Doom 3™: Worlds on Fire

25

“AXELLE, SHALL WE HOLD UP ON THE DRILLING?”

The scientist stood over the mammoth opening that, as far as she could tell, just kept going deeper, the symbols and intersecting patterns of the cave converging, dividing, and—as the pit went deeper—they seemed to change.

One thing she was sure of: this pit was no natural phenomenon. It had been made by something. But who, what—and where the hell were they? No bones, no record?

“I think I better go down, Tom. You stay here, and I’ll go take a look. Tell them up front to hold off bringing any more explosives in.”

Without damaging the sides of the giant pit, the team had carefully placed hand-and footholds, taking care to find unmarked areas to fasten the steps.

She turned around and started down, alone, into the pit.

The micro-exposives they had been using worked well, sending perfectly calibrated shocks into the Martian rock, shattering it like crystal. So far not a section of the pit wall had been damaged.

Hand over foot, moving slowly, the suit making the going cumbersome as Axelle headed down.

She felt a chill. Impossible, of course. Her suit regulated her temperature. The material, a mesh of micro-metals and a new plasticlike compound, was thin, but it could keep its wearer at a comfortable seventy-two degrees.

But as she went down, she thought,It could be something else.

And what’s that?she asked herself.What kind of chill is that? Maybe the same one from her home in Wisconsin, when the power would go out…and the things in her room all started to take shape, change, transform…

She pushed the memory away.

But she did look up. The opening at the top of the pit made a perfect circle. What made this hole? And the veinlike protrusions on the side? Decorative, functional, symbolic, or—?

She hit the bottom of the pit. She checked in with Tom Stein.

“Does it look okay?” Tom asked. “Think we can keep going? That is—”

But another voice crackled in Axelle’s ear. “Dr. Graulich.”

Matt, the lead geologist, out at the cave opening.

“Yes?”

“We just got an alert from the weather satellite. Something in the East, coming fast.”

She looked at the pit bottom, the handholds leading up. “I think I better get out of here.”

But with another crackle in her ears, she knew she had said those words too late.

The doctor walked into the small medical cubicle and, without looking down, started examining the screens positioned right above the bed.

PFC Tom Wegner decided to crack a joke. “I’m gonna live, Doc?”

But the medical doctor didn’t even smile. He just kept checking the readouts, tapping into his PDA.

“That bad, huh?”

Finally the doctor looked down. “No, son, it all looks good.” Then the merest sliver of eye contact.

“Just a few more minutes and we’ll get you unplugged here…and I’ll send the report to Dr. Betruger.”

“I mean it all looks good, doesn’t it? Nothing wrong that would keep me from the program?”

Wegner knew some of his fellow jarheads thought he was crazy to be volunteering. After all, had any of the other volunteers returned to duty? There were all those weird rumors. But there were always rumors in the military.

So some of those experiments didn’t turn out so good. Maybe a few guys got hurt, sent home. But the rewards? Unbelievable. Could set yourself up for life with that amount of money. Immediate transfer to Earth, a cushy job, and cash. Pretty sweet deal.

And though Wegner didn’t have a clue what the experiment involved, he didn’t really care. Optimism—always a Wegner trademark. Gotta be optimistic these days.

“Okay, there we are. All done. Nurse—” A young nurse came in, a real cute one too, not one of the usual wrestler-types with full mustaches. She smiled at Wegner. “You can take everything off and”—now another glance at Wegner—“I’ll tell Betruger you’re all set. You’ll sleep here tonight. Want you well rested.”

Wegner fired a quick glance at the nurse. Maybe a guy could get lucky in the infirmary. A small smile from the nurse—as if she could read his mind.

“Great. I’ll get a good night’s sleep for a change. None of the other guys snoring away, huh?”

No response to that. And with a tug, the nurse pulled off the last wire that fed data into the monitors surrounding the bed.

To the nurse: “How are the eats in here?”

But the doctor answered. “You’ll get a good meal.”

Wegner grinned. Sounded good. Except—a good meal.Isn’t that what they do to guys about to be offed? A good last meal? He let the thought move on. Optimism. Couldn’t do much these days without a whole hell of a lot of that.

Billy Suppa, the marine guard on top of Ridge 93—all the big outcrops of rock were numbered—watched the storm approaching.

He had seen these dust devils before. The training vids showed them, and they also showed the damage they could do. Some kind of strange Martian weather phenomenon. Dust storms that sprang from nowhere and then began rolling across the red ground. Kind of like tornadoes, but shaped like a wave, always breaking, then reforming. Except—he hadn’t seen one this big. Or this fast.

Billy could see two of the other marines arrayed on other ridges around Site 3. They had also turned to watch the zigzagging march of the storm.

“Got a big one coming,” he said. Comm would pick up his comment to them, but that was okay. The no-chatter rule didn’t apply to reporting something like this.

“Maybe we better—” he started to say.

But then he turned back to look at the two nearby marines.

One was gone. One minute there, and the nextgone. Damn, that was fast. The other was still there, looking at the storm. Then he watched that guard vanish too, as if a hole had opened up beneath his feet.

Then Billy felt a rumbling beneath his feet. What the hell was this? The storm, now some ground tremor. And now—his eyes off the storm, looking down at the rocky jumble of stone he stood on—he felt movement.

A slow rumbling that quickly changed as a hole opened up right where he stood.

Billy started to send out a message. “Shit, something—”

But then he and the rest of his message vanished down a hole that just suddenly appeared.

Through the violent shaking, Axelle tried to hold on to the wall, to the handrails placed there by her team. They had been working this area for over a year, and never a tremor. Now, with the dust storm already scouring the ground around the cave opening, tossing their equipment all over the place, smashing it against the rock, they were in the middle of…what? A quake?

“Secure all the equipment,” she said. “Tom…Tom, if you hear me, bring everything into the interior. We got—”

Then she could tell that her radio wasn’t working. No sound from her earpiece. Totally dead. Some side effect of the storm?

“Anyone hear me? Anyone getting this?”

And as she held on to the handrail, she looked at the cave walls. The twirling, twisting mesh of raised lines and shapes began—ever so slowly—to glow. As if somehow, somewhere a power switch had been thrown.

Axelle grabbed the handrail tighter. And she tried to tell herself—to convince herself—that she wasn’t scared.

“Got to go to work.”

“Right. Thanks for the tour, Private Moraetes.”

She smiled at Kane. “Maria. You can call me, Maria.”

“Name works for me.”

“And you?”

“Always been just Kane. So that will do.”

Another grin. “Go do your homework, Kane.”

He nodded, and started for his barracks.

Kane walked past Reception. Some people probably could be easily confused by the sprawling layout of this so-called Mars City. But when you’d spent as much time as he had fighting your way in and out of streets, past rubble, into landscapes where you damn well better know one rock from another—this was a piece of cake.

He saw a family. For a second he stopped. A man, his arm around a woman, holding a young boy’s hand. Like they were taking a walk in the park. The guy’s family must have arrived on the transport. Kane knew that some families actually lived here, the spouses and children of scientists and key administration people who didn’t want to be separated for a year. Some promotional material back on Earth called them the first Martian homesteaders—though how anyone could consider living in these tunnels and halls homesteading, defied all logic.

The boy turned and saw Kane standing there. The father turned also.

The boy’s eyes on him, Kane smiled. A kid, here. Seemed surreal. Kane nodded at the father, then started away.

But as he started moving toward his barracks, he heard the boy ask a question. “Daddy, why are there so many soldiers here?”