Kyra appeared in a cloud of green mist that immediately sent her into a coughing fit.
Her internal alarms instantly started ringing as she looked around, sensing danger, or at least that something had gone very wrong. Details came to her as the bright green mist slowly faded from the air. She was in a lengthy, tall, broad room, something that vaguely reminded her of a huge dining hall in a castle for some reason. The walls were layered, alternating between generic tan rock and what seemed to be brown wooden paneling along the middle. The floor was tan brickwork and the ceiling above was too lost to shadows to tell what it was.
It was what was splattered along the walls and the floor that really caught her eye. As the last of the green mist faded, Kyra finally put together what the hell had happened as she spied the remains of a lot of metal bits and a lot of gory bits and even more blood mixed in with green toxic waste. Judging from the sheer amount of waste and metal pieces, it seemed that this whole place must've been filled with those explosive forty gallon drums, and judging by the bits and pieces of bodies, it also seemed that there were a lot of some kind of demons around.
And...judging by the blasted, shredded remains of a suit of armor and some gear, including part of a torso and a thoroughly wrecked, charred plasma rifle, it seemed that Weldon had stepped right into the situation and either blasted on instinct or just been blasted by a stupid Imp or zombie. The end result was the same: she was gone.
Kyra felt a sick anger, boiling and bubbling, rising inside of her as she stared at Weldon's remains. She could taste her rage. There was nothing to do but swallow that bitter bile and move on, maybe put it to use as fuel when her tank was running low. And it was. Io and Hell and Antarctica had really taken it out of her, and here she was again, in the one place she didn't want to be most in the whole universe. Kyra laughed bitterly.
Except it wasn't in the universe, was it?
She shook her head and clamped down, forcing herself to focus. If she didn't focus she was going to wind up as dead as Weldon. She started looking around. There was nothing behind her but the teleport she'd come in on and a wall with more charred demon bits. She ignore it and started moving down the lengthy room, keeping an eye out for anything dangerous. There seemed to be an open doorway at the far end, and it was her only option at the moment.
As she walked, she tried her radio. "This is Staff Sergeant Kyra Morgan to anyone. Can anyone in the vicinity hear me?" she asked.
A burst of static made her heart leap and she thought she could hear a voice in it, but it was far too indistinct to make out.
"Negative copy on your response," she said. "Please repeat."
Another burst of static and what sounded like someone shouting, but again, it was so garbled and distant that she wasn't even sure she wasn't just hearing things. Abruptly, the signal cut out and she was left with dead air.
"Great," she muttered, coming to the end of the long room. It terminated in a smaller room designed much the same way, built around a single teleport pad.
Well, it wasn't like she had much in the way of options.
Kyra stepped aboard. In a flash, she was in another place.
A place of pure death, just waiting to happen.
She stood frozen on the platform, staring around her, afraid even to move her eyeballs. She had come to a smaller room that was designed roughly the same as the previous one, in more ways than one. It was packed with explosive forty gallon barrels. The dirty gray ridged metal drums surrounded her, but so did something even worse.
Barons of Hell.
There were three of them from what she could see, two to her left, one to her right. There might be another one behind her for all she knew, she was still too terrified to actually move. After several seconds of nothing happening, listening to the heavy breathing all around her, Kyra finally forced herself to start moving. How had they not noticed her? Maybe the flash of light was just from her perception? No, she remembered seeing it when someone else teleported in behind her. Maybe it just didn't register to them?
She began to do a slow check of the room around her and picked up on several things. The first was that there were actually five Barons, two more were behind her. The second was that the only way out was a hallway ahead of her that seemed to terminate in a room cast in metal. The third was that there appeared to be openings in the hallway, three to either side, and out of them stuck what were unmistakably chainguns.
They shifted occasionally, which meant they had to be Chaingunners.
How in the holy fuck was she going to survive this one?
After a full minute (that felt like an entire month) she finally determined that there was only one hope of survival, beyond trying to step off and back onto the teleport and going back, which might not even be an option. She knew for a fact some of them were one way and she'd rather not find out the hard way about this one.
No, she was going to have to run for that far room at the end of the hall. If she timed it right and was very lucky, then one of the creatures would attack her with either bullets or balls of energy and set off a chain reaction with all the barrels around. Or, if she actually managed to make it there and it hadn't happened yet, she could do it herself. That was, provided, she could survive such a reaction, and there was nothing waiting for her in the room.
It seemed empty, but it might not be.
She took a few deep breaths, studying her path. There was a relatively clear shot straight to the room between the barrels.
Okay, no way to do it but to just do it, and maybe die.
She ran.
A chorus of roars went up as everything in the room became aware of her at once. Kyra ignored them all as she heard snarling and stomping, then more roaring and the spooling up of chainguns as she hit the hallway and kept bolting. And then it happened. Just as she came into the room and did a quick sweep of it, finding it was indeed empty, (save for a teleport pad), an explosion occurred. Then another. And another.
A whole symphony of explosions touched off one after another and she could barely hear the roaring of the dying demons as she watched them burst in clouds of green mist. She pushed herself as far back into the small room as she could, praying the explosions didn't get her, and they didn't, stopping short of the threshold.
Kyra breathed a sigh of relief. She stared into the toxic mist, waiting, gun raised to see if anything had survived. While she was waiting, she jerked in surprise as her radio sprung to life.
"This is Carpenter to anyone, I need some assistance!"
Holy shit, Carpenter had made it! Kyra immediately responded, seeing that it was the short-wave, which meant he had to be relatively nearby. He was coming in strong enough. "This is Morgan, I hear you Carpenter, where are you!?"
"I'm in some kind of big, open room with a lot of openings along the walls and shitload of demons. I'm holding my own for now but there's a lot of them. I think my locator is busted," he explained against a background of chaingun fire.
"I'll try to find you, stay alive!"
"Working on it!"
Kyra hurried over to the teleport and stepped on. She reappeared in another very long room that still had the same design, although it was narrower and for some reason the floor was stairs leading to basically nothing but a wall. There were some more barrels around, though not nearly enough to be truly threatening, and no demons this time. With a heavy sigh, she started running down the length of the room. She could see a button on the far wall and right now it was her only lead. She got to it and punched it.
Immediately to her left, a section of the entire length of the wall lowered, while something else beyond it grinded up into place. She kept her weapon at the ready, trying to determine exactly what had happened, and finally put the pieces together. She was looking down on the room that she had initially teleported into and found Weldon's remains in. The wall opposite her was now open as well, revealing another lengthy room overlooking the initial one, and the thing that had grinded up into place acted as a platform connecting the two.
Why this had happened or why it was set up like this, she had no idea, nor cared. Kyra jogged across the platform, hit the other side, and started running back down it. There was another teleport at the end, she could see. She had no idea if it might lead to sudden doom or even in the right direction but at the moment it was still her only option and another survivor was alive and in danger. Without hesitation, she stepped onto it and snap-flashed into another location.
She was at the end of an open-faced corridor. It was broad, largely featureless, and, best of all, she heard gunfire coming from up ahead. Running down the short corridor, she came to its end and found several things, only one of them good.
The corridor opened up into a massive, almost arena-like area with no roof and walls of tan rock. Its floor was bubbling lava and at its center was an island of stone, raised maybe thirty feet up off the lava, with half a dozen rock pathways leading away from it and into the walls surrounding it, one of which led to the alcove she had appeared in.
Carpenter was on that island, fighting for his life. He seemed to have killed everything on the ground, a slew of dead zombies, Imps, and Demons surrounding him, and was now contending with a pair of pumpkins. Kyra ran forward, wielding her AB-10 Machine Pistol and calling out that she was on approach. She opened fire and the spray of bullets that came pouring out of the machine pistol managed to pop one of the floating one-eyed bastards. She shifted aim and skidded to a halt as she got onto the island and together they managed to kill the second one. As the two of them reloaded, looking around for reinforcements, Carpenter groaned.
"I'm definitely too old for this," he muttered.
"How old are you?" Kyra asked.
He sighed heavily. "Ninety two."
"Wow, you look pretty good for ninety two."
He laughed. "Perk of having access to top-tier medical services. I've got another couple of good decades in roughly the same shape, theoretically...have you seen anyone else?" he asked.
"Weldon, but she didn't make it. Otherwise no," Kyra replied.
"Damn. Could've used the help." He looked up at the sky overhead. "You know I never actually came here? Never wanted to. Had this fear...like I'd be tainted somehow. I don't know, everyone who went, even the good guys, came back a little different." He sighed again. "I guess it doesn't really matter now, huh?"
"No, not really," Kyra replied. "Are you injured?"
"Feel like dirt but I'm okay. I can still fight," he said, hefting his assault rifle.
"Perfect. Now the question becomes...where the fuck do we go?" she asked, looking around.
"Well, we can mark two of these pathways off the list for sure," he replied, pointing. "I came from that one. There was a little store of guns and ammo there, thankfully, but otherwise nothing. I checked out that one and it just dead-ends after awhile. How about the one you came from?"
"Dead-ends," she replied, looking back at it.
"Which leaves us with three other choices," he muttered, looking at the other paths.
She stared at them along with him for a moment. They all looked equally appealing. With a sigh, she set off down the left one. "I guess we start here." She paused suddenly and looked back at him as something occurred to her. "Are you comfortable with me taking operational command?"
"Yeah, you've more than proved yourself and I've had a gutful of goddamned command decisions. Take control with my blessing," he replied.
"I hear you," she said, turning back around and setting off again. At least that was sorted out easily enough.
The path led into a really tall, long passageway made of that tan cobblestone. Big, octagonal pillars ran down the center of the hallway, which curved to the left. As they began to head down it, Carpenter looked around, scrutinizing the strange architecture of the place.
"So...I don't suppose you've figured out what all this shit is about?" he asked.
"What do you mean? The invasion?" she replied.
"No. I mean, well, if you know-"
She shook her head. "No fucking clue. They just opened portals and started pouring out and murdering the shit out of everyone in sight. No demands issued, no nothing. They don't even seem to be doing anything except for murder and apparently, somehow, reworking portions of our world into their own. Although…"
"What?"
"Blair. I don't know. I really wished we could've got something out of him. Because either he was being controlled, or he had been bribed with something, both of them suggest a level of intelligence beyond everything I've seen so far. But what were you asking?"
"All of this, this place, the buildings, the bricks. I mean, this right here, this hallway we're walking down, clearly it was made somehow. I've seen candles around. Who keeps them lit? Why is any of this?" he asked.
"I also have no clue," Kyra replied. "I mean at this point you had far more access to the data than I did."
"Yeah, but you were here. Not on some expedition or patrol, but knee-deep in their guts, wandering anywhere that looked like it made sense. Unless I got the wrong impression from your explanation."
"No, I mean, pretty much. But no, I never found anything to suggest an explanation. I don't know if we'll ever get one. This place is so huge." She sighed as they ran out of hallway and it led nowhere. "Why is this even here?"
"Maybe it made sense to whoever built it?" Carpenter replied, looking around.
"Maybe but I doubt it. Come on, let's try the next one."
They retraced their route, moved back onto the island, and headed down the second path. This one led into another area of brown-tan brick. As she surveyed the area, Kyra got the impression that this hallway they were in now was wrapped around a central room. Also an octagon. What was it with these assholes and octagons?
They broke right and worked their way around the central room, finding signs of old battle. Long-dried blood, a dead Imp that looked like it'd had its throat ripped out, a zombie crucified to a wall.
"All right, that's creepy," Carpenter muttered.
"Yeah. Don't know why they crucify. If it's just something that naturally occurs to them or if it's because, you know, they're really demons."
"That's a far creepier thought."
"What was your thought?" she asked as they approached the corpse.
"This invasion has been going on for, what, a few days? UAC's been doing expeditions for about a year. This corpse looks old, so, not from the invasion. Unless they shrivel up faster in this dimension for some reason. Which means he must be some poor bastard who got snatched from an expedition weeks or even months ago, and look at all the cuts on him...they had him for awhile before they finally nailed him to the wall. And more than that...why here?" He looked around. "There's nothing special here. No alter, no signifying markers, nothing. It's just a brick hall."
"Maybe whoever made this place...their perception is different than ours. What makes sense to them, what matters to them, what's aesthetically significant to them is different."
"I mean it can't be that different," Carpenter said, "this is brickwork. I've seen masonry and there's doors around. Doorways and windows. Walls, flooring, ceilings."
"I imagine you'd be happy leading a scientific expedition if and when we get this under control," Kyra said as they continued.
"Oh Christ no, I'm never coming here again if I can manage it. Fuck this place."
Kyra laughed. As they reached the opposite side of the passageway, they found a door that led into the room the hallway was wrapped around. It was open, and dark inside. She could just make out a pillar taking up most of the interior, creating yet another octagonal corridor within wrapping around the central pillar.
"Careful," she murmured, flipping on her flashlight as they approached. The machine pistol felt too small in her grasp and she was glad Carpenter had an assault rifle. He aimed left and she aimed right. Both sections of the hallway were empty. "There's probably something either inside that pillar or around behind it."
"You sure?"
"Mostly. That's the other thing that bugs me: there's a lot of traps."
"Great. Do we split up or not?"
"No, we're both going-"
She broke off as they heard sudden movement. Snorting and heavy stomping, and then like a pink tide a group of the big bulldog demon bastards came around from behind the pillar and made for them. There had to be a dozen of the roaring demons. Kyra cursed as she opened fire, pouring lead into the wide maw of the lead one and popping the back of its skull. It went down but the others just trampled the corpse, bones breaking and leathery skin ripping open as their powerful feet smashed into it. Kyra emptied the weapon and reloaded, then emptied it once more, bringing down another pair and injuring a third.
Carpenter was firing away with his assault rifle, set to burst fire. He was quick and accurate, impressively so, and not just because he was into his nineties but because he must've kept up training and drills even after leaving the military. She reloaded one more time and together, they managed to kill the rest of the Pinkies as they were getting too close for comfort. The last one fell at their feet as they reloaded.
Kyra was down to her last magazine now.
"Bet they were guarding something," she said as she cautiously reentered the darkened area.
"I hate these things," Carpenter muttered, following. "Saw one take a guy's arm off during the invasion of the base. Ate it whole, there was so much blood…"
"Yeah, they're pretty sick."
They came around to the back of the smaller octagonal hallway and, sure enough, there was a blue skull-key laying on the floor. Kyra snagged and pocketed it, and they began heading back.
"That looks a bit like the keycards we use," Carpenter said as they got back to the island.
"They basically operate the same way," Kyra replied. They took the final path and made their way carefully through the rooms it attached to. They seemed somehow saner and more reasonable compared to everything else, and soon they found signs of UAC habitation. At first it was a few empty crates, then the remains of some old meals, and in the last room, which had to be opened with the skull-key, an actual tiny outpost.
"Thank God," Carpenter muttered.
Kyra did a quick sweep of the room and then immediately set to work on the only intact workstation left. Carpenter began hunting around for supplies while Kyra, after checking the power levels on her suit, attached it to the workstation and brought it to life. After a few moments of navigating sluggish menus and finding a tremendous amount of corrupted data, she finally managed to locate an uplink to a communications tower there in Hell with them.
"This is Staff Sergeant Morgan to anyone, can you hear me? Over."
There was a pause, and she prepared to repeat the message when there came a crackle of static and then a familiar voice sounded on the line. "This is Linaweaver, I hear you Morgan. What's your condition? Over."
"Oh thank Christ," she muttered, her relief immense. "I'm fine. Weldon is KIA, though, but I've found Director Carpenter. He's alive and kicking. Otherwise, we haven't seen anyone."
"Hey, holy shit, Kyra?!" another familiar voice said suddenly.
"Jack!? Are you all right? What's happening?"
"We got your message from Taggart! We came into Hell after you!" he replied, excited. "We got scattered but we're reuniting. Do you still have the data?"
"Yes! I have it," she replied.
"Where should we meet? We have to meet up...how are we going to navigate this fucking place?" Jack muttered.
"I have a solution," Linaweaver said.
"Oh. Sorry. I got a little excited," Jack replied.
"It's fine. I'm at a relatively intact UAC outpost right now. I've got access to a map of the region, or a partial one anyway. The point is, based on your comm signals, I can tell where you both are and where I am. We're a bit spread out, but there's a UAC Command Post in the region. I vote we meet there and figure out the next step. Anyone against this?"
"Sounds perfect to me," Jack replied.
"Yeah, I'm game," Kyra replied.
"Good. I'm sending over a data packet. Find your way there. Also, I found Falcheck, but there's been no sign of Powell so far. He might be dead, but he seemed pretty capable, so keep an eye out for him," Linaweaver said.
"Understood. We'll meet you there as soon as we can."
"Yep, we'll be there. Stay safe. And, um, Kyra...I'm glad you're okay," Jack said.
She laughed, hearing the awkwardness in his voice. How could he possibly be awkward about this? She shook her head. "Same to you. Is Jennifer there?"
"She's here, she's fine."
"I'm glad. See you there. Out."
"I found something, may be our way out of here," Carpenter said from across the room.
"Did you find any ammo or gear?" she replied as she finished downloading the data packet and studying it. It was a topographical map of a huge region. This was going to be a bit of a pain...then again, teleports were a thing.
"No, place is cleared out," he replied.
"Great." She joined him across the room and discovered a teleport tucked away in a tiny closet. They both stood there staring at it for a moment.
"Who goes first?" Carpenter asked.
"I'll do it. Give me a ten second count and then follow through," Kyra replied.
He nodded. "Good luck."
"Yep."
Kyra stepped aboard and vanished in a flash of light.