The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 01: Mars City Inbound

                                              -PART ONE: OMINOUS INTONES-

Mars looked like a real bastard of a planet.

Jack Ward had been given a view of the planet that had been slowly growing over the past two hours. It was starting to make him sick to his stomach, though he couldn't really figure out why. It was probably, he thought as he turned his view away from the window and inboard for the hundredth time, because this was his reward for doing the right thing. He gazed over the crowded, smelly cabin yet again and saw the same collection of sad sacks stuffed into the ship with him like sardines. There were fifteen of the poor bastards in there, himself included, and they were all Marines. Or that's what they were supposed to be, anyway.

He was going to Mars, and he knew what that meant.

He'd been sacrificed on the altar of big business, sacrificed to the great god in the neon sky: the Union Aerospace Corporation.

They all had.

For very different reasons, of course. Jack thought back over the last month and almost immediately turned away from it. What he'd experienced only filled him with disgust, and a harrowing kind of hopelessness. He began to look back out the window, they were actually going down through the outermost layers of Mars's atmosphere now, but instead he stopped and accidentally locked eyes with the kid sitting across from him.

"Almost there, man," he said, grinning. It was a nervous grin, the kind Jack had seen slapped on the pasty, pale faces of dozens, maybe hundreds, of kids too young to know what the fuck they were getting into.

"Yep," Jack replied.

He'd been stuck on this shuttle for almost two days now and holy shit was it getting old. He'd spent ten years in the United Marine Corps and it had taught him a lot of things. Patience was definitely one of those things, but Jesus Christ, even he had his limits. He was itching to get out of this seat, out of this shuttle and do something. Fucking anything. All around him, the shuttle began to tremble as it started the final descent towards the surface of Mars. Jack put his head against the headrest and closed his eyes.

He just wanted to shut off.

No thoughts, no emotions, just nothing.

Unfortunately, being a human being that actually gave a shit about things, namely his fellow man, that just wasn't really an option.

He kept his eyes closed as they continued to descend.

* * *

Their ship settled on a square of stainless steel that had been scrubbed and pitted by the bone-dry windstorms that regularly ravaged Mars. After settling on the support struts and turning the ship off, they'd been issued droning orders by a dead, electronic voice recorded who knew how long ago and shoved through who knew how many filters. Don't do this, don't do that, put on the pressure suits. They were all issued bland green pressure suits, no doubt built by the lowest bidder, and Jack took no comfort in the fact that they were all that stood between him and a hard, painful death in an atmosphere he couldn't breathe.

He and the kid, Jenkins, couldn't remember his first name, had talked a lot on the way there. Well, Jenkins had talked, Jack had listened and said as little as possible. It wasn't that he didn't like the kid, (okay, he was a little annoying), it was just that he wasn't in a talking mood, and he'd known too many like Jenkins, seen too many like him dead with limbs blown off or holes in their faces with their brains leaking out.

The only real quantum of solace he took from his present situation was that there should be basically no chance of anything like that happening up here on Mars. Shit, it wasn't like there were terrorists or insurgents or whatever the fuck the PR department was calling them these days way out here. No one had the funding to launch a full frontal attack on the UAC Mars Facility. Just a lot of boring shit up here, lots of patrolling and guard duty and not a whole lot else. Though...Jack frowned as he lined up with the others at the airlock. If that was true, then why did he keep coming across requests for more Marines in the Space Division?