She looked at Kane and gave him a smile. “And there you have the sum total of my knowledge about what they’ve been up to in Mars City. Not very helpful, is it?”
“Still, good to know what everyone was—Oh, wait!” He stopped at an intersection. “I’m guessing we go left?”
And left, Maria saw, was pitch-dark. Completely black.
29
KANE PEERED INTO THE DARKNESS THAT seemed to stretch forever. Infinite blackness.
“We’re going to need the lights,” he said. “To point out the obvious.” But his humor didn’t ease the tension he felt in Maria.
“I just wish we had some major lights. Guess they figured with all the emergency backup, these small things”—she dangled the flashlight, not much larger than her hand—“would be all we need.”
“At least we have them, and lots of batteries.”
“That’s not really what’s worrying me.”
Kane looked at her. “Go on.”
“If this whole area is dark, then the reactor, or at least the part dedicated to both main and backup power, is out. To get to Delta, we might have to see what the problem is. Got much experience with compact reactors?”
“Zero.”
“Ditto.”
“Our PDAs should have a basic schematic. Maybe instructions for an emergency shutdown or restart.”
Maria brought her PDA up, and in seconds she had cycled through a few menus before Kane could even look at his.
“Okay. There’s something here. Shows a reactor control panel. Might help. No choice anyway.”
“Great. Okay, lights on. And slowly. We don’t want any surprises down here.”
Kane would have insisted on taking the lead. But with Maria by his side, he knew better than to even suggest that.
Their steps echoed strangely in the dark corridor, as if the darkness itself made the sound carry farther, bouncing off the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
If anything was in there, Kane knew it would see and hear the two of them well before they could see it. He just had to hope that since they were traveling some back alleyway to Delta, it might be as deserted as it felt.
Funny thing about hope, he thought. Like a magic ability that can somehow keep you going.
Once, as they walked, he felt Maria’s right hand, holding her machine gun, just graze his left hand, which clutched the shotgun. The romance of weapons, he thought. Still, that little bit of human contact felt good.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice a whisper. No sense in adding to whatever alert the noise they made was sending out.
“Yeah. I’m okay.”
Their other hands each held one of the small flashlights, with their second weapon slung over a shoulder. They performed a rhythmic scan, moving the twin pools of light from the front, then to the side, and on up to the ceiling, over their heads, and down the other side.
Until their small beams came back to the starting position, facing directly ahead, and they started the pattern again. Their steps were slow so as not to outpace the scan of their lights. And so far the only thing they had seen was the smooth polished metal of the walls, ceiling, and floor. Ahead, though, Kane saw that they were slowly coming to an intersection.
He leaned toward Maria and whispered: “Do we go that way or—?”
She shook here head, and also kept her voice down. “No. We go straight. That’s another path to the new comm unit. There should even be a view of the outside from there, if I remember correctly.”
The outside… What time was it? Day, night? Did it matter?
“So we just go straight?”
Another nod from Maria.
They came to the intersection, and walked even more slowly as they neared it, almost creeping up to it. It would be a perfect spot for a surprise.
Kane edged out ahead of Maria and took the first look.
The corridor in either direction looked empty. But at the far end of the right corridor, he could see an observation area, probably for a visual inspection of the satellite towers.
The window was dark. Martian night. A faint glow at the line where the rocky landscape met the sky. The stars visible so brilliantly in the thin atmosphere of Mars. But he only permitted himself the slightest glance before quickly snapping to scan the front, the long corridor stretching ahead of them.
“At the end, there should be—according to my PDA—an entrance to the Delta Reactor Systems Control,” Maria said. “Used to be filled with workers.” Her voice was barely audible.
“So where are they all gone?”
“Good question.” She took a breath. “I’m afraid we might get the answer.”
Kane flexed his fingers. They took a few more steps.
Kane tapped Maria’s shoulder. “Slowly now…”
He didn’t like the way the narrow corridor they were in, almost a tube, opened up into something larger, something unseen. He couldn’t see the dimensions and shape of that room. It appeared dimly lit ahead, but way too dim.
He sensed Maria looking at him. “Keep your light on,” he said.
His own small tungsten lamp sent out a sharp spear of intense white light.
“What’s up, Kane? You know something you want to share?”
He looked at her, and he realized why his every nerve ending felt electric. He had walked through the complex; he’d been cornered, attacked, trapped, and nearly killed. Instinct was taking over.
He pointed to the path ahead. “This the only way to go?”
“Yes, unless you want to backtrack to the monorail. But I wouldn’t recommend—”
He held up his PDA. “And why does the schematic show nothing about the big space ahead?”
“We’re backing up to Delta. Neither your nor my clearance gets us that. Technically, we shouldn’t even be here.”
“So we’re close?”
“I didn’t say that. Just that whatever is behind the walls to our right is all Delta. Off-limits.”
“And the rear entryway?”
“Also off-limits. But I assume we’re not going to worry about that, right?”
Kane nodded. “Okay. So we go forward without knowing what’s ahead. Lights on—the light in the room ahead looks like it might give out any second.”
A click, and Maria shined her light up at her face.
“Starting to sound a lot like a lieutenant again, Kane.”
He smiled. Then: “Yeah, guess I am.”
They turned back to the corridor, to the open area just ahead, and with their lights cutting arcs back and forth, they were on the move again.
30
MARIA WALKED SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WITH Kane. Despite her jokes, his words had rattled her. She trusted his instinct, and her fingers were now a claw wrapped around the trigger of her gun.
Only a few steps, and they’d enter the large open area, next to the walls of the off-limits Delta Lab. Her flashlight caught what seemed to be dust floating in the air, like a musty attic just opened, the motes caught by the white lights, swirling and dancing in anticipation of their entry.
In between each step they took, she tried to listen for some noise that would indicate that something lay ahead. There was a distant, constant hum—some machine—but nothing else.
One more step and they’d be in the large open area. They took it together, crossing some magical threshold that would finally allow them to aim those lights up and look around.
“Oh, God,” Maria whispered.
Both her hands were full, but she wanted to grab Kane’s arm, hold it for dear life. “No,” she moaned.
Now her light moved along the walls slowly as she tried to take it all in, understand what they were seeing. At first glance, it looked as though the walls and ceiling themselves had melted as if made out of candle wax—melted, and then hardened in a flash.
But it was what was embedded in the “wax” that she made sense of only gradually, like an optical illusion. There were recognizable shapes: arms, legs, a bit of a head, an open mouth, the curve of a shoul
der sticking out.
The walls and ceiling were covered with bodies.
“Are they all dead?” she asked.
Kane’s light had stopped on one bulging shape—a head. Eyes wide open, mouth a small cavern, arms either missing or twisted backward into a shape that would have rendered them broken and useless.
“I’d say dead. Guess we could nudge one and see what happens.”
“Right,” Maria said. “You first. What did this to them?”
“Not sure I want to know the answer to that question.”
“Let’s keep walking.”
They brought their lights down and aimed them forward. Maria truly hoped that each one stuck on the wall was dead—because she didn’t know what she’d do if one suddenly stirred and came to life as she walked under it.
“Careful,” Kane said. He pointed his light down at the ground. Something wet, glistening, there. “Don’t step in that, whatever it is.”
“I’ve seen enough vids to know that,” she said, moving slightly to the left, away from Kane, as they both dodged the strange puddle and whatever had produced the leak above them.
Maria resisted the temptation to aim her light up and look.
The puddle continued, and Maria just wanted it to end so that they could walk through this cave in tandem. That would feel a whole lot better.
Then: a whistling noise, the pitch rising. Maria started to speak: “What the—”
A handgun, spinning through the air, smashed into her head and she went flying to the ground.
Her light rolled from her left hand, and she reached up to her forehead and felt blood. Kane knelt down to her. “Are you—”
And then what looked like the metal leg of a chair came flying through the air. She could see it, and yelled just as it was about to hit Kane. But that split second of warning was enough for Kane to dodge the worst of it. Still, the flying metal bar grazed his head and sent him staggering to the right, nearly into the wall of bodies.
Maria knew that she had only seconds to act, to get back up and find out what was attacking them and stop it.
She rolled onto her knees as what was the rest of the chair smashed down into the space where she had been reclining. Again, mere seconds separated her from a blow that would have killed her.
She wanted her light, but that would have taken precious seconds away from her next moves: getting the machine gun, aiming it forward, while her left hand ripped one of the grenades from her belt.
“You okay?” Kane yelled.
But before she could answer, a high-pitched wailing noise filled the space, a sound that brought tears to her eyes. Then a loud clack-clacking by something on the floor, and Maria waited until whatever was making the sound was finally caught by Kane’s light.
And the horror before her made her gag. She registered its form even as her finger pulled tight.
Like some prehistoric crustacean, or heavily armored spider—only grown to the size of a room. Its legs sliced at the air as they hurried to bring the thing closer.
Maria noticed her bullets ricocheting off those legs, perfectly uselessly.
But atop the carapace, a near-human torso, save for the head with its multiple eyes and the mouth-like opening that issued its shrieking scream like a weapon.
Maria backed up. A quick glance to Kane to see him doing the same. Both had moved into the puddle now, and somewhere the still rational part of Maria’s brain realized why it was wet.
This was the spot where it trapped any who came this way. That was why it was fresh, wet, glistening—
The chair leg rose from the ground before the thing. It began a batonlike twirl, and then started whizzing toward her. Maria leaned right, and the chair leg went careening crazily past her.
A blast, then another. Kane firing his shotgun. And Maria saw a chunk of the thing’s upper torso blow away. But it only seemed to make it scurry closer to them.
Then she remembered what she held in her left hand. A simple thumb movement released the safety and started the timer. More blasts from Kane, closer to the thing’s head this time. One of its pincer legs reared up and then—like some old-fashioned telescope expanding—it uncurled and took a cutting swipe at Kane.
That’s it, she thought. Keep looking at him. She rolled the grenade gently under the thing, not wanting to catch its attention. The spider creature had resurrected the chair and now sent it flying to Kane’s left. When he dodged it, he’d have to move close enough for that pincer to skewer him.
The grenade rolled, and for a second Maria thought it would hit a leg and bounce back, useless. But it went neatly between two of the stamping pincers, under the thing’s body.
Kane dodged the chair and fell into the wall. A front pincer started up.
And then the grenade exploded.
The explosion echoed weirdly in the room. Maria dug out a second grenade, thinking, If one didn’t stop it, then what the hell will another do?
But the explosion blew away some of the legs; one leg came rolling to a stop right before her feet. And the body seemed to split in two as the torso looked down and around as if it something mysterious had suddenly gone wrong.
The spiderlike thing had obviously lost interest in its attack on Kane. But Kane was now close enough to put his shotgun to good use. When the head of the thing looked up after its damage inspection, Kane fired two rounds right at the head, biting off great chunks as if it were some kind of dense fruit.
The torso began a spastic waving and shaking, until—finally—it was motionless.
31
INSIDE MARS
AXELLE—HER HELMET OFF—KEPT SUCKING IN THE tunnel air as if to prove to herself that it was in fact breathable. She detected a smell in the air—something metallic and sour—that made her gag.
But she could breathe it. She was alive, and—
She looked up at the cavern she had just entered, which kept growing wider and wider, so much so that her training in planetary geology told her that such an unsupported opening was—quite frankly—impossible.
And with every step she could see that the walls—all deeply lined with arabesque-like swirls merging into angular grooves and carvings—were beginning to glow even more.
She licked her lips. The taste of the air was even more vile than the smell.
She could see the walls glistening with a sheen of moisture. She stopped and looked back where she had come from, the path looking like an endless, ever narrowing umbilical leading back to what used to be Mars Excavation Site 3.
Not any longer. Axelle Graulich, lone survivor of the Martian Excavation Team, may have started in an excavation site, but this was someplace else.
Am I still on Mars? she wondered.
Another lick of her lips. She was thirsty, and even though she knew she had air to breathe here, how long before thirst started taking its toll on her. She picked up her PDA. No signal, of course. Nothing but the archived images and maps and information. The thing was useless here.
Still standing, she had the thought that somehow something was waiting for her at whatever the other end of this might be.
OUTSIDE DELTA LAB
Theo heard noises all around him. Screams, human screams, he thought. A terrible howling followed by silence as it ended. Until another screaming voice filled the halls here. And gunshots! So many sounds of bullets and explosions, until they too went quiet.
He mouthed a word, being careful not to say it. He just made the shape with his mouth, a silent puff of air….
Please…
And even though he had been so quiet, just standing there against a wall with bright light, he heard sounds. Steps.
Help is coming, he thought.
But it took only a moment to see how wrong he was.
INSIDE DELTA
MacDonald pressed the keys on his PDA, feverishly getting down everything that he thought he now knew. He understood what had happened. Yes, it was now all so clear. And even though he was curled up behind an overturned lab
table, hiding and unable to dictate into the PDA, he could still write.
And then…and then, when a radio signal came back, he could send the message, and let the world know what was really happening here.
And what could happen everywhere…
He paused for a second and tugged at his crotch. Hours ago he had urinated, when the mad parade of things streamed out of the portal, and MacDonald, unable to move, could just barely see them as they emerged to begin their conquest of Mars City.
Because that’s what it was like. He wrote that. An army. Conquest, and an ancient war begun again….
And maybe he alone understood what could be done, what might be done to stop this. If it wasn’t already too late. If it wasn’t already completely hopeless.
The gunfire had subsided from outside Delta Lab. The marines there now were all dead or transformed.
No, he wrote. Recruited. There was something about the human creatures turning into zombies that seemed voluntary. Did they have to…some way, somehow…want to become part of this army of horrors?
So many questions, but he kept tapping the keys, knowing that he might not have much more time to get it all down.
His fingers danced over the tiny keyboard.
Word after word, until:
“Dr. MacDonald. So good of you to remain here. With us.”
And MacDonald looked up to the master in charge of the Delta Labs—Dr. Malcolm Betruger, standing right over him.
BALLARD DEEP OCEAN RESEARCH LAB
David listened as Julie explained her observations to one of the new arrivals, Dr. Ati Watanabe.
“We’ve recorded the process, and it’s been replicated each time. No doubt in my mind….”
Watanabe looked at Julie more than at the 3-D loops on the screen, which showed the bacteria taking command of the tube worm host. Julie’s strong point never was dealing with peers. Watanabe seemed to be evaluating Julie.
“What she means, Dr. Watanabe—” David started to say, to present Julie’s point a bit more politically.
But Julie fired a look at him that said Back off, and she continued.
Doom 3™: Maelstrom Page 14
