"Are we ready?" Jack asked, looking over his team.

Jennifer looked about as solid as he expected her to, pretty much raring to go. She had a chaingun now, which he'd gotten very close to asking her for, because his plasma gun was just a quarter full now. And he could see in her eyes that she could tell he wanted to ask for that chaingun, and the look she'd given him almost said: Try it, motherfucker.

So he hadn't.

Wells looked...morose, but ready. The simple fact that she'd made it through the invasion up to this point meant that she had to be at least a pretty good shot with a decent set of survival skills. Luck was a factor, but that only got you so far. She had a pistol on her hip, an assault rifle slung over her shoulder, and a shotgun in hand, ready for action.

Harper...didn't look great. He was on his feet, assault rifle in hand, and his gaze was pretty steady, but he was pale and obviously in pain.

They all reported back to him that they were ready. They were in the same area they'd taken a break in. He and Jennifer had gotten up after five minutes to help Wells police up some ammo. They were about as ready as they were going to get.

"Jennifer, stay on Harper. We need him alive for this part," Jack said.

"Yep," she replied, glancing at the technician. "Stick close, got it?"

"Yeah, I can do that," he said.

"Good, just worry about keeping your ass alive for right now. You're the package, we're the deliverers. Everyone, keep it simple, keep it tight." Jack took a moment to study the data packet Anderson had sent him. It had a map to the junction they had to repair. It didn't seem that far away, but he knew how quickly that could change in a place like this. They had to get through an industrial area up ahead, the one he'd noticed when first entering the Refueling Base, which led to a storage section, and that led down.

Down would give them a shortcut, ideally.

He sighed softly. Time to roll the dice again.

Jack set off through the door to the right of the stairway he'd taken to enter the Refueling Base. It felt shitty to leave so many Marines, so many other humans behind, but he knew it was necessary, and that he'd been lucky to get even the short time that he'd gotten. Plus, he had Jennifer back, and two other Marines to back him up.

And that was worth a hell of a lot.

The first area seemed clear. A squad of a half-dozen local security guards led by a pair of Marines had gone in earlier and cleared it out before hurrying back to rejoin Anderson as he led another assault on another Refueling Base. Jack was extremely glad he was in charge. There were some people who were born to take command in combat, and some who weren't, and, in his experience, too many of those who weren't found their ways into command positions. He didn't necessarily wish them dead, but...fuck, how many people had they gotten killed because they didn't know what the fuck they were doing during this invasion?

Jack shook his head. Time to get back in the game.

He studied his environment closely. The place was shot to hell and back. Steam leaked from ruptured pipes in the walls and ceiling, sparks bled from circuitry panels and shattered monitors. He figured this might have been some sort of heat exchange, or maybe a routing room for power...or fuel. No, probably not fuel. The pipes would be bigger and this room wouldn't be here anymore. A lot of advances had been made in fuel tech, but the latest innovation was some unfortunately very volatile shit that was easily blown up.

Of course, that was how he'd managed to fry that Arachnotron.

"Jennifer, you see that spider thing?" he asked.

"The one shooting plasma? Yeah! Fuck! Can't believe there's more of them," she muttered.

"I'm calling them Arachnotrons, for the record."

"How the fuck do you come up with these names?" she asked.

"Yeah, that's a cool name," Harper murmured.

"I don't know, just...comes to me. Like reaching into a hole and pulling it out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."

"Okay, what do you call the big fat brown fuckers that vomit Lost Souls?" she asked.

"Pain Elemental."

"Hmm...okay, yeah. I guess so. Like from that old game?"

"Yeah! I can't remember the name..."

"Monsters and Mazes, it was based on that old tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons. I played the shit out of the video games when I was growing up."

"Oh my God, I love you."

She laughed. "I know."

Up ahead, past a collection of dark, complicated-looking machinery, he saw the entrance to the storage wing. Okay, really time to focus up. They passed several dead Imps and zombies. Jack got to the door, waited for everyone to get in position, then opened it. It disappeared into the ceiling, revealing a long passageway where the walls were made up almost entirely of rectangular openings. He immediately hated the layout.

Besides the tons of openings, he could see a few cross-corridors cutting across the main one. He could see boxes and crates and shelves in a lot of the openings, but most of them were obscured and several had flickering lights, putting him on edge. He couldn't hear anything but the distant chatter of gunfire and the occasional explosion, now very muffled by the layers of walls between them. Jack waited for a few seconds.

"Come on," he muttered finally, slowly stepping forward.

They were looking for a stairway just off the back of this storage wing that would take them back down into, oh boy, the underhalls again. Though this time for only a relatively short trip. Jack could sense something in the area with them, though he couldn't be sure of what. Please, not more fucking Arachnotrons.

As he passed between the first of the two openings in the walls, it happened. A roar went up. Not just one, not just a few, but a dozen, dozens possibly. And he recognized the source: zombies. A shitload of zombies. A stack of boxes to his left tumbled over and a pair of shotgun-wielding ex-security guards appeared. Jack yelled, turned, and fired. His own shotgun thundered in his grasp and blew the head clean off one of the zombies. The second missed as it returned fire, barely, and he adjusted, pumped the gun, and repeated the action.

All around him, gunfire opened up.

Jennifer let out a scream as she aimed the chaingun down the main passageway and let that six-barreled beast off its chain. As over a dozen and a half zombies sauntered and stumbled into the central corridor with them, almost all of them wielding weapons now, an array of red hot lead spewed into them, blowing bits and chunks of decayed gore and blood-smeared armor off their bodies. More zombies were coming in behind them. Wells and Harper were covering the rear. Jack spied more zombies spilling into the central corridor from the side passageways. She was going to have to reload soon, and he didn't want them overwhelmed.

Jack opened fire.

He blew a head open like a watermelon. Pumped the shotgun, shifted aim, turned a sneering face with glowing green eyes into so much free-flying pulpy gore. A bullet glanced off his armor, another punched into his dented chestplate, another barely missed his head. He fired again, the shell taking one of the zombies in the neck and decapitating it. He had to admit, after facing down goddamned Revenants and Arachnotrons, and with not just three Marines backing him up but Jennifer with a chaingun, he was almost relieved to be fighting a bunch of zombies. Even a few dozen of them in close quarters was better than most of the shit he'd gone through so far. And so they finished the cluster of undead bastards off in record time.

"Well...that was easier than normal," Jennifer muttered.

"Yep," Jack replied, grinning as he quickly fed more shells into his shotgun.

"Makes me wonder what's waiting for us up ahead."

Jack lost his smile. She had a point. It no longer felt like paranoia: something, some kind of intelligence, was obviously at work here. Something that felt damn near omniscient. Something that was aware of them, and reacting to them. It was possibly coincidence, but the more time went on, the less certain he was of that possibility. Too many coincidences for comfort. And he was sure that pattern would hold up.

It also clued him into the fact that he was letting Jennifer's presence calm him down. Not good. Although he didn't need to be too wound up, certainly he needed to stay switched on and keyed in to his environment.

Otherwise he'd end up dead.

It was easy to believe you were invincible when you'd survived all the shit he had, but he had scars of near misses to prove otherwise.

"All right, Wells, Harper, Jennifer, start collecting ammo. I'll sweep the area, see if anything's still alive," he said.

They all snapped off replies and got to it. Jack set out, slowly and methodically searching the interconnecting corridors of the storage area. He had to admit, it was a bit of a nightmare in terms of a place to fight hostiles. Stepping over corpses, he checked the passageways and the recessed areas where they stored all the crap. It was a weird setup, given normal storage bays were just a row of rooms accessible via a corridor. This was closer to something you'd find in an apartment complex, a row of open-faced stalls you could rent out to your dwellers so they could stow their extra crap, and maybe you'd put up a blanket over it to serve as a door.

There was certainly enough random junk strewn around inside. Crates, shelves, boxes, chairs, desks, corpses. Though hopefully the corpses were a recent addition. Jack managed to track down only a pair of surviving zombies that had missed out on all the fun and put them down pretty quickly. He salvaged some shells from them, located the exit they were meant to take, and returned to the others. There, he took his share of what they'd found. Mainly just enough shotgun shells to bring him back up to a half-dozen full loads.

What he wouldn't give for a chaingun, or more ammo for his plasma rifle.

"Babe, have you come across any of these since hitting dirt?" he asked as they began making their way towards the rear exit.

"No, I didn't even know there were more on Earth," she replied. Then she smirked. "Don't you think you're getting rather informal with me?"

"I can stop if you want, Sergeant," he replied.

She laughed. "No, I don't care. I like it. I'm just surprised. You always struck me as kind of...by-the-book."

"It's the fucking apocalypse and demons are ripping apart the planet. I think at this point that as long as I kick ass at kicking ass, I can call you whatever you and I are comfortable with."

"I happen to agree, darling," she replied.

He laughed. Then he felt kind of bad, hoping that they weren't making Wells or Harper uncomfortable. They were bringing up the rear and had yet to pipe up. As they reached the exit, Jack refocused.

Time to get serious again.

He opened the door and slipped through into a brightly lit landing with a descending stairwell. Peering carefully over the edge, he frowned as he saw its depth.

"Fuck me, why is it four goddamned floors down?" he muttered as he began walking down.

"Probably some kind of regulation, maybe?" Jennifer replied, following.

"Nothing had better be down there."

They marched down the stairs, finding the environment bland and boring. Nothing but the metal stairs, the metal landings, and concrete walls, broken only by the regularly placed light fixtures that shined an unerring titanium white luminosity over the stairs. It was a relief, at least. Fighting demons in the dark was so shitty.

Finally, they reached the bottom and found themselves in a long concrete-and-metal corridor not all that dissimilar from the ones they'd used to initially infiltrate the starport. It seemed virtually untouched by the conflict, save for some cracks in the concrete that looked like stress fractures from explosions. There was just a single door at the other end, and again Jack wondered what the fuck this was for, and how many other seemingly random or arbitrary areas there were in this massive maze of a starport.

They moved down the passageway and gathered by the door.

"Are we ready?" he asked.

They all responded that they were and took up positions. Jack hit the access button, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It dropped.

The area beyond the door was a small square of a room, maybe twelve feet by twelve feet, and the floor was mostly covered in bubbling green acid. The walls were made of some strange dark asphalt-like material that didn't quite look like regular asphalt. There was a little plus-symbol of concrete in the middle, serving as an island, and to their left, an elevator lashed to the wall. The four of them stood there and stared for a moment.

"I don't think this was part of the original design," Wells muttered finally.

"Nope," Jack said. "Fuck."

"Now what?" Jennifer asked.

Jack checked the map again. If they were going to make this repair, they needed to get back up to the surface, which was now four stories up. "We've got to go up. Let's get over to that elevator. As for this crap..." he muttered, looking down at the bubbling toxic sludge. It looked reminiscent of the toxic waste that came out of nuclear plants.

The suit should be able to stand up to it.

But how deep was it?

"Hold on," he said, reaching out and getting a good, solid grip on the door frame. Carefully, he placed his foot in the acid and began to lower it. Immediately he could hear the armor begin to hiss. He expected his foot to sink down, but it stopped after barely two inches. There was solid ground beneath him. He quickly pulled his foot out and shook it dry and slowly the hissing subsided. He raised it and checked it. The acid had eaten into it, but not too badly. It was still intact. "Okay, don't step in it if you can manage it, but if you fall it won't be the end of the world. We're gonna jump it. Carefully, one at a time. I'll go first. Don't move until I say. Cover me."

"Got it," Jennifer replied.

Jack backed up a few steps, then ran forward and leaped into the room beyond. He landed with a soft grunt on the little concrete island in the middle. He looked up. There were several ledges at varying heights all around him, and he felt a wave of frustration when it became obvious that the elevator only went up to the first level.

At least there weren't hostiles hanging around.

Jack prepared himself, then took another few quick steps to the edge of the concrete island and jumped over to the elevator.

Something smashed him in the back at the same time he heard a shotgun blast. He cried out, making it to the elevator but completely losing his balance and falling face-first onto the metal floor of the lift. Behind him, a gunshot rang out, something roared, and then a second later there was a splash. Then a lot more roars and growls sounded.

"You okay?!" Jennifer called.

"Fine!" Jack snapped as he hastily got back to his feet. More gunshots rang out. As he hunkered down in the elevator, which had open sides but a solid roof, he saw that the previously unoccupied ledges were now occupied by assholes. Most of them were shotgun-wielding zombies, but there were a few Imps in there as well. He pulled out his pistol and opened fire. A round punched a nasty, gory hole through the head of one of the roaring zombies and it pitched forward, fell twenty feet, and crashed into the toxic bath with a big green splash.

He stepped back as a few fireballs came his way and shotgun blasts rained down from above, popped back out and fired off a few more shots. Two more zombies pitched forward and dropped into the acid. Repeating this action twice more, he emptied his pistol and between him and Jennifer firing from the open doorway, they put down close to a dozen hostiles on those ledges. As the last Imp took a shot in the mouth and died, everything calmed down again. After reloading, Jack took one more look around.

"Okay, looks clear. Wells, you're up," he said.

"Coming," she replied.

He covered her while she made the jump. Nothing else appeared and she joined him on the elevator. "All right," Jack said, "we're going to ride the lift up and secure the immediate area. Once it's ready, I'll send it back down and we'll cover you two while you repeat the process."

"Got it," Jennifer replied.

"Ready?" he asked. Wells nodded.

Jack hit the button, hoping that the damned thing even worked. With a jerk, it started up. Slowly, the lift ground its way upwards, ascending towards the first floor. Jack got his shotgun ready and stepped to the right side of the lift while Wells went to the left. They waited. It seemed to take forever, but finally the lift rose up to the first floor. As it was revealed, bit by bit through the open back, he immediately spotted hostiles.

There was an open passageway extending away from the area the lift let out onto. The walls and floors were made of large, smooth gray stonework masonry, the ceiling made of some gritty gray rock material that also looked strangely manufactured. He didn't let it throw him off. Down the way were two raised platforms, one just visible through an opening in the left and one at the end of the passageway. Imps walked around back and forth on these platforms, and the second they saw them, the brownish-red things began chucking fireballs.

The pair of Marines opened fire, weapons roaring to life. The firefight was short-lived, as they had gotten good at putting down Imps at this point, especially ones at a distance. Their fireballs didn't move all that fast and were easy enough to dodge. Once the last shotgun blast put down the last Imp, Jack put Wells on guard duty at the beginning of the passageway and took the time to cover Jennifer and Harper while they made the journey up. The elevator, thankfully, was good for one more journey, and a few minutes later, he was joined by the rest of his squad.

With all four of them now up there, it was time to find a way up and out of here.