The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 41: Uplink

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?