"What happened to Burrows?" Collins asked, his voice unusually subdued as they slowly navigated a new crate maze in the subterranean storage area. According to the data packet that Blair had sent over, they shouldn't be too far from where Powell should be.
"Shaved gorillas got him," Kyra replied. "We tried to help him, but…"
"Damn," Collins muttered. "Poor bastard...at least he's with his family now."
"What happened to them?" Kyra asked, opting not to go down that particular theological discussion route at the moment.
Collins sighed. "Bombing got them. He used to be a businessman with a fitness fetish and a boxing proclivity. Three years ago, he's on vacation with his wife and their two kids in Japan and boom. Local terrorist cell wanted to send a message and bombed a fucking tea shop. They happened to be walking in front of it when it happened, on their way to some tourist trap. He almost lost his right arm and got some brain damage, they didn't make it. Took him a year to heal up proper, but once he could, he signed up for the Marines."
"Fuck," Kyra muttered. There were way too many stories like that.
And that had been before Armageddon.
She took another look around as they emerged from this latest crate maze into another semi-open area. It looked clear, save for the dead fiends and zombies. Most of them had been killed with headshots. That, combined with the fact that they were near where Powell was supposed to be, according to Blair, meant they might almost be done with this part of the mission. Kyra had to admit, she was itching to get back into the fight in a more meaningful way. Though certainly there was enough fight to go around, even down here.
"He might be nearby," she said, and activated her radio. "This is Staff Sergeant Morgan with the United Nations Marine Corps, does anybody read me? Over." She waited, but there was no response. Well, it was worth a shot. Maybe his radio was busted or he just didn't have one. Or maybe the effect, whatever it was, was worse down here.
"Where's he supposed to be?" Pace asked.
"There," Kyra replied, indicating a door that read STORAGE 17-B. "Make sure we remain secure. I'm going to see if he's actually in there."
Both men responded affirmatively and set to it. Kyra marched over to the door and hammered on it with her armored fist. "UN Marines, anyone in there?!"
There was a pause and dead silence, though that didn't necessarily mean anything. Doors and walls in facilities like these tended to be oddly inconsistent with how much or little you could hear through them. Some seemed to transmit sound, others seemed soundproofed. Abruptly, the door popped open just an inch, indicating that whoever was on the other end had engaged the manual override, which released the door from its catch. Clever way to get the door open just a little. She suddenly wondered why the fuck they didn't have an 'open partway' option built into them, but figured it came down to the same answer as everything else.
It would cost more.
A pale face behind a glass visor peered out through the crack, as did the barrel of a shotgun. "Who goes there?" a steady voice asked.
"Staff Sergeant Morgan, UN Marines. You Powell?" Kyra asked.
"Yeah. Is it secure out there?" Powell replied, disappearing from the crack. She heard something spark and abruptly the door opened the rest of the way.
"Yes," she replied.
"That big bastard is gone?"
Kyra felt a stab of fear. "What big bastard?"
Powell began to respond, but his words died in his throat as he looked past her, over her shoulder. Kyra spun around. A panel on the wall was opening in apparent silence. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
Pace was standing guard with his back to the panel almost directly across from where Kyra was currently standing. She saw a pair of hooves and thick, bent-backwards legs coated in shaggy brown fur had already appeared, being revealed by the panel as it glided upward. Twisting around, trying to react in time, she dropped her shotgun and snagged her chaingun.
"Pace! Six o'clock!" she screamed.
The panel continued opening as Pace started to turn and move away simultaneously. He had decent reflexes, but the big beast behind him had better ones. Even before the panel had finished rising, a long-fingered, powerful hand, each digit ending in a long, black claw, shot out and wrapped around Pace's helmet. He screamed. A second hand shot out and joined the first, effectively encircling his whole helmeted head.
She expected the thing to twist or rip his head right off his shoulders, but it didn't.
It pressed its hands together.
Pace's scream cut off abruptly as the helmet crumpled and collapsed like a soda can, while his head popped inside the helmet like a ripe melon. An awful gush of blood accompanied the small shower of glass that flew out as his visor shattered. The panel finished rising up, revealing a huge chest and set of broad shoulders and thick arms, all looking like they were carved from pure muscle. The face attached to this wretched demon was sneering, a visage of pure, terrifying fury. It sported two thick black horns growing out of its misshapen skull, and even as Kyra began spinning up the barrels of her chaingun, she saw a green glow start to emanate from its right hand. She already knew what this thing was, what it was trying to do, and she wasn't going to give it a chance. She was going to send this fucker straight back to hell.
A scream like a battlecry from a Valkyrie warrior out of legend exploded from her throat as the chaingun opened fire. Kyra roared as she hosed the eight-foot terror with an array of pure metal death. A second stream of bullets, much less powerful, joined her own as Collins opened up as well. And then Powell was stepping out beside her, blasting away with a shotgun, pumping it and squeezing the trigger as fast as he could.
The bullets and shells converged on the immense roaring terror, and it was slammed back into the niche it had been hiding in. Thick red blood splattered the interior of the monster closet as the thing was shredded, pulped, and chopped by the incoming fire, and it was slaughtered before it even got a chance to hurl a single one of those green balls of energy. The acid-colored glow died in its broad hand and it collapsed into a heap of chewed-up meat and gristle. Kyra realized a few seconds later that she'd expended her entire magazine for the chaingun and had to genuinely suppress an urge to scream an obscenity as loud as she could.
She could not afford to lose it, or even make the others question whether or not she was losing it, right now. Instead of screaming, she slung the chaingun and switched back to the shotgun, then whirled on Powell, who seemed like he had to fight not to take a step back from her.
"Collins, grab his shit," she snapped without taking her eyes from Powell.
"Yes, Staff Sergeant," Collins replied, already jogging off towards Pace's corpse.
"Powell, we have a situation. Your nuclear power plant is going to go critical in under two hours. Can you fix it?"
"Yes," he replied tightly, and she could tell by the way he immediately slipped into cold professionalism that he instantly grasped the immensity and imminent danger of the situation. Too many people were affected by shock like that, losing precious seconds or even minutes as they attempted to get their head around some new situational evolution. The more she was around him, the more she was respecting Powell. "I can fix it. I know how to get there from here. Get me there and I'll do the job."
"Perfect, let's move out."
The walk through the underground section from Powell's location to the sub-level ingress to the utilities building wasn't what Kyra would call pleasant by any stretch of the imagination, but it went better than she'd expected. In her mind's eye, she had seen them fighting through waves of maggots, legions of zombies, swarms of flying skulls. But in reality, they'd only run into a pair of skirmishes, once with a pack of fiends, once with a handful of pinkies. Powell managed to lead them in terse silence through the blood-drenched, body-strewn underhalls of Strata Station. After fifteen minutes, they came to the utilities building entrance.
"I'll go first," Kyra said, taking the lead. Their primary goal here was keeping Powell alive long enough to fix this problem.
After that, she intended to make a beeline straight for Command Control and get some answers out of Blair and Carpenter, one way or the other.
She hustled up the ladder and hit the button that opened the hatch at the top. Waiting to see if anything wandered over to investigate or gave itself away, then hauled herself up and out. That gut-wrenching moment of forced vulnerability came and went without repercussions as she got to her feet and pulled her shotgun out. The maintenance hatch let out into a derelict storage area. To her right was a row of those fucking barrels of toxic waste, stacked three high to the ceiling, to her left were more crates stamped with the UAC logo.
"Clear," she said, moving over to the only exit and checking it out, to see if they'd have to pry their way through. By the time the other two were up, she'd determined that it looked fine. "Okay, ready?"
Both men responded affirmatively, weapons at the ready.
She opened the door and led them out into a central access chamber that had been, unsurprisingly, painted in blood. Only a handful of zombies still lingered, men in torn, bloodied, or shredded technician's UAC jumpsuits that were clearly on the lower end of the zombie intelligence spectrum. She put them down easily enough with quick pistol shots to their domes, then took in her surroundings. Three big doors awaited her attention, with a smaller one behind her, indicating surface access. She ignored that for a moment and honed her focus onto the one marked POWER CORE. It was presently outlined in a ring of angry red lights.
"Tell me you can unlock that," Kyra said as they approached it.
"Gimme a minute," Powell replied as he crouched by the control panel.
"We're down to roughly an hour and twenty minutes," Kyra replied, checking the timer she'd set on her HUD when Blair had informed her of this.
Powell cursed but otherwise set to work. Kyra took a moment to try and get in touch with someone else, either Linaweaver or Blair, but the radios were down again.
Fucking great.
Powell sighed abruptly and stood. "It's a no-go. Executive lockdown. We need two keycards in order to lift it," he explained.
Double great.
"Fuck, come on, let's get to it," she replied, looking around. The other two doors were labeled HEAT EXCHANGE and WATER FILTRATION. "I don't suppose you have any idea which one might be better to start looking in first?"
"No, they could be anywhere, and the only way into that plant is through that door. It's an extremely secure area," Powell replied.
"Fine. Come on." She headed for the Heat Exchange area. Might as well just pick one and go with it since they didn't have any meaningful data one way or the other. Thankfully, this door wasn't locked, she found as she opened it up.
On the other hand, the way ahead did not invoke confidence.
The room beyond was large and shrouded in a dark mist. She just barely had hints of deeply intricate, labyrinthine snarls of piping and machinery and arcane equipment to either side of her. Obviously something had started leaking badly and never been fixed. Unmoving bodies lay scattered across the metal deckplates like forgotten toys. Somewhere in the mist, something growled. Something else hissed.
"Nice and easy," she murmured, leading the way with her shotgun.
Kyra couldn't be sure but she thought that there were at least fiends moving around in there. And they had to not only hope there was a keycard here among this mist, but also find the damned thing. Well, corpses made the most sense to search first.
"All right," she said, keeping her voice low as they came in after her, "you two start searching bodies, I'll stand guard and-"
A flickering glow slowly appearing out of the mist dead ahead of her caught her attention. She cursed and readjusted her aim.
"Hold on, might be something here."
The glow quickly resolved itself into a sphere, and then, a few seconds later, a madly grinning skull set aflame, drifting through the air, was revealed. A moment of genuine panic doused her like a bucket of ice-water and Kyra shouted a warning as she squeezed the trigger.
"Flying skull!"
The thing popped in a spray of charred bone and a symphony of shrieks and roars came to them from all around. The mist enveloping the room seemed to come alive with activity and Kyra cursed again as she targeted the hazy outline of a fiend coming forward, whirling up to throw a fireball. She blew it head off, pumped the shotgun, and then turned to blast another flying skull that was coming straight for her from her ten o'clock into more free-flying bone bits. Collins and Powell immediately opened fire as more fiends and flying skulls came at them, and Kyra quickly lost herself in the sickening thrill of battle.
A fiend was coming for her and she jerked the shotgun towards it and fired before the gun had even stopped moving. The shotgun jerked in her armored grasp and a fist-sized hole blew open in the thing's chest. It dropped with a roar and she was already tracking a flying skull buzzing towards her, intent on turning her into a zombie and another squeeze of the trigger vaporized that thing into so much motherfucking bone dust, its flames extinguishing instantly. A fiend hanging off a pipe, just barely visible through the mist and high up on the wall, shrieked as it hurled a fireball at her. No time to dodge, so it smacked her in the shoulder and sent her stumbling. And apparently out of the way of another fireball, as she saw one sail past her helmeted head from the back, missing her by inches. She dropped to one knee, aimed, and fired again.
The fiend hanging off the pipe got its shoulder demolished and it fell shrieking to the floor, its arm still attached to the pipe. Twisting around the other direction, Kyra emptied her shotgun into a pair of fiends trying to encroach on her territory from the back. One took a shell straight to the face and went down in a spray of pulpy demon gore. The other was made of sterner stuff. It leaped at her as she snatched her pistol up and she just barely managed to punch it in the side of the head as hard as she could, straightening back up and sidestepping simultaneously, trying to keep the flow of combat moving without pause.
The thing's skull cracked as it sailed by her, most of its large body missing her, and she shot it four times in rapid succession as it hit the floor and rolled. A fifth shot to its big, screaming mouth blew out the back of its cranium and cut off its shrieking permanently. Kyra immediately went looking for the next target, but found nothing.
Looking around, she saw that the three of them had managed to successfully repel the attack.
No time to enjoy the victory.
"Get to searching," she said as she quickly reloaded.
The men got right to it after they'd finished their own reloads. She kept watch while they hastily checked any of the corpses that might be holding a keycard. The minutes dragged by with a painful lethargy, but finally, Collins turned up a red keycard in good condition. Kyra took it, pocketed it in a secure part of her suit, and then led the way back across the main chamber over to the water filtration section. Opening up the door, she was grateful to see that there was nothing waiting for her, but her gratitude quickly turned to frustration as they began their search and turned up a whole lot of nothing for what felt like way too long.
They entered the water filtration plant with a little over an hour left on her timer.
When they finally tracked down the blue keycard, hidden away in the pocket of a technician who had crawled behind a pair of huge tanks to die, they had less than fifteen minutes.
"We gotta hurry," Kyra said as they hustled over to the primary door.
She fed the blue keycard into the slot and pocketed it as the door chimed affirmatively. Next, she shoved the red keycard in and the second chime came through. There was a pause that lasted just long enough for her to worry as she pocketed the other card, and then a loud click and the red lights ringing the door disappeared.
It began to slide open.
"All right, get ready," she snapped.
The door opened to reveal a large chamber that had also been infested with the dark mist, though not quite as much. She could see the edges of the room and they seemed to be made entirely of technology. Screens, control panels, pieces of equipment, workstations, all of it ringing a large, open space. In each corner was a huge pillar of technology covered in strips of glass that all were glowing a deep green.
One of them was pulsing rapidly.
These must be the cells, she realized.
The place looked clear, though. "Okay...let's get to work."
"Yep," Powell replied, already making his way along the wall to the immediate right of the door, where the malfunctioning cell resided. Kyra and Collins followed after him, keeping a sharp eye out for anything that might be around, but she could see nothing. She couldn't help but feel that she was missing something though. But what? All this shit was starting to get to her. After waking up on fucking Europa, going through three derelict bases and Hell twice, then dropping in feet first to Hell on Earth and now being shoved on a transport and flown straight to motherfucking Antarctica, it was a bit much.
And certainly just the beginning.
What darker depths of hell was she going to have to drill into before this was over?
Powell reached the cell and immediately ripped a toolkit off the wall, dropped to his knees, and began his work.
The timer was down to fourteen minutes now.
"You seeing anything?" Kyra muttered as she and Collins took up sentry duty.
"If I had, you'd definitely be hearing about it," he replied, and the unease in his voice was obvious as well.
Being surrounded by green-lit mist and corpses probably wasn't helping, but she wasn't sure if she was just being paranoid or something was actually going on.
Kyra let another minute go by before speaking up. "Talk to me, Powell."
"Good news," he replied, "it's an easy fix."
"What's the bad news?"
"There is none. I'm fixing it now. Just need to replace two simple parts, I'm halfway done with the first one."
"Hmm."
Kyra would normally chalk the paranoia up to just that: paranoia. But now when something felt too easy, it was possible that it had actually just worked out, or that the semi-omniscient intelligence behind this invasion, whatever the fuck it was, might be playing with you. So which one was it? She carefully checked the chamber over.
There didn't seem to be anything but-
Kyra froze as she heard a very slight sound overhead. She looked up.
The breath left her lungs.
"Nobody. Make. A sound," she said quietly. "Powell, don't stop working. Collins, look up."
He looked up and she heard him gasp.
Overhead, what she must have initially mistook for...something else, she wasn't sure what, had to be dozens of those spider things.
The skull spiders.
They were suspended from the ceiling, largely immobile, and she thought they must be sleeping. Jesus fucking shit they'd walked into a nest of the motherfucking things. Maybe, if they were very careful, they could get this done without-
Somewhere in the room, a loud alarm chime sounded, and it seemed to be the loudest noise on Earth right then.
"Fuck!" Kyra screamed as hundreds of dark black eyes snapped open and immediately the army of skull spiders began to stir.
"What?!" Powell snapped.
"Just keep working! We've got your back!" she replied.
He didn't respond and presumably just kept working. Kyra and Collins raised their weapons. The skull spiders began to fall into the room and over them like a rain. She managed to get a single lucky shotgun blast off, pulverizing two of the things and turning them into free-flying chunks of gore. And then they were all over her and she had to deal with the skin-crawling horror of that. Even with the armor it was a fucking nightmare. One of them latched all eight of its bony legs around her helmet, snapping its alien jaw right in front of her faceplate. She heard Collins shouting in rage and probably fear and heard Powell let out a yell of surprise.
"What the fuck!?" he snapped.
For a few seconds she felt blind with panic. Then training and instinct reasserted themselves, she grabbed the body of the one wrapped around her helmet in one armored hand, and squeezed. It burst into a dark, gory pulp and she tore the remains of it from off of her. With a jerk, she knocked one on her arm loose and blasted it with the shotgun when it landed on the floor. Working fast, she smashed her fist against her armored chest, catching another and half-crushing it. With another violent twist, she wrenched yet another off her back, turned around, and stomped on it as hard as she could. She saw two were on Powell and he was no longer working.
Cursing, she grabbed one, got a good hold on it, and flung it across the room. Then she straight up punched the other as it crawled across his back.
"Keep working!" she snapped.
They had barely eight minutes left.
As the skull spiders continued their assault, letting out horrifying little shrieks of menacing rage, the alarm began to cycle faster. Kyra turned her shotgun on the spiders as they hit the floor all around them and scuttled for her. Collins seemed to be holding his own against them, so she went to work and pumped out the remaining seven shells, blasting away as many of the upside-down skull bastards as she possibly could.
There were too many of them and they were moving too quickly for a proper reload. So she stomped on another one, crushing it to demon pulp, as she pulled out her pistol and opened up. Collins was screaming in rage, smashing and stomping and blasting away with everything he had. She pumped rounds into the spider things as they crawled forward, some leaping at her. She made a fist and punched one directly in its deformed face as it leapt right at her, letting out a disturbingly deep, guttural growl before it died.
"Powell! Sit-rep!" she shouted as her pistol ran dry and she hastily reloaded.
"Halfway!" he shouted back.
She glanced briefly at her clock. They were below five minutes now. Shit. The alarm was cycling even faster. The next several minutes passed in a blur of frenetic, frenzied activity. She blasted through two more magazines and stomped, bashed, and threw too many of the bastard monsters, desperately trying to keep them from Powell as he worked with a silent intensity. By the time the last one was blasted to hell, her armor was giving her damage warnings. Panting, she hastily reloaded her pistol, holstered it, then frantically reloaded her shotgun.
"Powell?!"
"Done," he replied abruptly.
All at once, the alarm cycle died and lights that had begun flashing red at some point faded. A loud humming noise that had begun to fill the air now drifted off until it, too, disappeared. She turned around and looked at the tube. The bright green lights behind the glass were no longer flaring. Powell was closing up a panel.
"Will it hold?" she asked, willing her pulse to relax.
"Should," he replied. "It will for sure for the next day or so."
"Good enough," she said, then looked at Collins. "Good?"
"Fine," he grunted, looking unhappily at his left arm. She frowned as she saw a crack in the armor there. Damn, those things could get a strong grip if given the proper opportunity. She'd been lucky. They'd all been lucky.
Kyra activated the radio. "This is Morgan to anyone, come back. Now." She waited. Nothing but static. "Goddamnit!" she snapped. "Come on, let's go. We need to get over to Command Control and figure out what the fuck is going on over there."