflected a few shots and that fireball pretty well, little worse for the wear. But as she came into the tram station itself, she was even more grateful for the armor, because two things became apparent to her. The first was that the tram was not going anywhere. Someone, or more likely something, had trashed it so bad it wasn't even on its track any longer. The second thing she determined, as she prepared to simply hoof it across the tramway, was that the glass shield had been breached.
After double-checking to make sure her suit was not only intact, but topped off with oxygen, Kyra stepped into the airlock and began to cycle through.
The long day just kept getting longer.