Doom Story Update

2k words

***

Cold wind rushed against his black combat armour as Andreas emerged onto the deck, tugging his helmet beneath his arm as he made his way down the gantry. Dozens of flight personnel rushed by, their shouts distorted by the sound of spooling engines and warning sirens.

Stencilled beneath his boots was a giant logo, the symbol emblazoned at the forefront of the steel runway. Three bars formed a wall around a sphere, the letters ARC written beneath it. The ARC was the first – and only – line of defence against the demonic invasion of Earth, and the carrier acted as the mobile command centre for the entire Coalition.

The fleet had been patrolling the North Atlantic since its inception, searching for key opportunities to strike at Hell’s forces. His stomach just couldn’t tolerate the constant rocking, and he couldn’t wait to be back on dry land despite the demonic invaders.

He proceeded over a pair of painted flight lanes, arriving at the runway’s flank. About a dozen identical dropships stretched down the flightdeck, their aerodynamic hulls pockmarked with exhaust vents and thrusters, their matte grey paintjobs reflecting the morning light. As he approached the first one along, a figure wearing a jumpsuit and matching flight helmet clambered into the cockpit, sealing the opaque glass canopy over his head.

The thrusters on the twin nozzles flared to life, Andreas wincing at the piercing noise as he pulled on his helmet. It connected to the collar of his chestpiece with a pneumatic hiss, creating an airtight seal, his breath fogging up his visor as it automatically dimmed like a pair of transition glasses. A heads-up display flickered on in the corners of his vision, graphics like his ammunition counter and vital signs glowing in shades of blue. Gear like this cost more than most marines would make in a lifetime, but that wasn’t just because of the fancy HUD and accompanying pressure suit.

“All set in there, Eva?” Andreas asked, rapping the top of his helmet with a fist.

“Stop hitting me you bozo,” a synthetic, but distinctly female voice replied inside his helmet. “I may be surrounded by layers of Kevlar and synthetic plating, but my lattice still responds to kinetic energy.”

ARC had uploaded Eva into his armour, the AI serving as a mouthpiece for the higher-ups and as his personal combat assistant. Most commissioned marines in the Coalition had some sort of helper on-call, be that a real person or not, and Eva was running across several platforms aside from Andreas’, her main power core situated on the lower deck of the carrier.

He moved round to the rear of the dropship, stepping onto the lowered ramp. Lining either side of the cramped interior were rows of crash couches, all save for one occupied by his fellow marines, though their armour was painted over in the standard green. The cargo bay was separated from the cockpit by a small archway, Andreas seeing the pilot peeking through to give him a thumbs-up.

“The section’s all ready, sir,” the pilot said, his voice coming through the speakers in his helmet, Eva doing him the courtesy of patching him into the local channel. “Just say the word.”

Andreas signalled back to the pilot, and the ramp began to close, the whine of hydraulics filling the cabin. The spooling engines rumbled the grating beneath his feet, Andreas moving down the aisle towards the free seat.

“Seargent,” one of the marines greeted, offering a prim salute, the rest of the seven men inside following suit.

“Time for formalities has passed, boys,” Andreas replied, waving for them to be at ease. “It’s Hell on Earth out there, hope you brought enough ammo.”

He planted himself in the crash couch, placing his pack and weapon into the slots beside the chair, reaching up to secure the harness over his chest. As soon as he was strapped in, he felt the aircraft roll forward, pitching to the side as the pilot lined them up with the runway.

“This is a bad plan,” Eva chimed. “The demonic presence on the Spanish coast is at level four going on five. Approaching via boat would be a far safer option.”

“All part of the job description,” Andreas replied, drumming his fingers against the harness.

“Considering you were a security guard when this all started, I doubt that ‘flying through demon-infested skies with volatile Argent cells in the hold,’ was in your job description.”

“Security officer,” Andreas corrected. “And they’re not volatile, those cases are unbreakable.”

“Clearly you haven’t been to Mars in a while. Some of those bases were completely vapourised…”

He lurched as the dropship took off, reaching a hundred kilometres an hour in an instant and climbing still. He knew there were pistons built into the runway that would snap forward once the aircraft was at full throttle, sort of like a giant spring-loader built for planes. His left side crushed into his harness, the pressure relenting once the aircraft began to ascend and then level out.

Through the portholes, he could see they were banking, Andreas looking out to see a great ocean spanning the world below. He could see other ships dotting the water, curdles of foam forming arrowheads in their wake. The flotilla was comprised of hundreds of naval craft of every type, from patrol boats to battleships, forming a protective cordon around the carrier. The mobile command centre was giant compared to the rest of the vessels, almost a kilometre long and a hundred meters wide, its sleek hull bristling with guns and antennae that could decimate a town in one salvo.

The pilot turned them about, the groaning of metal subsiding as they closed ranks with two other aircraft of the same design, the trio of planes forming a line. There was a series of comms checks on the local channel as the rest of the section reported in, Andreas replying when it was his turn. Once the pilots had matched speeds, the aircraft turned in synchronicity towards the east, shedding altitude and coming close enough to the ocean that he could make out the waves. Once out of the protection of the ships, they didn’t dare fly much higher, as the mist rising off the water would provide cover for their approach, and it had been known that demons liked to use the cloud layers to ambush unsuspecting aircraft.

“The fleet admiral has assigned a squadron of fighters to escort,” Eva said, pausing before continuing. “Should be able to see them off the portside.”

For a moment all he saw was mist, and then a shape began to emerge, the profile of a fighter jet unmistakable. Its jet-black wings were inverted, angled towards the cockpit rather than away like most traditional jets, racks of red-nosed missiles mounted along the hardpoints. Its single thruster projected a cone of blue afterburner, easily outpacing of the slower, larger dropships.

The fighter pilot tilted his wings in greeting before soaring off up and out of view. A compliment of supersonic jets should put the antsy AI at ease.

Ten minutes of flying over the ocean passed before there was details on the horizon, Andreas straining out of his seat to look through the cockpit canopy. The sea crashed into a coastline, giving way first to shallow tidepools, then to soil and cliffs. Andreas didn’t find living on a boat all that appealing, but seeing the state of the land, it may as well be paradise in comparison.

He could remember a time where the land was lush with the colour green, complimented by the azure shade of a bright sky. This was no longer the case. Dirt had turned to sullied ash, the remnants of sprawling woodlands reduced to skeletal husks, jutting out of the ground like tombstones. Valleys ran through these ashlands, and while the ocean was still home to water, these ravines now sported cesspools of lava, bubbling with yellow goop that could be seen even from here. These magma tides burned against the shore, forming ovals of obsidian that scabbed the ocean’s edges.

The closer they flew to the shore, the more the skies took on a more hellish appearance as well, the clouds choked with soot, flanked by crimson auroras. Even the turbulence had picked up, Andreas unable to help but think even the air itself had been smothered by Hell.

There was little chatter on the comm channel, even less so on the dropship, but who could blame them? Humans had taken Mother Earth for granted, and seeing it become warped inspired a dread that went beyond fear. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. Far in the distance, the chains of mountains still stood proud, their sloped surfaces yet unblemished. It was like looking at nature preserves in a zoo, but on a global scale. He’d heard from a scientist that ten percent of the world’s landmass had been consumed in hellfire.

The dropships shifted again, flying over the shore as they shed some velocity, and pilot’s voice crackling in through the intercom.

“Landing clearance received from control,” he said. “ETA ten-”

The ship reeled, Andreas gripping his harness tight as the aircraft rolled, putting him face-down in relation to the Earth. The lights in the bay flickered, turning from white to yellow as they bathed the ship in harsh flashes.

The other marines spat and cursed as they were rocked in their seats, the aircraft correcting after a second, the men looking to Andreas and the cockpit in alarm.

“What the fuck was that?” Andreas demanded, directing his attention to the pilot.

“We’ve been hit!” the pilot replied, shouting over his blaring instruments. “Engine power’s going critical!”

The portholes on the near side had blacked out, a screen of smoke obscuring the view. The pilot suddenly looked up through the canopy, seeing something that Andreas couldn’t from this angle. Spitting a string of curses, the pilot gripped the flightstick and turned the nose of the dropship down, and Andreas could have sworn he heard something speed over the ceiling, close enough that he could sense its presence.

As he looked out the far side window, he saw a round shape flit through the air, turning like a gyroscope to reveal a face. A wide mouth with too many teeth stretched in a grim approximation of a smile, a solitary eye jutting from its upper lip. Dangling from its ball-like body were tentacles, or maybe those were limbs, the extremities folding back over its flank as the creature began to come back for another run, using seemingly no visible form of propulsion.

The ship lurched again, Andreas feeling the craft sink as something landed on top of it, presumabley another of the cacodemons. They often moved around in packs ranging from three to ten.

“Where are those damn fighters?” Andreas asked nobody in particular, his toes curling in his boots. He hated not being able to do something, the feeling of being powerless making his skin crawl. He couldn’t even fight back, the dropship possessed no armaments of its own save for a thirty-mil on the nose, and aiming that at these flying demons would be impossible unless they flew straight in front of them.

He heard something he could only describe as chewing, metal rending somewhere overhead, followed a distinct crunching sound. The commlink was full of panicked calls for a status report, but what could Andreas say that wasn’t immediately obvious?

“Backup’s dead,” the pilot muttered over the channel, presumably meaning the backup engines. “I can’t get it stabilised. Brace yourselves marines!”

They were going down, the right half of the dropship listing , the pilot pulling his stick far to the left to compensate. The electronics were still functional, the pilot flipping at the overhead switches, the roar of the thrusters filtering through his helmet. He must be trying to slow them down as much as possible.

“We got parachutes on this thing?” one of the marines asked.

“Wouldn’t matter at this height!” another replied. “You’d splat like a damn pancake, assuming those things don’t eat you first!”

“I’d take my chances!” the first replied, his voice wavering on the edge of panic. He needed to reassure them fast.

“Stow it, marines!” Andreas ordered. “You’ve been in worse situations that this. Our pilot has got us, he’s trained for this sort of thing.”

He was trying to sound nonchalant, but he was just as terrified as they were. The ship was falling apart, and the incessant chewing of metal was a chilling reminder of what exactly they were up against if they managed to survive.

The rumbling of the ship took on a new octave as the pilot engaged all the thrusters, Andreas fighting the g-forces to peer through the canopy. The nose was aimed square at the shoreline below, the pilot remaining remarkably still in his seat as the ground came rushing up towards the canopy. The chances of living through a hard landing were slim for the marines, but the cockpit would be taking the full brunt of the impact.

“I knew this was a bad idea!” Eva said for the first time in minutes. Although she was made of electronics and code, she seemed as distraught as the marines were.

The world shook as they plummeted to the ground, the dropship bouncing once before ploughing nose-first into the sand. The bay seemed to explode, gear flying through the air as the crash dislodged their cargo.

Andreas saw something dark flying towards his face, and then a pain like no other struck him across his visor, and then his world shrivelled into darkness.