The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 11: Obsidian Station

She reappeared in a stink of brimstone and a flash of black light and a jolt of pain that crackled through her entire body.

Kyra barely managed to get the visor up as she crashed to the metal deckplates and vomited. Only it was really mostly a waste because there wasn't enough left in her stomach to come up, just a bit of bile and spit that fell out of her mouth as the dry-heaves wracked her body. She groaned sickly, absolutely loathing the feeling of vomiting, and something groaned in response. Kyra looked up, her vision blurry, and saw a dim room around her. An uncertain feature was lurching slowly towards her. She groped for her pistol, her hand unsteady, and finally pulled it free of her holster. She aimed up, still crouching down, trembling in agony, and squeezed the trigger. Lucky shot: went right through the zombie's skull and dropped it.

When she didn't hear anything else, Kyra sighed softly and stayed crouched there, hugging herself. The other teleports had not felt this bad. About five seconds later, it occurred to her that she had pulled her pistol from its holster.

That she still had a holster.

That she had been forced to raise her visor to avoid vomiting on it.

She'd come through the portal with everything intact.

"Worth it," she groaned weakly, then hawked and spat a few more times. She needed to get a drink of something. Preferably some goddamned vodka. After allowing herself weakness for another twenty seconds, Kyra finally forced herself back up to her feet. She wasn't done yet, not by a long shot, probably.

There was always more fucking work to do.

"Where the fuck am I?" she whispered, spitting one more time before lowering the visor back into place. She hit the light amp function and surveyed her new surroundings. They looked vaguely familiar, and she realized that the place she was in resembled the place she'd initially left on Typhon Station. Oh hell, she wasn't back there, was she? Well, that seemed like something worth knowing, so she began moving slowly around the room.

It took close to ten minutes, but she cleared the lab, managing to find the lights and another magazine for her rifle, which she promptly reloaded. She also made a very unhappy discovery, something that disturbed her on a deep level: the lab was changing. One section of the far right wall had been replaced by ugly green brick. It looked completely unnatural and incongruous alongside the high-tech polished metal of the lab. The floor around it had been partially replaced with more of that ugly wood she'd seen so much of just recently.

"Who did this?" she whispered. Why would anyone do this? Did the monsters do it? How? What the fuck was happening here?

She heard a deep growl coming from somewhere else in the complex she'd come to and put those thoughts aside again. They always seemed to intrude. After a complete sweep of the lab, including a few smaller storage rooms that held nothing but technical spare parts and one work area meant for repair of the no doubt dozens of intricate pieces of technology that helped this particular room run, Kyra approached the exit.

Why had she come through this particular portal with all her things intact? Not that she was complaining, but it didn't make sense. She at least had the vague notion that there was a fundamental difference between the portals between dimensions, and the portals between areas within the same dimension that she had used. It, for whatever reason, made more sense that those simpler portals would leave her things intact, but maybe the inter-dimensional portals were more complex. Maybe that first one had gone wrong in that fashion?

Obviously there had to be some way to get stuff through the portals beyond just flesh, because there existed UAC technology and gear on the other side. Well, she supposed it made enough sense that that first portal had simply malfunctioned, since she'd appeared somewhere where there had been no other portal to receive her, and obviously she hadn't made it here, where she was supposed to have gone in the first place.