Part I: The New Terror
Chapter I: Main Engineering
Video Game: Doom
By: LunaRoseAngel

"This is bulls***." Jack Ward growled darkly as he stalked through the bloody, flickering corridor. The shotgun was a dead, warm weight in his hand, as if surgically attached. It might as well have been.

"Aw, come on, babe. You telling me this isn't want you had in mind for our honeymoon?" Kyra Ward replied over the wraparound earpiece comms unit. He grinned briefly at her snide remark, keeping his eyes on the shadowed doorways, locked in the crimson trim of emergency lighting. He shifted his view intently to the double doors at the end, the hangar to his back. Getting in had been easy, getting in further might not be.

"Not quite. I was hoping to go to Hawaii." Jack replied. Something growled distantly, echoing through the ventilation system.

"Earth's overrun, remember?" Jack hesitated, mentally. He flashed back to their trip into Hell a year ago to kill what Kyra had so aptly named Baphomet. Returning to Hell on Earth had been fairly easy compared to burning into Hell Itself. Jack's theory had held true...for a little while. He had bought them a week before...something...regained control and the invasion continued. But by that time they had managed to save what was left of Humanity. Since then, they'd been spread across the stars, sparsely thinned across the solar system.

It made for crowded living, but the Human Race currently inhabited several mining colonies along the Belt, a few permanent installations on the Moon and several of Jupiter's Moon and Mars, and several hundred colonies orbiting Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Venus. That was all that was left, now. That was the legacy of mankind. With a total population count of roughly ten million. Jack tried to put the thoughts aside.

"Yeah, but we still own Hawaii, remember?" he asked, reaching the double doors at the end of the corridor. He tried them. Locked. He sighed.

"That's classified, remember?" Kyra replied. Jack chuckled.

"Come on, babe. There's no one here but us. This is cake, remember?" Kyra was silent.

"Yeah. Honey...I'm sorry if you're upset about this...but you know how it is. You know how we operate. For the best of mankind...even if it's on our honeymoon...I love you." she said finally.

"You know I love you, too, babe. Don't worry. I love killing demons. I love the way you look covered in blood. Preferably someone else's. Let's just...get this done and go home. Now, remind me why we're here again." Jack replied. Really, he just wanted to hear her voice. And have some more time to figure out how to get around this locked door, short of blasting it open. As if they'd given him enough ordinance for that anyway...Kyra started it off with a sigh.

"Let me run through the briefing again...Sergeant. Before UAC royally s*** their pants on Mars, they tried the same thing in a controlled environment. Same technology, different place. Io. If you look around, you'll notice that's where we currently are. Demons invaded, lots of people died...they locked the facility down. Abandoned it." she explained.

"So...what? It just disappeared off the face of the record book?" Jack replied. Kyra sighed again while he began hunting through the various side doors, only finding several small maintenance closets and storage rooms.

"You know the UAC, Jack. They bought Mars. And her two moons. How hard would it be for them to sweep something like this under the rug? Or hide the facility entirely? I mean s***, we thought the two moon bases on Phobos and Deimos were meant for waste disposal."

"So why didn't they just nuke it from orbit?"

"It was worth a lot of money. They were basically hoping that if they just cut the power, lock the doors and wait it out...everything would eventually die and they could go in and clean the place up. Try again."

"And they never got around to it, eh? So what brought us back?" Jack was beginning to enjoy this. He pulled open another door and found a small maintenance closet that came complete with a service hatch. He popped it open and stared down a flickering shaft. Jack lowered himself after a moment and began climbing carefully down.

"Command picked up a power surge from the base. After that another more intensive scan revealed a mobile power surge in the core of the facility. Whatever it is...it's had time to move around the whole base and do...whatever it is it does." Kyra explained. Jack didn't press her anymore. He knew the rest. He hoped off the ladder, staring down the length of the dark tunnel he'd gotten himself into.

After kicking ass on Earth, and ultimately running away, Jack and Kyra had been put to a different test: helping Humanity without shooting a gun. They spent about ninety percent of their time over the past twelve months either going from one place to another or personally training the new recruits to fight the Forces of Hell. Although no actual plans had been made to take back Earth yet. As far as Jack had heard. In between training exercises, long retellings of events not so long past and tweaking on the not so Universal database on the demons, he managed to find time for eating, sleeping, keeping in shape, (with Kyra as often as he could), and more recently, getting married.

Jack stared down the tunnel, keeping his shotgun shouldered. So far, they hadn't run into anything living. But there were no corpses around, Human or otherwise. That sent Jack's combat senses screaming. That, plus the awful, ominous feeling he was getting from the Io Installation. Jack reviewed exactly what it was he was doing here while he stalked down the narrow passageway. Steam leaked into the air from several ancient pipes, giving the area a diffused, surreal look. The plan seemed simple enough.

After the mobile power source had moved around quite a bit, final scans, done by Jack from the speed ship he and Kyra had taken directly to Io from the Belt, had indicated that it had come to rest in the very center of the base: the fusion reactor. Something that Jack had all intentions of setting to overload and blowing to Hell. And he would be doing that if Humanity didn't need the room. After clearing the base, Command was giving the go ahead for technical and reconstruction crews to come in and make the place livable again. Things were crowded enough as it was and everyone was getting desperate, all the while trying to have babies and restart the population for the ultimate miracle attack on Earth that would reclaim them the planet.

Jack had little hope of that. He had heard whispers of special research being done based off of the UAC's designs, but it was very top secret. Namely because if anyone caught wind of more experiments based off the technology that had gotten everyone into this mess in the first place, there'd be a rebellion or mass rioting or...something dangerous and boring like that. Honestly, Jack found it hard to get excited about anything anymore besides Kyra. Maybe it was why he found himself in the current weapon predicament he was in.

Maybe it was because they were growing lax from no real combat since Earth, but when they'd gotten the call, all they had on them were their shotguns and pistols. No rocket launchers. No chainguns. No BFGs, (not that he'd run into any since the first). Not even a double barrel. Just plain old shotguns and pistols. Throw in a pair of radios and medikits and that made a full field kit. As far as the manual was concerned from way back when. Of course Jack wasn't caught completely on unawares. He had his armor at least.

He finally found a corresponding ladder and slung his shotgun, hurriedly clambering up it. He popped the hatch atop the ladder and found himself standing in a similarly dark, old, dusty maintenance chamber. Jack opened the door and stepped out. He was past the locked door, and now found himself staring at an even larger pair of double doors. Or at least, where they had once been. They were broken down now, busted outwards by what looks like sheer, brute force. Jack would put his money on a Hell Knight, or maybe a lot Demons in a pissy mood.

He made his way through it, walking beneath a flickering sign proclaiming: Main Engineering. A good place to be if you were on your way to the Fusion Reactor. Jack missed Kyra as he stepped into the large, domed room. It was huge, dark, full of shadows and could be hiding anything. He wondered again why they had decided to enter the base from separate locations as he slunk along the wall, skirting the edge, looking for anything lurking in the darkness. The area remained as still and silent as a long abandoned tomb.

Kyra could have watched his back. But he trusted his combat instincts enough for that. She'd do fine on her own, and he'd do fine on his. A lesson he had learned back on Earth. He kept his eyes open, staring at four large pillars that dominated the rounded, domed room. Each pillar was lined with technology that had once glistened but now was dead and inert. Power wouldn't last forever. The air tasted stale and the crimson lights were getting to him. He wanted to do this fast, get in and get out and have a real honeymoon with his wife.

Jack finally made it around to the other side of the room, locating the corresponding double doors that led deeper into Main Engineering. At least his path was simple. Main Engineering led on to Research and then that led to the Reactor. Three simple sectors. Easy as pie. He stopped before the large double doors and stared up at them.

"I've got a problem." Jack muttered.

"What? Resistance?" Kyra replied immediately.

"Not of the alive kind. More of the 'locked door' variety. And it's a big one. Can you...reroute it or something? Get to a security station, hack it?" he asked.

"Negative. If you can't find a way to open it from there, you'll have to go around. Security Centers are shot, far as I can tell. Besides, there's not enough power for a hack."

"Yeah, and there's not enough time to go around."

"There is if you stop b****ing and do it. Besides, we already planned for this, remember?"

"Uh...vaguely?" Kyra heaved a weary sigh across the channel.

"Christ, babe. You never pay any attention when we're planning. Where would you be without me?" Kyra asked.

"Dead, probably." Jack replied.

"Not with your luck. Listen, honey, we already went over this when we looked at the map on the way here."

"I was busy looking down your shirt." Another sigh. Jack smirked.

"Well, I was busy trying not to get us killed. There should be a maintenance hatch in the upper right hand corner of the room. That will take you to the Comms Center. From there, you can work your way around through Oxygen Purification and Storage. That will bring you into an alternate entryway into the lab, my entryway. We'll meet up there, tackle the Labs and Reactor together. Got it?" Kyra asked.

"Got it." Jack replied. While she was speaking, he had hunted down the service hatch and pulled it open. Another ladder, another tunnel. Wonderful. "Love you, dear." he said as he lowered himself into the darkness.

"Love you too, babe. Try not to get yourself killed."