The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 16: Hardcore Hardware

"Clear," Jack said as he finished scouting the abandoned maintenance room he'd come into. He was glad to be out of the damned sewers.

He maintained watch while the others got up out of the narrow shaft one by one. The room looked like it'd been hit brutally hard. Blood ran in trails along the floor, where it looked like corpses had been dragged for some reason. There were spent shell casings, pieces of corpses, and debris scattered everywhere. But, probably the most frightening aspect of the room was the disturbingly low light level. The lights overhead were dim and weak.

Jack tried to recall what the Computer Station looked like. If he remembered right, it was a tall, upright, strangely structured building. It appeared to have something like three main levels, and now they were at the bottom. As he approached the door, Jack wondered how bad it was. He opened the only door in the room and looked out, then got an idea of how bad it was. The corridor beyond was pitch black, and what little of it was revealed by the maintenance bay's thin light showed only dented metal and blood.

"Well, this sucks," he muttered, leaning out and peering left, then right.

"Yep," Blackmore said, joining him. "It sucks more because on the way over, it occurred to me that we should probably take a look at the mainframe. There's gotta be a lot of information stored here and we should probably have a look at it."

"Yeah, I guess so," Jack replied morosely.

He wasn't looking forward to spending any amount of time in this place, let alone more time.

"Also," Blackmore continued, "we should be able to access the base's LifeScan through here. We'll be able to determine if there are any other survivors on this moon."

"That would be good to know," Jennifer said.

Jack sighed heavily and flipped on the flashlight at the end of his shotgun. "Well, let's get started," he said.

His ammo situation hadn't really improved. Currently, his SMG and one of his pistols were spent, totally dry. He'd left the last remaining magazine for his pistols in one of the sidearms, in case of emergency. The chaingun was reloaded, but he wanted to keep that for emergency too. The shotgun was loaded, but it only had one more reload left. He'd found some ammo down there in the sewers, but he'd expended a lot getting to the Computer Station. He felt like he was kind of constantly riding the edge of ammo depletion.

It was pretty stressful.

Jack took point again, heading for the left for now. It seemed to be his specialty. As he moved down the darkened passageway, playing his light across closed doors and broken vent grates, he thought for the hundredth time that it was a goddamned miracle he was still alive. Phobos Base had death written all over it in eight dozen different languages. He reached the end of the corridor and hit the access button.

The door opened to reveal an Imp in the process of walking towards him. Jack didn't even give it a chance to shriek. He was already aiming his shotgun at the right height, so he just adjusted the aim a little and squeezed the trigger. The Imp's head, caught in the beam's light, vaporized in a thick, chunky plume of dark gore. Further on in the pitch black room, Jack heard several more hisses and about half a dozen spots suddenly lit up with the awful red glare of hellfire. He snapped out a curse, aimed, and fired at the nearest one.

The Imp fell, a hole in its chest, but he was already moving, making way for the others to give him some damned backup. The others spilled into the room and they managed to clean it out in record time. They put down the half-dozen Imps that had been hanging around, then the small squad of Z-Sec zombies that arrived to investigate all the noise. Once they were sure they were alone, at least for the moment, they searched the area. It seemed they'd come to a very rudimentary central nexus for the bottom of the facility, which was very threadbare and utilitarian. The walls were a stark, slate gray concrete, or probably it was made of regolith from Phobos's surface. It was cracked and covered in ash and blood.