The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 23: Frozen Silence

Kyra's whole world became swirling white-gray chaos as she fell out the back of the ship.

Her chute, which had hooked wirelessly into her suit, deployed automatically when it reached the appropriate altitude. That was to say: almost immediately, given how low they were to the ground. Grunting as she was violently yanked upwards, she fought against panic. She'd been through worse than this. Much worse. The biggest problem was that she was in enemy territory, in demon territory, and visibility was shit.

That was kicking her battle anxiety up to eleven.

But as she had over and over, especially recently, she called on skills and abilities honed by years of training, combat, and war.

She calmed down.

Good thing, too, because she hit the ground a moment later and almost immediately landed on a damned fiend. The spiky bastard let out a shriek and began whirling up to hurl a fireball her way as her chute automatically disengaged and popped from of her suit of security armor. Kyra tried to shoot it with her rifle, but in that instant realized that it had been ripped from her grasp sometime during the leap out the back.

"Fuck you!" she screamed, focusing all her rage at that particular development on the fiend before her as she whipped her shotgun into play.

That had survived the fall.

She stuck the barrel in its sneering face and squeezed the trigger before it had time to launch the fireball it was generating. The fireball disappeared in a puff of smoke and its head disappeared in a plume of dark red gore. The body took a few jerky, stumbling steps in the snow, blood spraying violently from the stump of what had once been a neck, and then collapsed in a tangled heap of ivory spike-studded limbs.

With the boom of the shotgun going off, Kyra immediately heard warning cries from elsewhere in the storm. Her suit was working overtime to cut down on the audio white noise of the winds and trying to amp up the visibility, but the storm was a bad one. She took a quick look around, turning in a circle. There were no hostiles in the immediate vicinity, but she could just barely make out the edge of what appeared to be a fence in one direction. It seemed like the only viable way to go, so she started walking.

There was no way in hell she'd find her rifle in all this mess.

The shotgun and pistol would just have to do for now.

Fuck, she'd made due with far less, literally in Hell.

Kyra didn't do particularly well in storms. The constant movement all around her triggered all sorts of internal alarms that she had to learn how to adjust. She'd been through sandstorms like this all over the Middle East, and she had enough snowstorms under her belt that this wasn't new territory. It was just hated territory.

She activated her radio. "This is Staff Sergeant Morgan to anyone, do you copy? Over."

She listened as she kicked through the ankle-deep snow. Nothing but static. Great. Kyra hit the fence and looked around. Nothing but more fence to the left and right. It was less of a fence and more of a solid barrier. Knowing her luck, she was on the outside of it and would have to find a way in. She tried a few more times to get in touch as she went left and began moving along the perimeter wall. Of course they'd build a ten-foot perimeter wall in fucking Antarctica. It was probably some kind of violation of some international law, given how touchy Antarctica was, even after that mess with the fall of the treaty, but clearly the UAC didn't give two fucks about the laws. They'd made it clear by now they wiped their asses with the law.

She'd never been more enraged, more livid in her entire life than at the Union Aerospace Corporation. They'd drilled straight to Hell just to make a fucking profit. And now billions were dead. Probably billions more would die.