Doom Story Update

3k words. Sorry for the delay, I wasn't happy with the order of the next couple chapter breaks, and did some rewording to make them more sensible.

****

“Fantastic...”

They followed the yellow-striped pedestrian lanes across the gallery, pausing by the ankle of the first generation mech, its size comparable to a flatbed truck. The second generation battlesuit had all the scope of a toy soldier, but that was only because of Andreas’ bias towards its bigger, older brother. Standing at five meters tall at the shoulder, the mech was a diminutive replica of the far bigger suit, though there were a few key differences. Its build was far more sleek, its edges rounded out to give a more smooth appearance. Its thin limbs allowed more manoeuvrability at the cost of its sturdiness, but that didn’t mean the hull was fragile by any means. It was more comparable to a walking tank, and it had the weaponry to compliment the fact.

Like its grand predecessor, the right limb was comprised of a weapon, Andreas noting the copper coils ringing its length through gaps in the mechanics. It was longer than he was tall, and from what he knew about railgun weapons, this was not one of them.

“That is a particle cannon,” Eva noted, her drone swerving up to where the cannon joined to the chassis. “capable of delivering a superheated pulse of energy in short, infrequent bursts. See the heatsinks on the side, here? A single shot generates enough heat to melt aluminium.”

Andreas nodded in approval, though he still shot glances at the gen one every couple moments. “I’ve always been partial to energy weapons. What kind of damage can it dish out?”

“Aside from melting anything set in the path of the beam? The shot is followed up by a secondary blast as the beam dissipates. The explosive is equivalent to six of your plastic explosive bricks. That’s slightly bigger than what you did to the gore nest.”

Now Andreas voiced his impressiveness in the form of a whistle, earning the glance of a few nearby engineers wearing high-vis overalls.

“It’s no BFG, but I can make do with that,” Andreas said.

The centrepiece of the mech was the cockpit, the canopy made up from three narrow, red-tinted windows. They didn’t provide much of a field of view, but there were no doubt cameras all over the chassis that could be visible from the inside. Above the cockpit, a driving lamp crowned the mech, the high-beams currently switched off. Below it, a pair of chainguns were mounted onto the sternum, Andreas guessing they were fifty calibres. The last of its armaments was on the opposite prosthetic limb, where below a giant metal fist was a serrated knife, the wrist-blade longer than a spear. It seemed the builders had designed gen two’s to fight at range as well as close-quarters.

“This model slightly differs from the base ARC mech,” Eva mused as she floated over its shoulders. The left hardpoint should be a ranged weapon, not a fist with a knife, but it should prove adequate in the event a demon should get too close.”

“It’ll be more than adequate,” Andreas said. “There’s enough firepower here to take out a mancubus … or a Baron.”

-xXx-

Research and Development was the facility situated behind the foundry warehouses, the footprint of its box-shaped structure taking up less room than a church, but the reason for this was because most of its contents were belowground. The surface access was mostly barren, save for a kiosk and an access lift. The lift was industrial-grade, big enough one could fit a forklift on the platform with room to spare.

As Valeria led him and Eva into the elevator and thumbed the key labelled 1, he guessed the first level was fifty feet deep, but the facility must run triple that depth judging by the numbers on the panel.

A delicate ding announced their arrival, Andreas following Valeria out into a carpeted room. Filing cabinets and office terminals were propped up against the sterile-white walls, open archways to the left and right leading to adjacent rooms, their signage marking them as Laboratories one through to six.

There was a desk off to one side of the lift, and despite the racket it caused when it pulled up to the level, the woman typing away at her terminal didn’t look up at the newcomers. She wore a white lab coat with a blue tie wrapped over her collar, one hand reaching up to push up her black-rimmed glasses as the other continued to clack away on the keyboard.

“Selena, I have the shards you requested at long last,” Commander Valeria said, reaching into her coat for the glass spheres. “Drop that last project we talked about, getting these shards ready is top priority.”

“Valeria!” the young woman, Selena, said, her eyes a pretty shade of blue, and blazed with startlement. These two must be familiar if they weren’t referring to each other by rank. “The Argent shards, of course! Thank you, ma’am.”

“Don’t thank me, it was Seargent Andreas here who did the heavy lifting.”

“Oh! Seargent, hello,” Selena greeted, flashing him a meagre smile, one she broke before he even had a chance to return it. She must not get out of these labs very much. She turned back to the Commander. “Lab four is still prepped, like you requested, we can begin running diagnostics immediately.”

“How long will that take?” Valeria asked. “I need the mech reactors powered as soon as possible.”

“I’m not sure. An hour, maybe?” she replied. Like Valeria, Selena’s Spanish accent had her rolling her R’s. “Are we expecting an attack?”

“It’s very likely,” was all Valeria was willing to say, and Selena seemed to get the message, shutting off her terminal and proceeding down the passage on the left side of the room. As they passed over the small lip in the threshold, the floor took on an unbroken, ceramic texture, the lab illuminated by light strips running across the ceiling in an unbroken line, a warm breeze brushing his face Andreas followed the two women inside. A quiet, humming sound filled the lab. At first he thought it was air conditioning, but as he looked up at the little grills built into the walls at head-height, he realised they were air recyclers, pumping cool, fresh air from the surface.

There were two men gathered around workstation at the far side of the lab, also wearing white coats, and Selena called them over, holding up the shards and relaying Valeria’s orders. They wasted no time in bringing them over to a strange device propped up in the corner of the room. It looked like a photo-copy machine, except its flat top was comprised of a capsule that looked suspiciously like the argent canisters that his dropship had been ferrying before it had crashed. Selena popped the glass spheres into the capsule, and with a button press, glass windows sealed over the container, and the glass balls began to suspend in the air.

Readouts started appearing on the machine’s surrounding monitors, Andreas thinking of heartrate monitors he’d seen in hospitals, the three scientists muttering among themselves as they got to work, Valeria watching them over their shoulders. Andreas wondered over to the other side of the lab. Where another bulkhead separated an adjacent room, Andreas spotting a dash of moving colour through the door window.

The doors didn’t slide open at his approach, a glance at the retinal scanner nearby confirming a level of security was required to pass through, and the reasons were obvious after a few moments. Lining one side of the hallway beyond were a series of containment units, their glass cylinders stretching all the way from floor to ceiling.

There were things inside some of these pods.

Every second or third container along, demons idled behind the glass in various states of agitation. An imp was raking its blunt claws along the glass in furious swipes inside one, a whiplash flicked its cybernetic tail in agitation in another, slithering around its prison in slow loops, its eyes zeroing in on any hint of movement. There wer a couple of zombies too, and at the far end of the room, the last pod along housed an ethereal humanoid, Andreas able to see the wall through its transparent body. This was a spirit, and Andreas had only seen their caste in photo’s. They were ghosts through and through, able to possess any demon and grant them unnatural resilience. He wondered how they managed to capture one.

“We used to run tests on any wounded demons we could safely recover from the field,” Valeria said, standing beside him as he peered into the containment room. “Autopsies, mostly, a few live fire exercises as well, anything that could give us an edge.”

“We had something like this back at a research base I used to work at,” Andreas explained. “They broke out once and we lost control of the whole facility. Hope that doesn’t happen here.”

“I’m guessing you did not have a suppression field in place,” Valeria said, dipping into an explanation when he shook his head. “It’s an invisible bubble surrounding the Rallypoint. Any demon caught inside it has their powers significantly reduced, and it also prevents portals opening inside it. It’s one of Samuel Hayden’s inventions, so don’t bother asking me how it works. As for the pods, they’re reinforced with alloys imported from Mars, which are also owned by Hayden. They’re not breaking out unless the field shuts down.”

“How’s the suppression field powered?” Andreas asked.

“What do you think? It’s Argent shard compatible, and can run uninterrupted for eighty years straight before needing a replacement. I’d show you the generator, but even I need to go through five levels of security just to access it.”

Across from the containment pods, the wall was lined with reinforced doors, Andreas asking the Commander where they led. She explained they were holding cells, where demons could be stored before security transported them to other parts of the base.

“How do you move them around?” Andreas asked.

Valeria led him over to a nearby cabinet, pulling one of its swinging doors open. Inside was a wall mounted rack with a dozen odd devices suspended on the hooks, Valeria lifting one that looked somewhat like a pillory, with two holes for securing one’s wrists.

“We place their containment pods on a trolley, or we use these for the more compliant subjects,” Valeria said, handing him the shackles. They were heavy duty, the bands inches thick and made from solid steel. There were magnets ringing around the clamps, the locking mechanism must be electronic.

“I struggle to imagine that,” Eva noted, hovering between their shoulders. “A demon would fight to its death before being cuffed by one of those.”

“You’d be surprised how docile a combination of the suppression field, sedatives, and electric shock therapy can make them,” she replied. “After a few days of capture, most of them just stand there, like their brains have switched off. One time a scientist even touched the shoulder of an imp and it didn’t even flinch.”

Andreas handed the shackles back, Valeria securing them in the cabinet. “Selena’s work will take some time, Seargent. If you wish to return to your quarters, I’ll send for you once the shards are ready.”

“I think I’ll stick around here for now,” Andreas replied. “No point walking off if I’m just going to come back again.”

“I too, wish to stay and study some of your equipment,” Eva said. “If that’s alright with you, Commander?” she added, a little more tactful than Andreas was.

“Bueno,” Valeria said. “Just make sure you put anything you touch back the way it was. Selena and her team are picky like that. If ARC was good on their promise, you’ll be in your mech before you know it Seargent.”

-xXx-

Andreas spent the next day familiarising himself with all the mech’s capabilities, with Eva and a couple of the engineers giving him pointers. His already scuffed sleeping schedule had seen him stay awake during the night but sleeping through the days, leaving him with little to do but wonder the base during lights-out.

There’s been a few mishaps during his mech induction course, and he had even toppled the battlesuit over, forcing one of the workers to fetch a crane, and a part of him wasn’t sure if one day of training would be enough. They hadn’t even let him use the particle cannon to see its true capabilities, but Eva insisted that he wouldn’t be disappointed when the time came to use it, and he trusted her judgement.

His wonderings took him up one of the walls, the westward wind hitting his face as he emerged from the service lift. The floor panel inside it had about thirty buttons, tiers of facilities built into the outer wall like books on a shelf. Andreas wouldn’t even place a restroom so close to where bombardment was likely to strike, but he guessed space was a commodity in the Rallypoint.

There was a guard stationed just outside the lift, a service pistol and rifle strapped to his combat armour. He only offered the barest nod to Andreas as he stepped out, the kind one reserved for regulars, although Andreas had never been up on the walls yet. He didn’t fancy himself a celebrity, but everyone seemed to know who he was all the same.

Looking left, the length of the rampart stretched on and on, until it terminated at a corner a couple hundred meters out. Running along the boardwalk at regular intervals were the buttresses he had seen on his way in from the ground, each one a bunker in its own right. He could see turrets mounted on hardpoints bristling all along their three outer faces, with their roofs occupied by radio antennae and other sensory equipment. Along the inner face of the board walk was a waist-high wall, there to provide a safety net from the sheer drop into the courtyard.

On the right, the view was the same, except the walk along the wall only stretched a few dozen meters on before it met the corner, the vector change occupied by a plateau, with one of those great guns sitting upon it. Soldiers milled about along the outer wall, some dipping into the bunkers, others peering out into the city through scopes or binoculars.

Andreas made his way down the right side, the metal thrumming with each touch of his boots. It was just after four in the morning, the sun just grazing the sky, the skies turning a mysterious shade of pink with its welcome. The skies were still congealed with clouds of endless soot, making the heavens seem much closer than they really were. If the wall were twice as high, Andreas might have been able to pass through the wisps of cloud. No wonder all these people felt cut off from the rest of the planet, his senses were convinced he was stuck on the inside of a box of smoke.

The plateau in which supported the heavy anti-air gun was ringed with a warning radius, there to stop passer-by’s from being clocked by its lamppost-sized barrels. Like the mechs, the gun emplacement was gigantic, bigger than Andreas’ childhood house.

There was no visible place for the controls that he could see, the controls were likely right beneath it, or in some of the more secured facilities dotting the courtyard. Perhaps it was fully automated by an AI like Eva.

There were no safety barriers on the plateau’s outer edges, perhaps that was intentional, so the gun could have as wide a firing arc as possible. Andreas got as close to the edge as he dared, a lump forming in his throat. He thought that jump from the rooftop might have gotten his fear of heights in order, but it seemed he had a few more leaps of faith before that happened.

From this height, he could gleam the full destruction of the city in all its infested glory. Craters and urban ruins formed an endless band of circle in all directions, forming a skyline that to Andreas, appeared like the metal jaws of a cyberdemon. While the direction Andreas had travelled in on foot from was a mix of intact and blasted ruins with more of the former than the latter, the same could not be said for the other cardinal directions. Building blocks to the east looked like they’d been subjected to nuclear blasts, craters hundreds of feet wide pockmarking the concrete grids. A mountain chain scabbed over a section of the metal maze to the northeast, casting great pools of shadow over that portion of the city. Towers and skyscrapers had once dominated the wealthier distrits, but now only their foundations remained, their long bodies draped over the streets like shattered corpses.

Draped over most of this doomed vista was a shade of unsettling pink, its colour like that of gums with the skin peeled off. It wasn’t as apparent closer to the Rallypoint, but it dominated a couple miles out towards the skyline, forming a sea of flesh mingling with the broken metal. If Andreas unfocused his eyes, he could see movement out there, little microshifts that weren’t demons or humans, but the flesh itself, squirming in tidal ripples. It was like watching all the grubs wriggle in poisoned grass, the sight making his skin crawl.

He turned his eyes downward, peering over the drop towards the encampments sieging the walls. Commander Valeria had informed him that they had seen very little activity in the camps aside from the occasional departing demon, leaving only skeleton crews hugging the walls. Even the winged demons had stopped their attempts at coming down on the Rallypoint from directly above, which she had told him were very regular occurrences.

She’s preparing, Andreas thought. No two ways about it.

He remembered the Baroness mentioned something about her cathedral, Andreas wondering what kinds of surprises she’d pull out for her coming attack, and if she had anything that could compare to the battlesuit’s Valeria had kept under the rug this whole time. He had a feeling the forty-meter tall mech would catch the Baroness off-guard.

Perhaps she’d be stunned just long enough for the mech pilots to finish her off for good. She was tough as bricks, but even she would be vapourised if she got caught in the path of a railgun or particle cannon.

He frowned at the image, the thought of Sharrya reduced to a pile of ash troubling him. Sharrya was his enemy, just like Eva always deigned to remind him – she was responsible for this hellscape that had overcome Spain, and yet he didn’t harbour as much hatred for her as he should have. If he had grown up here, that might have changed, but he didn’t share the same prejudices as Valeria or her men possessed.

He'd only known Sharrya for a few days, and while she was on the opposite side of this war, she was more a rival than his sworn enemy. A mindless demon would have cut him down the moment the chance arose, yet her obsession with him was born from intrigue, not malice, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t reciprocate said interest.

He closed his eyes, conjuring up the image of her feminine silhouette, how her pronounced curves drew her muscular form into a streamlined hourglass shape despite her brawn. Andreas had to admit it was a little flattering to be hit on by someone at the very peak of personal physique, even if she had the lower half of a goat, although her fur looked very soft…

Andreas shook his head, dispelling such thoughts. As Eva had said, he had to stop thinking with his ‘thingy’, and look at the bigger picture. Sharrya had made his journey more interesting than not, but she had her side, and he had this, there was nothing to be done about that. Still, it would be a shame to watch her die, and this war wouldn’t end until either she did or these walls fell. There was no other option… was there?

He had to wait until the operation was in full swing, the coming fight could go either way. Sharrya didn’t know about the mechs, of that he was ninety percent positive, but likewise, they didn’t know what Hell had provided Sharrya with.

All he could do was meet her on the field, protect as many people as he could. Sharrya might offer him lenience, but that lenience did not extend to the Spanish people. Mutual intrigue or not, he would do everything in his power to keep the civilians safe.