“We have a ways to go, Theo. You understand?”
“Yes.”
Maria took a breath. She never saw herself as the nurturing kind of woman. And she was pretty sure that kids weren’t in her future. Now she tried to think what would reassure this boy, who had seen so much that was beyond belief, beyond understanding.
“You just stay nice and close, okay?” She gave his shoulder a slight squeeze. “We’ll be all right.”
But she didn’t believe that at all.
The shrieking of the floating heads, yammering at Kane, became just one more thing to ignore. He quickly found out that a shotgun blast sent them flying away like balloons that had air escaping.
But the others below, the ones that now saw his arrival—different story there.
He realized too that he was in so much pain now that he didn’t give a damn how much more pain he felt. Just add it to my plate, he thought.
Kane saw that the humans, the wretched creatures being plucked from the stone corral, looked up at him. Were they beyond hope? Did they think that they could survive, could be…saved? Does anyone ever really come back from hell?
He moved down the stone hill, strange gases shooting up, spraying him with a near-scalding steam.
Fuck it, he thought. Just keep moving.
He kept telling himself one thing: the chair was empty. Whatever, whoever, occupied that chair was gone. And that might be the best goddamned chance he had.
He didn’t let that other thought sink in, the one that was really just too absurd to think about: that what he was doing might shape the fate of humanity.
For now, this was simply the thing that had to be done, the mission, the goddamned operation—that’s all. And if there was one thing he knew about himself, once he signed on to a mission, he succeeded or he’d die trying.
Axelle. Kneeling in the great opening. Knowing now that this had once been a massive ceremonial hall, a place of science and religion for all those who lived here, back when Earth was still a toxic sea.
The sounds somehow clarifying, not into words but into images, nearly hallucinogenic in their clarity, their intensity. For the first time, she saw them, the beings who once called this home.
The sudden tears made her eyes go blurry. To see them, the first human to know that there was a time when others were here, and to know what they looked like…
Would she ever be able to tell people of their faces, the somewhat humanoid shape, but also so distinct, eyes and mouth never seen before? The way their limbs moved, as if each were saying—
No! she realized with a jolt. That movement was part of the way they communicated. And still—with only images and icons and feelings and flashes of the scene—they who were gone, who had vanished from here, quickly tried to tell Axelle their story.
She knelt there still, as if in prayer. Listening, and then wondering—
When they are done, whatever will I do with all they told me?
39
“NO,” SWANN MOANED. “MY GOD—”
Campbell backed up, the BFG ready in one hand and a shotgun in the other. They each had a few grenades. He looked at what came into the room, flanked by a small squad of other creatures, each seven, eight feet tall, with guns molded to their shoulders.
“Campbell, we have to get—”
“Shut the fuck up, Swann.”
The thing leading the squad roared to stop. One for the books, Campbell thought. The books of the perpetually insane and demented.
It was nothing less than a small tracked vehicle, a near-tank whose turret, as one moved up to it, resolved into the shape of a human. They were one thing, one being. And worse: Campbell knew who the being was. Or rather—used to be.
Sergeant Kelly—who had been the last bulwark stopping the hordes from Delta from getting through to the rest of the complex. Now, quite obviously, turned into one of them.
Not just one of them. Maybe there was some kind of twisted status in that Kelly was like this: part machine, part fucking tank, and part marine turned zombie. All these insane thoughts in an instant.
And in the next instant, Campbell started firing the BFG as rapidly as he could.
UAC HEADQUARTERS
Ian Kelliher knew that something bad was happening. He watched as his team tried to stop the transmission, but—whether due to fail-safe procedures or whether the system had somehow locked—the transmission continued.
At the same moment he could see the warnings about power surges throughout the UAC buildings, and then messages appeared warning about frequency spikes being sent out of the building.
The UAC network was probably more secure, more protected than even that used by the Pentagon. And yet—at this moment of transmission—signals filled with power surges, massive data packets, and who knew what else had simply…left the building.
Where the hell had they gone? Could they even find out? What was in them?
But soon his attention snapped back to the scene in the lab, the frantic scientists running around, and now the other chamber, glowing, the golden Labrador about to reappear. The test that caused all the protections of the fabled UAC network to fail…and allowed something to get out.
Kelliher felt sick. Instinctively he put a hand up to his mouth. He didn’t want to see what would appear. But he knew he had to look.
And yes, the lab would get all the data from the “experiment.” They might be able to analyze what had happened on Mars, what was still happening.
Something started to appear in the chamber.
Kelliher thought: Have to contact the President. The fool. And Hakala. Need to speak to him. Need to plan, oh God, need to plan.
The chamber filled with the familiar yellow-red glow.
The scientists, knowing that they had been too late to stop the transmission, now gathered near the chamber.
The scientists and Kelliher waited. Because in seconds, they’d all be able to see what had just been sent across the room, traveling the distance that they knew somehow changed the teleportation process.
It was a countdown of a different kind. One he wished would never end.
But then—on the screen—he could see…
Maria stopped. Two of the commando zombies, armed with standard US Space Marine issue, started raising their guns even as they walked toward them.
Maria did two things fast: she looked down at Theo. If he bolted it could be a bad thing. But he stayed by her side, his eyes looking dead ahead at the lumbering creatures.
Then she quickly looked back to make sure that there weren’t other things trying to get them in a trap. She couldn’t see anything behind her….
She did notice two small trites crawling in and out between the legs of the zombies. Could that mean there was one of the larger spiders around somewhere?
She waited just a second until their guns looked ready to fire, and then she pulled Theo to the right. The blasts from the zombies sprayed the center of the corridor with shells. Now Maria began firing, one-handed, drilling holes in the skulls of the things, sending sprays of whatever passed for blood and brain into the air.
“Close your eyes, Theo!” she shouted above the blasts.
The spider things started shrieking. A warning? Panic?
The trites were harder to hit as they started racing down the hallway, caroming off the sides crazily to avoid being hit. They behaved smarter than the zombies—that is, unless something out of sight was controlling them.
But when they crisscrossed, their tactical maneuver bringing them into the center of the hallway, she could target the center and have a good chance of hitting one. Which she did, and one trite exploded under the barrage.
The other kept up its crazy jumps back and forth. But now Maria could concentrate on just that one. And with only meters left separating them, she finally started hitting the protrusion atop the spiderlike carapace.
The trite slid to a stop, motionless at their feet.
She took a breath, and then looked down at
Theo. “You can open your eyes now.”
He looked up at her. “I never closed them.”
She nodded, thinking that the boy had been changed by everything he’d seen. And where will those changes lead?
“Ready to go on?”
He nodded, and Maria, her hand still on his shoulder, led them down the hallway.
The mass of creatures, the mix of zombies and demons, the things shaped like a land walrus, slow and dull but deadly, the floating skull heads, shrieking and snapping—
They all acted to stop Kane, though maybe what was happening was unexpected. The idea that someone would actually get here.
Surprise, surprise.
Amid his blasts, the satisfying hits that ripped holes in the things and sent others flying backward, Kane shot out a section of the hellish corral, and the humans—gibbering, insane probably, but still human—started crawling out.
More confusion for these guardians of the Soul Cube.
The confusion was good, helping Kane reach the cube. He scrambled up the last few feet, dodging blasts from the demons with their small cannons molded to their upper torsos.
Maybe it was his lack of fear, the fact that nothing he saw could scare him. Or perhaps it was his sense from so many battles on Earth that surprise can indeed be everything. Maybe it was the lucky break of freeing the crazed beings, the human food, the living morsels they fed upon, that probably somehow powered them.
Or perhaps it was all three of those things.
But Kane now reached the stone chair, molded to fit a massive creature that wasn’t there—and beside it, the Soul Cube.
He grabbed it. And in that moment he felt its power. The responsibility. The cries. The sacrifice of millions. All funneled into this item that stopped the invasion from hell last time.
Kane spun around quickly. Some of the freed humans looked at him for help. They could be a liability. But if being human meant anything, it was the ability to care for others, to give a damn for your fellow creatures.
The defenders of this cavern swirled around him in confusion, easy targets. Kane tried to say the words to the freed humans: Follow me.
But his mouth was too dry, with only the dusty taste of his own salt, blood spatters, and who knew what else.
When he started moving back to the opening, it was more than clear to those few humans left what they should do.
For Axelle, the terrible story was clear. The proud and wonderful Martian race sacrificing itself, channeling all its power, what we would call their “souls,” into this device that was part extraordinary weapon and part fantastic mystical device. They all had to do it so that it could be wielded by one of them, one lone hero. Each and every one, feeding the weapon.
Abandoning their planetary existence to stop this. To seal the evil away with this ward of psychic power that was a million years—if not more—beyond our comprehension.
A sacrifice for the ages.
And the images and sounds that filled her head told her that, with the cube removed, gone and taken back to the other universe, there was no hope.
Ahead, she could see the reflected glow. The opening, the massive open wound that would lead to the place of monsters and madness.
And then Axelle had one hopeful thought: I have survived until now, in this nether region between Mars and some death universe. It has to have been for a purpose….
Such a human delusion, a voice inside her head suggested.
But she pushed that voice away and clung to the thought, delusion or not.
40
UAC HEADQUARTERS
WHAT WAS ONCE A GOLDEN LABRADOR RETRIEVER was now yet another new creature that had never been seen before. The lower jaw protruded as if it had—Pinocchio-like—grown, curving up like the maw of a prehistoric creature.
And there, on the dog’s back, another opening, a two-foot-long gash lined with teeth, opening and shutting, each shutting signaled by a terrible snap.
The dog’s paws now three-toed claws, each ending in perfectly curved hooks.
The dog reared up and began to scratch at the chamber wall. All the scientists recoiled. The chamber wall should be able to resist nearly anything. But for a second it looked as if this thing might smash through the explosive-resistant polymer material. And wouldn’t that be fun?
“Kill it,” Ian Kelliher ordered. “Kill the damn thing now.”
They had a number of different methods to do that, but the lead scientist in the lab down below went for the most direct method. He threw a switch, and the chamber became filled with electric spikes dancing around, spearing and skewering the monstrosity until it finally stopped its incessant clawing at the chamber wall. And lay down, dead.
Nobody said or did anything for a moment.
Then Dr. Adoni said: “Sir, we got all the data. We can begin—”
Kelliher shut off the audio.
They got all the data. But in that moment, the very moment of the transmission, something was sent out of the lab…and around the world. To where, to how many places, and God, what was it that was sent?
Kelliher sat in the room, the screens now all quiet. And planned what he had to do next.
The radio was on, and Campbell could hear the chatter in his ear.
But above that he heard the clanking of the treads that were now the tanklike lower part of Sergeant Kelly’s body.
He started firing, sending a steady spray of the massive shells at the rolling monstrosity.
And the thing could still speak as Kelly screamed with each blast that hit it, yelling above the blasting gun, “Master Sergeant Thomas Kelly…reporting for duty!”
“Jeezus,” Swann said.
“Fire your damn gun,” Campbell ordered.
Campbell leveled the BFG right at Sergeant Kelly’s head when he was blindsided by a shell that hit his left shoulder, the blast sending him flying to the ground.
Something to the side, he thought. I wasn’t watching. Must have come at me when I wasn’t looking….
Now he could see what it was: one of the tall demons, guns on its shoulders. It could have kept firing, but it stood there, waiting.
The treads kept clacking away, closer. The voice, again, “Master Sergeant Thomas Kelly…reporting for duty!”
Campbell noticed that Swann was beside him, dead. Didn’t even hear that blast, Campbell thought. He tried to raise the BFG, but now it was too heavy.
And he knew why the demon just loomed over him, waiting. He was Kelly’s to kill.
Campbell tried once again to move the gun, and then he tried to dig out his handgun. He felt his fingers touch the gun handle, and then the tanklike tracks stopped. And then the blasts from Kelly made everything vanish.
Maria walked with the boy out to Reception, and everyone standing there turned and looked at her.
For a minute she wondered if they might think that she was one of them. Her face was spattered with blood, and Theo’s clothes were in tatters, his eyes hollow. She stood there and waited. Would they just stare at her, stand there—and goddamn it, that’s all?
But a soldier walked over to her. He looked from Maria to the boy, then back to her eyes. What stories do my eyes tell? she thought. Are the nightmares so easily read in my eyes?
Then the soldier turned and bellowed at the waiting crowd. “Medical, get the hell over here.” He turned back to Maria and Theo, speaking to both of them. “It’s going to be okay. You’re safe now. It’s all going to be all right.”
Words of reassurance.
And Maria didn’t have the energy left to tell him how hollow those words sounded.
Kane climbed back to the opening, taking care to retrace his steps. And with every creature he killed he saw how the artifact he carried, the Soul Cube, glowed, as if the death of these things powered it.
And when one of the guardian creatures tried to attack Kane, he could fire the cube at it, watching the way a starlike burst sliced into the creature. The guardian screamed out at the contact, and reared back
as the ancient weapon cut into it.
The humans Kane had freed scrambled to keep up with him. But he couldn’t pause to help them. They had to get out on their own, because what he had to do was more important.
He tried not to wonder if Delta would still be guarded when he came out. Could he go from Delta, and leave Mars City, to take the Soul Cube back to where it belonged? Did he have enough time, enough energy, left to do that?
He turned again to fire at creatures scrambling after him. As each one fell, and the cube began to glow stronger, they seemed to hold back. If something was going to stop him, it wouldn’t be them.
The cave—alive with voices—took on a deeper glow as a swirling vortex appeared before Axelle and like an iris began to open.
The voices in Axelle’s mind screamed out with each widening of the bloodred iris.
There’s nothing I can do, Axelle wanted to say. I can only watch this. And she knew what it was. She knew that before her eyes, the ancient opening to hell was being reborn.
What would come through that opening?
Kelliher repeated the name…“Campbell?”
There was no answer from Mars City, though the radio communications were up and running. General Hayden tried again to speak to Kelliher, and again Kelliher let the general’s voice hang in the air unanswered.
Then: “Karla, do you have the President’s office?”
“Yes, sir. Just waiting on you, then they will patch you through directly to the President.”
“Good. Let’s do it.”
Kelliher wondered how the President would react when he heard what Kelliher would ask for, what he wanted to happen to his dream for the UAC—his dream really for the future of humanity—Mars City.
He waited, and then an image of the President appeared, already looking as though he knew something really bad was ahead.
“Mr. President…” Kelliher began.
41
KANE REACHED THE OPENING, THE PORTAL that led back to Delta. He could see that it now seemed smaller, as though with time it were losing energy. Only temporary—soon to be replaced with something more permanent. If he let that happen.
Doom 3™: Maelstrom Page 18