Archive of Our Own

Work Text

Freeman nodded. He didn’t hear what was said but the nod made the other scientist stop talking.The HEV undersuit was a black carbon fiber weave. Getting it on was a bit like getting on a wet glove but once it was on the rest of the process went smoothly.The scientist smiled and said something in the half-commanding half-condescending voice of elder academia. Freeman didn’t listen. The passing comments were never relevant. If someone wanted to tell him something he needed to know, they'd look him in the eye before they spoke. Everything else was useless background noise. New coworkers sometimes mistook his silence for disdain; it wasn't for them, personally, just for anything -and anyone- not relevant.He charged the suit and the fibers tightened across his chest and down his back, taking out slack that would compromise movement. The HEV was a work of art-his art. His research and development, his design of the carbon base layer, his insistence on low slack tolerance. They’d shoved carbon nanotube technology forward by a decade to meet his specifications and the results fit like the second skin.The security guards at the first and second checkpoints greeted him by name and he nodded to them as he passed. Security guards were relevant in that they were ignorant. Ignorant of the work they guarded, ignorant of its impact on the world around them. Ignorance made them a liability. Liabilities required attention. So he knew the security guards, made eye-contact, checking yes you're there, at your post. That is correct, now stay there and don't touch anything. Most scientists didn't bother to acknowledge them.Most scientists didn't understand liability very well.Each segment of the Black Mesa complex was isolated, both physically and intellectually, from the others. Research teams worked in parallel, independent and unknowing, solving the same problem five different ways to prevent intellectual cross-contamination. No one scientist had the whole picture but Freeman knew enough to be very, very careful.No one tampered with physical applications of theoretical particle physics or pulled apart anomalous metamaterials for this long without getting an itchy feeling in their fingertips, an odd and distinct sense of being watched, and a sure knowledge that work smart, work safe was code for do exactly as you're told, don’t ask questions. And who was writing the procedure? No one at Black Mesa he could name.Medical units stationed in the hot labs provided emergency regeneration boosters for life-saving treatments. Warnings and disclaimers informed the user they would force tissue regrowth in record time, at the risk of death-by-cancer later in life. Freeman had never used one and never known someone who had. They were like AEDs, everywhere but useless unless something went very, very wrong. "You get to pick, no liver or two?" the security guards joked about them. Freeman touched one as he passed, for luck. The crystal insertion was as routine as any reality-challenging, physics-ignoring experiment ever was. He'd done them before, many times. That was his line in the script of Black Mesa. Don the suit, insert crystal, record observations, run his own set of trials testing the boundaries of the material's physical properties. Was it replicable? Were yesterday's predictions upheld? Or was the element of maddening randomness in its response patterns going to baffle their tiny corner of academic humanity for another day? "They went to a lot of trouble to get it..."
He looked up, searching for the speaker. Another white-coated scientist, watching from a glass-walled observation alcove.
"...Want an especially good look at this one..."
"...Not rated for this..."
"...Deviating from standard procedures..."
The hair on his neck stood up and his palms itched. This was a new procedure, dangerous, inaccurate, too many variables. Who was writing it? He crossed through the final checkpoint into the hot lab, passing from the realm of man to the realm of radiation. The realm of this-will-kill-you-painfully. The HEV was designed for this and worse and was tough enough to withstand the daily physical wear without compromising integrity. It would have quite the military application if it weren't so prohibitively expensive. More than once someone had joked he didn't need to worry about being rescued from the hot labs, the higher-ups would want his suit back at any cost. The startup sequence went well. The sample arrived correctly mounted. Aside from an increase in background hum and vibrations, all seemed as predicted. His mind half on the crystal and half on yesterday's notes, written firmly in ink on the triple-layered standard-issue carbon copy laboratory notebook, he wheeled the sample into the mass spec's observation core. Yellow-green lightning split the room. Energy spidered outward, searing bolts leapt from crystal to every conductive surface. Their after-image flashed behind his eyes as he fell.He landed face-down behind the spec shielding matrix. His teeth ached with bone-deep vibrations and he saw only hazy flashes of the energy discharge. He heard the crackle of electricity and rolled away as a bolt walked across the plating he'd been on. It jumped to the shielding matrix and something in the machinery overloaded and burned. The suit's heavy rubberized insulation protected him but he didn't know for how long, or if the burning-rubber smell was coming from him or from the polymer sheathing on the chamber's failing electrical components. Black acrid smoke billowed up from the control computer, and he had his answer. His hair stood on end with static charge. In the back of his mind, buried somewhere deep in the academic training of a decade spent in laboratories, he made a mental note on his mental lab notebook:
Upgrade electrical wiring in mass spectrometer.

And increase electrical resistance in HEV armoring by additional 10%.
Clearly the over-designed, absurdly expensive prototype suit was the only thing keeping him alive. Mostly alive. As the bolts sizzled past he felt his heart jog with arrhythmia. He had minutes, or less.An explosion, then falling, then darkness. Silence. No heartbeat, no background roar of blood pressure.Death? No, he heard his own breathing again and his heart, and the pain faded. Pain, what pain, when had he been injured? The world blinked back, a different world. Dark, angry purple sky, shivering ground, a distinctly biological background vibration, like twisting cartilage. Energy built and exploded, and darkness again. Something was in the darkness. Several things. They looked back at him, lurid green eyes and tripodial forelimbs twitching in his direction. I am not a biologist he protested, but he made himself think on paper, letting the liturgical process of observation with ink stand as a filter between his senses and his sanity.
Gravity less than earth. Ground soft, spongy, biological in origin. Fungus mat? Autonomous life-forms five-limbed. One visible visual processor.
Not overtly hostile. He felt the world shift, tilt, and this time he was ready for the dragging sense of movement, part vertigo and part failed-elevator-fall. The lab came back. Or he came back to the lab. What was left of it. The security guard was dead, electrocuted. He’d done his job. He hadn’t touched anything he wasn’t supposed to, but he was dead anyway. The script failed him. Blood on the walls meant others were dead too, violently. Alarms blared, one for a hot-lab breach, one for mass electrical failure, one for a hazard containment lockdown and one for a medical emergency. And one for a facility-wide evacuation notice, uselessly recommending exit through now-sealed doors. He stopped to breathe in the relative safety of the ready-chamber and watched a life-form coalesce from a ball of yellow lightning into a holding tank. What….? He cursed the tunnel-vision mindset of the laboratory hierarchy and thought of all the data wasted just because he was a physicist and not a biologist. Clearly someone had known the crystal could, apparently, teleport organic matter. Tesseract? Wormhole? A tesseract wouldn’t have produced the falling, dragging sensation. Theoretically. It didn’t matter that he knew, because they’d already known. They’d been ready for alien life-forms and they’d still sent a physicist. And now people were dead. And more were going to die. And all he had was maybe the ground’s a fungus. “We warned them!” The white-haired scientist cowered behind a ruined diagnostics panel. “We told them a resonance cascade was possible!” Told whom? Freeman wanted to shout. “Get to the surface. Go for help. Someone must know we’re trapped down here!” He turned away from the cowering scientist. Go for help. Sure. If the combined research and intellect of Black Mesa couldn’t close whatever door they’d just opened, who on the planet did they expect might help? He inspected the angry little organism in the holding tank. Unlike the pentapods in the darkness, this one certainly acted hostile. He wondered if there were more, and if so, what he was expected to do about it. He imagined if one shot the thing, it might die. Or smash it like a bug. Doing so would probably destroy invaluable research samples, but if it were that or getting bitten, he’d take the destruction any day. I’m a physicist, he wrote on the mental page. Then in a fit of un-scientist-like temper he underlined it three times and circled it. Not a biologist!

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The scientist initiated the retinal scanner but didn’t seem interested in accompanying him. He stepped through, and leapt back from the electrical arc walking its way across the control panel. The door imploded into a crumpled heap of metal and glass. The arc cut and he ran, and felt it snap back behind him in the hair on his neck. So much for a localized disaster. The hall beyond was a flickering labyrinth of overturned equipment and blood. He almost ran into an unaligned laser and watched in horrified fascination as it superheated the wet innards of a dead guard. It tracked a smoldering line of melted black polymer floor tile back across the hall. He stepped over the guard, conscious of the blood now tracking behind him, and picked up the crowbar the guard had been using on the security door.
The cold steel felt reassuringly solid in his hands. He smashed the glass and slid through the opening, careful not to tear the suit. The elevator was just beyond. Upstairs, someone would have order. Someone would know how far the disaster had spread and what, exactly, was going on. He hit the button, heard a scream, and glimpsed the falling, flailing white-coated men- and felt the crash resonate up through the shaft. No one upstairs was going to help.The ladder went up four floors, and he appreciated every moment he’d spent keeping himself in shape in some personal vendetta against the image of the weak-backed intellectual. He stepped out onto the landing and a bullet whizzed past his head. He dove for wall’s meager cover, but the shooter was another security guard, white-faced with panic but already aiming for another shot- not at Freeman, but at the-
-the thing. The staggering, bulbous, clawed… thing. White coat. Pants. Shoes. Talons. Blood. No face. Alien. He stated it in his head, firmly, in ink. Then he saw the name badge. Dr. Herkimer. Dr. Herkimer was an annoying microbiologist of forty-five, who thought he could grow a handlebar mustache but couldn’t and was inappropriately enthusiastic about his saxophone. He was not an alien. He had not been an alien at lunch yesterday, when Freeman had overheard him regaling three poor cornered interning post-docs about the virtues of his sax single. The faceless head screamed.The security guard shot it dead. “What the hell…” The man voiced Freeman’s thoughts, but Freeman was three steps ahead of him.The small creature in the tank. Grasping claws. Extending mouth. Co-opting a victim’s nervous system through the brain and spinal cord, puppeting a body for increased mobility. Vicious claws and teeth, a crude but effective means of acquiring nutrients. I am not a biologist! he screamed into his notebook. He did not want to understand the parasite’s traits and methods. He did not want to recognize the lab coat and clothing, or know the face under the dying alien membrane. The body beneath was dead, had been the moment the thing took hold. He could see that now from how it came half-detached, exposing bone and brain tissue. But there were no numbers to hide in, no theories of gravitational anomalies produced by resonance with internal crystal planes. There was only blood, bodies, and the crowbar in his hand, as a second parasitized scientist stalked down the hall. Its screaming was eerie and grating, too aggressive to be pitiful, and the claws left no space for mercy. Maybe killing it was a mercy to the former human underneath. The guard’s shots flew wide, so he slammed the crowbar’s notched end down its throat and wrenched up, dislodging the parasite enough to slow it. Then he smashed in the bulbous head. Oily yellow pus and red blood splattered back at him, but it went down in a wet limp heap. He stood panting over the corpse. The guard was watching him with the same mix of horror and relief he felt. It was one thing to kill from behind a gun, at distance, and another thing to feel the twitch and thrash of death in your own hands. The crowbar was warm and sticky, but he gripped it tighter. I am not a killer, he thought, but I will not die down here. He nodded to the guard and set off down the hall, a fresh blank page in his mind’s eye. Alien lifeforms hostile, parasitic. Original form small, probably vulnerable. Aggressive. Uses human host as organic tool, weapon and vehicle. Not fast. Probably not sentient. I hope.Three more parasites between him and the tram. Three more wet, bleeding once-humans, once-coworkers. He made himself look away, not wanting to know who they’d been and if he knew them. He watched Dr. Kenmyer die at the tram platform, his screams echoing a long moment after his impact. There would be no escape that way. He crawled through a weakened section of wall and into his own laboratory, now thick with fumes from melted electrical components. Multi-million dollar resonance analysis equipment, gone in minutes. His coworkers dead. His own carefully triplicated stack of laboratory notes gone, lost, destroyed, irrelevant. For three long, gasping breaths he surveyed the damage. The lab was finished. Nothing could be salvaged, not from a disaster like this. The equipment was too delicate, too finely calibrated. There would be no coming back here. A parasite sprang from the rubble and he smashed it down viciously. The crowbar pinned it to the floor, its innards leaking even as it scrabbled for escape. The thing whined and screeched and died, fighting every second.
So I will fight too, he thought. I am a physicist, and I will live.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He crawled through a ventilation shaft and dropped into the empty hallway beyond. Something chittered and he raised the crowbar defensively, but the parasite had found easier prey. He watched through the glass in fascinated horror as one parasite distracted a curious scientist while another crept up behind and leapt. It settled onto the man’s head, engulfing the cranium in seconds. Barely a minute later and the man was a brainless puppet. He’d succumbed without protest, without a fight. Dead, without falling.The hall swam before him. They were intelligent, capable of working together. More than animals, they were vicious enemies. Did they see humans as the unthinking beasts, or did they know they were destroying fellow intelligent life? Something moaned behind him and he spun. In the darkened lab, a puppet twitched, groaned and stood. He slammed the crowbar down into the soft tissue again and again. The man under the alien writhed with each hit, fingers reaching for him even as the body failed and fell. He turned away, disgusted and relieved- how many had he killed now? Three? Four? One less to follow him, one less monster to worry about. Around the corner the bodies of a security guard and a parasitized scientist lay entangled on the floor, blood and fluid pooled around them. He looked away, not wanting to recognize the guard. What use were they, if they couldn’t even shoot the creatures? No. He shoved the despair down and turned back to the guard. In the gristly pile the gun lay mostly empty. Its casing was greasy with blood but he picked it up and inspected it. Five bullets left in the clip. The crowbar was still comfortingly heavy, but now he could kill something before it came into grabbing range. He crawled through the next set of broken security doors. His own unit was now well behind him, but as long as he kept traveling up he was sure to come out somewhere in the upper Black Mesa complex. Then green lightning flashed in front of him. He threw himself back, memories of the resonance cascade flooding back, but no- this small tear in reality only deposited a four-legged green-flanked bulbous many-eyed thing on the floor before sputtering out. It chittered rhythmically, then sent a blast of sound and force in his direction. He dove for what cover the broken security doors offered and wasted three bullets bringing it down. The maggot-like body writhed twice and leaked green ichor. Maybe a biologist could tell him why everything was trying to kill him. Or maybe they’d opened a wormhole into some intergalactic battlefield. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He’d never fired on a living target before. Somehow the sense of accomplishment with the gun was different, more mature, than with the crowbar. The crowbar was an intimate weapon, the gun impersonal and advanced.
To kill with the club of the dark ages or the bullet of modernity, which is the more human?
A human voice thanked him. A white-haired scientist, not one he recognized, cowered in the corner. Gore splattered the man’s wrinkled face. The scientist wrung his blue-veined hands and sobbed his thanks at the rescue. Freeman left him behind. Elder academia’s arena was the mind, the papers, the data. Clearly the cutthroat world of grants and review had not prepared this man to witness genuine violence. I will live today, and you will die, he thought, and felt the thrill of exhilaration and a strain of disgust at the scientist’s weakness. Had he ever been a cowering lump of flesh, prey for the vicious beasts now prowling the corridors? Or did his decision to live, and willingness to kill, set him apart? Movement in front of him demanded answer and he raised the gun, but hesitated. A man stared back at him. A man, but not a man. Skin faintly green. Suit faintly wrong. A parody of a man, a thing in a man skin, but not a parasite puppet. Something new. Something coldly, calculatingly observant. A colleague. He sensed it deeply, the gaze on him like his own on a data stream, weighing the information, the variables, the usefulness. And he raised the gun again, and shot the two maggot-dogs as the crashed through the glass beside him. When he looked back, the observer was gone. Deep in the bowels of the mothballed nuclear sample storage, he came across another white-coated scientist, this one less cowering and more talkative. “Take me with you,” he demanded, glasses askew. Freeman read his nametag. Mortmontry. He nodded once and turned away. Let the man follow or not, maybe he’d be useful. The man didn’t scream when he bludgeoned a puppet to death in front of him, or when he rifled through the dead for a pass card to get through a locked door. Mortmontry calmly worked the retinal scanner, miraculously undamaged, to open the door for them both. He locked it again behind them and sank to the floor. “You think that’ll keep them out?” he asked, and Freeman saw his bravado for what it was: five minutes of adrenaline and a state of near-shock. He didn’t answer, and wished he hadn’t read the nametag. But the room held much-needed ammunition. He offered a spare hand gun to Mortmontry but the man shook his head. “I don’t know how to shoot,” he said. “I’d just hurt myself. You better go on without me.” Two corridors down, yellow lightning splattered in mid-air. He aimed for the maggot-dog and adjusted his posture as a bipedal, monocular three-armed alien stepped through the breach. He recognized the creature from the flashes of the far world during the resonance cascade, but this one seemed different. It arched its back and electricity seared from its hands straight for his chest. Freeman saw it coming and tried to dodge but he was slow, he couldn’t outrun electricity. His suit shrilled with alarms as he hit the floor, pain lancing through his right side from the discharge and left side from the impact. He fired up at it, missing twice before hitting the eye and head. It collapsed in a heap of limbs and claws, dark blood oozing from the shattered eye. Something rattled in a trash can. Parasites chittered from the corners. He dragged himself to a floor hatch and dropped into the waterway beneath, part of the mountain’s extensive cooling system, and caught himself wondering inanely if the aliens would follow him down here. Of course they would. They were a hostile, invading force. They didn’t look human and they almost certainly didn’t think like a human would, but clearly “kill the humans” was a concept they understood. They’d keep hunting him. They’d keep coming. So he splashed down the water pipe, grateful for its size, and found himself trapped. Panic ate at him, compounded by the pain in his side. He leapt for a floor grate, missed and slipped on the landing. He came down on his burned right side and gasped in pain. Cold water flooded through the charred, melted suit, soaking his clothing in seconds. Get out. Get out! The panic response overrode the pain and he struggled up. The water was stale and old, but he was thirsty enough to consider drinking it. He needed more of it to reach the grate. A flow valve? An emergency floodgate? Yes, there. An auxiliary flood control, in case of coolant failure farther down the line. Of course. He wrenched the wheel, gasping with each turn. He’d never realized how much arm movement necessitated core movement. It worked, and the tunnel filled with water. Another deep moment of panic, the inborn fear of drowning, nearly made him miss the puppet waiting above the grate. The thing rasped out a dry, grating moan and reached for him with long clawed hands. He shot it and climbed out, nearly spent by lifting his weight from the water. He wondered if the floodgates would continue to flow, spilling out like a forgotten clogged toilet behind him. Mind seeking distraction, he thought. Signs of disassociation. He searched the halls and chamber beyond- a loading dock for transporting heavy equipment to the reactor research labs. Below him. Far below him. Wrong direction. But what choice did he have? Only one door, only one way forward. And forward, now, was down. The lift leaver was blocked by the body of yet another guard. He lifted the man under the armpits and hauled him back. The body was still warm, the arms limp and loose. At least the man wasn’t a puppet; he’d been spared that indignity. The lift moved with grating, maddening slowness. Every breath was pain, every hitching click of the lift’s cogs another jolt on the melted flesh over his right side. He looked down over the edge, trying to gauge the distance, and felt the click click of pointed chitin legs on his shoulders, the obscene fleshy warmth of the parasite’s belly against his neck, and the smelled the swampy stink of its orifice opening over his face. The crowbar flashed up and into the body cavity, skewering it through, before his conscious mind caught up. Warm fluids sluiced down his head and shoulders, dripping from his elbows and pooling around his heels, a strange and eerie anointment to his will to live. Cold shivers wracked his spine but he held himself still, crowbar in hand. That was close. Too close. And where there was one, there were more. And yes, the sound of skittering feet- and the crowbar went through the thing with a satisfyingly wet crunch. An emergency medical aid box flashed from a platform near the lift and he jumped for it, landing hard and gasping. The lift slid past and stopped, its automated tones happily announcing journey complete. The aid station had a helpful little diagram and an auto-delivery cable that mated to his suit’s medical port. He’d never used it before and wasn’t entirely sure what the delivery mechanism was. He plugged the cable into the suit and gasped. Euphoria rolled through him and his vision hazed in bliss. Down the wall he slid, until the cable to the aid station drew taunt. It chimed completion and withdrew; its payload of nerve stimulants, narcotics and tissue-regrowth formula now swirled through his bloodstream. Rapid breathing, elevated heart rate, cold sweat, vertigo… as he cataloged the effects, he shivered in the most visceral pleasure he’d felt since some biochemist grad student spiked the punch at the physics luncheon with a favorite synthetic party stimulant. He shook sweat out of his eyes and wiped his forehead. No wonder the darn things were covered in warnings. The high was brief but powerful, so powerful he was reaching for the cable again before he realized the box was empty. He wondered which mad chemist had been responsible for including a synthetic opiate alongside the regrowth formula, so the pain of forced tissue regeneration was accompanied by a habit-forming pleasure. A dangerous, deadly combination- any employee injured bad enough once to need treatment would be liable to harm themselves again just for the drugs. But then, this was Black Mesa. The chemist in charge of the health packs might have just found the idea amusing, or been using the aid stations as a cover to supply themselves with narcotics for years, microdosing daily without anyone the wiser. Freeman’s pleasure was in the realms of mathematical theory as applied to predictable physical outcomes, not the biochemical response patterns of the human body, or so he told himself, firmly, again. I am a physicist, I am above this, he complained to his lab notebook. Immediate, effective, crude. Recommend removal of opiate, unnecessary except for repeated exposure. Which was likely to be today. Forced tissue regeneration hurt. It used an exorbitant amount of steroids, drained the body’s caloric reserves and mostly just made stiff scar tissue over the wound without healing underlying damage. Freeman flexed his hands and stretched his shoulders. The skin stung and twinged in odd, unfamiliar places; the new flesh not yet strong enough to stand much strain. If he was hurt again, in a normal world, he would weigh the pain of the wound against the pain of forced healing. But with the boxes spiked and the high likelihood of being repeatedly zapped, stabbed, munched, splattered or irradiated… he sighed. Could he escape before his body became addicted to the pain/pleasure feedback loop, or was his choice now between lifelong addiction and death by parasitic brain-eating alien tick? He pushed himself up the wall and staggered away from the aid station. Hopefully he wouldn’t need another one. Hopefully he’d never have to see one again. He wondered what his burn looked like, and if bits of the suit’s torn lining were now embedded in speed-healed flesh. He envisioned himself at the end of his journey, crawling up through the mountain and into daylight, a monstrosity of overgrown skin and suit, an alien in his own land, and shook off the fevered image.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The walkway ahead buckled and fell, taking a half-materialized maggot with it. The thing’s sonic screams echoed eerily up from the darkness. No way forward by the usual path, but pipes went around. He climbed up into the pipe structure, praying they wouldn't collapse under his weight. They groaned and shook but held.He knocked out a grate and slid into the ducts, oddly pleased to be using the crowbar for its intended purpose of levering things apart. The ducts were clean and clear of aliens and blood; the odd knot of dust and hair was a welcome change; he wondered if he could stay in them, if he could reach the surface via HVAC system alone.Give the HVAC guys a raise, he jotted in the mental notebook. They were probably still alive, somewhere on the surface, blissfully unaware of the chaos below. Mundane tasks like maintenance and cleaning were taken care of by an off-site crew, on certain days, supervised of course but by personnel the base considered ironically unimportant and expendable. By Black Mesa’s previous standard, that had meant meager pay, terrible hours and a rotating roster of temps, but by today’s standards that meant not important enough to be dead yet. The duct didn’t go far enough.He dropped out in an unfamiliar part of the coolant recycling system, where murky contaminated water moved sluggishly through enormous storm drains. Service platforms provided access, but rarely; and the cavernous place was crawling with life-forms.They’d been here a while. No way the colonies of ceiling-clinging barnacles or the herds of parasites had spawned in the scant hour since this horror began; no, today was not the first breach in the walls of reality, nor the first to escape containment. It was just the biggest to date, the one impossible to ignore.A door across the canal looked hopeful. Too far below to jump to solid ground, he opted for a hesitant leap into the water. His damaged suit let more cold moisture in and he didn’t want to think about the possibility of infectious bacteria or radioactive particles. Who knew what labs upstream dumped their liquid waste into the system.He slaughtered his way through the parasites on the service ledge and bludgeoned a maggot-dog to death to reach the door, and found it locked. Its heavy steel frame defeated the crowbar’s attempts at opening. Apparently he was on the wrong side of the safety barrier, the OSHA-required impassable walls designed to keep non-maintenance personnel from blundering into the wrong corner.Only one way forward. He eyed the sluggish murk. Ick. It was shallow enough to stand in for the most part, but an unexpected dropoff left him thrashing and gagging. He followed the channel until a service ladder let him out and found a health box helpfully bolted to the wall. Apparently OSHA standards were good for something after all.He hesitated to plug in. The system would purge any infection, but what if it was spiked? He doubted it would be, locked away in this far back corner. It was an older model from the ones in the main lab, and had a thick coat of dust on top. His suit wasn’t giving him health warnings yet, but the burn in his side was still tender and now soaked with contaminated fluids.Better drugged than dead, he reasoned, and plugged in. The euphoria didn’t come; clearly the opiate was an aftermarket addition. He sighed in relief and let the box do its work, imagining he could feel the antibiotics purge the still-healing flesh. The box chimed complete, still mostly full, and he unplugged from it. Hopefully he would find a hazmat suit repair station nearby too, and could patch the hole.The catwalk led him to an unlocked door. The door led him into a maze of steel plate walls, an accidental space between necessary infrastructure co-opted to provide maintenance access. After many wrong turns in the maze, he found a catwalk over the cargo delivery system. Crates hung frozen, victims of some power shutoff somewhere else, over a cement-floored void.Only one way forward.I’m a physicist. I can do this, he thought, and looked down. Each cate was suspended by a magnetic clamp and cable. They were helpfully staggered, with not too much space between. But suit or no suit, if he missed a leap or hold he was dead.Application of force and trajectory. I can do this. His heart pounded in his ears and his suit chimed a blood pressure warning. He hissed at it to shut up, thanks, and leapt for the first crate. He clung to the cable as the crate swayed under him, the magnetic clamp making terrible groaning noises. If it gave, he would fall with it.Finally the crate steadied and he readied himself for the next jump. Seven crates. Six chasms of infinite air. Six moments of sheer terror. He’d slaughtered aliens without so much as a hitch in his breath, but this- this was panic. This was the physical, visceral paralyzing fear of death that so destroyed the brilliant minds he’d seen cowering in corners.He understood now, and he pitied them. And he made himself jump.His palms were wet with sweat. The crowbar slid through his fingers as he sank to his knees on solid ground. He’d made it across, somehow, impossibly, and was still alive. His suit informed him his heart rate was steadying, his blood pressure returning to normal. It also informed him he was dehydrated and should drink water soon.He’d had… what, a cup and a half of coffee and a breakfast bar this morning, a few hours ago? His mind flashed back to the break room, sitting with his elbows on the table, perusing the duty roster while sipping the bitter cheap black lab coffee. A multi-billion dollar physics laboratory employing the world’s top minds and they still fed them like grad students.If- when- he made it to the surface, he’d demand better treatment from his next job. Who knew what that would be. Worm-hole physicist? Alien hunter? If nothing else the military ought to have a spare corner somewhere for someone who could summit Black Mesa during an alien invasion.Speaking of which…. he wouldn’t be surprised if he met them half-way. The military had a base in the vicinity, the arid, desolate landscape and distance from civilization a benefit to their activities just as it was to Black Mesa’s. Surely someone had gotten word out to the base. If anyone knew about this by now, it would be them.He turned a corner and there it was, an elevator with an up arrow. He almost kissed the doors in relief. The elevator was still working. It went up. It went up and up and up and he almost shouted for joy. Finally something was going right.Then the doors opened, and the body dropped from the broken ceiling tiles with a heavy, wet sound.Lights flickered across the incongruously bold black and white floor, like something from a derelict elementary school. Live wires hissed and sparked, and blood, drying fast, told a violent story. Parasites skittered in the shadows and something moaned above the drop ceiling.He retreated into the ducts again, preferring their dim and dusty interior to the chaos outside. In there, at least, darkness was normal, and not a symptom of the deteriorating laboratories.The duct got him into a storage room, where he watched through the grate as a scientist was hoisted upward by a barnacle and devoured head-first. He passed under the barnacle while it was busy, reasoning there wasn’t much he could do for the lower half of the person it dropped behind him. It’s not my job to save them, he reminded himself. It’s my job to live. One man was still alive. Remmington, his old department head from Orientation, the catch-all category for Black Mesa fresh recruits. Of anyone who might outlast the invasion on sheer crusty will alone, it was this man. Had he survived the parasites by poisoning them with his own dry stream of useless, outdated physics trivia? Probably.“Gordon!” he exclaimed, too loudly. Freeman motioned for him to be silent, but it was too late. The ceiling collapsed in as another barnacle dropped its poisonous red tendril. He stepped carefully around it as Remmington pattered on. He caught “must have survived,” and “calling for help,” but when he turned to Remmington to motion for him to follow, the man was already hunched under a table. “You go on without me, I’ll wait here for rescue. Freeman, you’ll make it up, I’m sure. Just don’t forget about me!”And so he turned away, and left the man to die. What could he do? Of all the souls in the mountain, this one was not his favorite, but Remmington had been the first name and face he knew in the mountain, the man who’d delivered the infamous newbie speech and hazed them all with a false containment breach, and had hand-picked the “survivors” to be hired from the pool of panicked applicants. Freeman remembered the drill well, had known it wasn’t a real breach, just as he’d known this one was.Remmington had told him once, in a moment of infuriating patronization, “Physics isn’t desire, Gordon. Physics is action! You cannot sit and stare at your experiment and desire it to be, you must act upon it. You must be the first motion of physics upon your world, if you want to receive anything from it.”The words had been nearly nonsensical at the time, as he’d been buried in designing an experimental framework for assessing crystal resonance, his first step towards working with the metamaterials responsible for the breach, but they came back now.He did not merely wish to survive, like the cowering scientists and ineffective security guards. No, he went out to make his survival a reality by being the operator of his reality. The crowbar pivoted in his hand as he brought it down through a leaping parasite. The hall lights flickered and revealed another, and he smashed it under his boot.The storerooms and breakroom provided water. The crowbar did not give him access to the vending machines, and his wallet was locked up safely in his locker a very long way behind him. So he raided the cabinets and found a bag of stale chips. Better than nothing, he supposed. The salts and carbohydrates tasted good after the strain and forced healing.Behind another storage room he found a security office with ammunition and, hallelujah, a shotgun. The security guard locked in his little cubicle helpfully informed him the only way out was the way he’d come, then refused him entry on the grounds he might be infected and not know it yet.The man had apparently been spared the worst of the invasion and had no intention of exposing himself to it.Freeman couldn’t blame him. He’d have done the same, in the man’s shoes. Survive, he thought, and silently wished the man well. Maybe they’d find a living guard down here, bunkered and safe. Or maybe a dried husk, dead of dehydration and choosing that way out over the unknown horrors beyond.He reentered the ducts and crawled onwards. This one was not empty, and twice the parasites’ claws dug through his suit and pierced his flesh before he could wrench them off in the enclosed space. Blood loss, the suit told him, as if the slick trail he left behind wasn’t evidence enough.On the far side of the ducts, a man ran towards him screaming for help and was shot dead.For a split second he wondered if the aliens had figured out human weaponry, but no. The faint background whirring told him this was an intruder drone, a barbaric safeguard in the high-security storage vaults. Enormous quantities of precious metals and nuclear materials were used in Black Mesa’s research and, as a deterrent against theft and sabotage, a brutal system of automated defenses guarded the vaults. The intruder drone hummed and chimed a one-heartbeat warning before sending a splatter of lead his direction. The suit deflected the first three impacts and by then he was behind a crate, moderately safe. The drone shot lightweight projectiles, certainly deadly against an unarmored trespasser but less effective against his suit. That said, the suit was informing him of new punctures and a sharp pain in his calf meant at least one had penetrated. From then it became an arithmetic of how many hits he could take, and where, before the machine did irreparable damage.He made it to the shutoff box with only minor wounds; minor being “survivable” by the suit’s classification, and by the presence of an aid box behind the dormant drone.This one was spiked. Flesh grew over the bullet buried in his leg and over the lacerations caused by the parasite attacks, as painfully as experiencing the wound all over again, and as pleasurably as- as- his comparisons failed him.Freeman was not a man of physical pleasures. He did not drink, he did not pursue recreational drugs. He did not have intimate relationships. His body didn’t crave chemical stimulation beyond his morning coffee. He had no context for what the synthetic stimulants were doing to him, but he knew it wasn’t good for his long-term health.I live at cost, on borrowed time, he thought, and unplugged from the box. The suit told him he was in good health, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. He swung wildly at a chittering blur and on the second swipe crushed the parasite.If he wasn’t careful, the medical treatment itself might kill him before the blood loss and trauma would.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He steadied himself on the wall and stood. The high-security vault would have the perquisite high-security supplies office, with useful things like ammunition and yes, grenades. He was very pleased with this development, though he realized he wasn’t familiar with the explosive range of the grenade. A gun’s physical application of force and destruction was easier to control; a grenade would wound or kill him as easily as any other organism.A staircase led up. Normal people, people not crawling through vents and ceilings, accessed the vault through a series of double-locked doors where identity was verified and paperwork checked. Around the corner of the stairs a living security guard hailed him. “You alive too, friend? Let me come with you, I’ll watch your back.” The man shot two parasites off the stairs and nodded to him. “I remember you, I used to work the tram station. Freeman, right? You know how to use that thing?” he asked, eying the shotgun.Freeman answered both questions with one sharp nod and headed up the stairs. The guard was familiar, vaguely, and the man’s friendliness disconcerted him. Another scientist barricaded in the security office shouted encouragement but declined the guard’s invitation to come.Then the guard shouted and charged past Freeman, into a conference room. He dove over the table, sending papers flying, and grasped for a pair of white-trousered legs just as they vanished into the vent.Screams echoed down the vent and the man’s shin bones, with feet and leather shoes still attached, fell back out. The guard dropped them and vomited.Freeman left him behind.The dry labs and conference space off the vault were designed for board member visits and government oversight. The organic contours made the space feel less sterile and utilitarian, but tricked the eye into ignoring blind spots and shadowed places.Freeman spun at the dry crackle of a rift. Bright yellow lightning danced over the checkerboard floor and two bipedal aliens materialized, hissing venomously at him. He caught one through the head with the shotgun but the other lashed his legs with electricity. He went down on his knees at the sudden numbness and shot up into its gut as it prepared a second blast.Three more searing balls of lightning, three more elongated bipedal shadows emerged around the corner. He cocked the shogun and-From over his shoulder, shots rang out. His right ear howled in pain.“Got one!” the guard hollered.Freeman shot the other two bipeds and stood, stiffly, shaking the numbness from his knees. The suit told him he was not significantly injured. He limped to around the corner and into the little green-carpeted office at the end. It had once been a chemical storage closet, before someone’s expansion and someone else’s budget cut had converted it into the joke of a workspace it was now. But it had the world’s ugliest plaid couch, a tiny desk, a recycled banker’s light and a drawer full of pistol ammunition.And the chair behind the desk was empty.Freeman clutched the back of the folding chair, knowing if he sat down he might not get up again. Thornton, the only man in the entire mountain he’d truly trust at his back with a gun, wasn’t here. The man was as eccentric as any physicist and he loved firearms. He had a concealed carry permit and always brought a pistol to work. And because he was Thornton, it was a special silver-plated engraved fancy limited-edition gun with the date of his doctoral dissertation defense stamped on the butt.He’d known Thornton probably wasn’t in the mountain, but he’d hoped. Silently, without letting himself know he’d hoped. And he knew it now by the crushing sense of aloneness he felt at the sight of that cheap empty chair and sagging plaid couch. It was Tuesday, and Thornton never came to work on Tuesdays.So instead he got stuck with the joke of a security guard, who was at that very moment carving a notch into his sidearm with a pocket knife. Liabilities. But the guard did know how to fire a gun, and together they made their way through the green-carpeted offices and whiteboard-walled workstations. The guard even bought him a soda at the vending machine, while Freeman shot the biped that teleported in beside them.“So the guys say you don’t talk because you think everyone’s inferior to you,” the guard stated, as they caught their breath in the hall after clearing it of parasites.Freeman lowered his brows and glared, first at the half-drunk soda, then at the guard. And didn’t answer.“You really can’t talk?”Freeman drank the last of the soda and crushed the can in his gloved hand. He dropped it and pushed through the double doors, out of the visible-to-dignitaries sections and into the bare-walled caverns of the mountain’s productive space. He was tempted to let the guard charge through first and be grabbed by the barnacle’s tentacle, but at the last minute he blocked the guard and shot the thing off the ceiling. Who knew how many humans still lived in the mountain? He wouldn’t waste this one, even if it was proving to be an annoyance.On the landing, the double-beep of a security drone warned him seconds before bullets cut across his path. He dove and rolled to the wall, slid under the drone, and shot it.“I’m hit!” the security guard yelled. Blood blossomed dark on his blue uniform, just above his knee. Freeman shook his head. He’d forgotten how tender bare human flesh was. He marched the guard back down the stairs and fairly shoved him into the aid station on the landing.The guard moaned and his eyes rolled back. He collapsed into a shivering heap on the floor beside the trash can, making incoherent noises of pleasure. Freeman ripped the man’s pants and checked the wound; pink scar tissue formed over it in seconds, making an angry, tender knot over the bullet wound. The guard wouldn’t bleed out, but he wouldn’t be good for much either.Freeman wondered if he looked as ridiculous caught in the throes of the aid station as this man did, and fervently hoped he didn’t. Alien invasion aside, he did still have some dignity. And a reputation for insufferable arrogance.He went back up, past the drone, bypassed the vault entrance it was guarding, and shot a parasite off a dead man’s head. The body collapsed like a stringless marionette. Something skittered behind him and he looked back to see two more parasites fall from the ceiling. He crushed them with the crowbar, conscious of his limited ammunition, and told himself he bothered because he didn’t want them to catch the drugged guard before the man could defend himself.The next door past the vault opened into a maintenance tunnel, all exposed ductwork and utilitarian cement. The bipeds showed up with bold color against the grey backdrop. Down into the maintenance cargo bay he went, reasoning that any section built to receive regular shipments must have easy access to the surface.But the bipeds just kept materializing. He shot two, launched a grenade at a third, and sprawled behind a crate to shield himself from the explosion. The crate shattered on impact, sending fragments of plastic packing material spiraling into the air. Behind the cloud, two more bipeds crackled into reality. Up came the shotgun but it clicked with impotence.He dropped it and drew the handgun in his right hand, the crowbar in his left. He shot the first biped through its ruby-red eye while the second raked his side with electricity. He spun and caught its torso, just under the three arms, with the hooked end of the crowbar and threw it over, then shot into its center of mass three times.It stopped twitching. He hissed a relieved sigh, suddenly very tired.The cargo bay doors wouldn’t open. They were broken or jammed or needed some form of authorization he didn’t have- he didn’t know, but the room was a dead end.He skirted the five alien bodies and retraced his steps out of the maintenance area and into a wood-paneled hallway he’d only seen in passing. All its doors were locked and reinforced, electronic safeguards automatically triggered by the disaster on the lower floors. Proprietary technology, precious research, irreplaceable samples… whatever the company didn’t want to risk discovered or liberated by law-makers or rivals, it was blocking his exit. And so back in he went, surveying the room. There had to be an exit. There would be an exit, or he’d make one with the rest of his grenades.Yes, there it was. A vent opening. He crawled in and was admitted to the inner sanctum of the HVAC system, where a giant fan whirred overhead and a tarnished ladder led promisingly upwards.The fan was enormous, each blade as tall as he was. It wasn’t moving fast, but it was moving with purpose, and with enough torque, he guessed, to sever a limb, suit or no suit.He walked back off its catwalk and considered. Then he turned around. Beyond the fan lay another shaft, his only path left. But to get there…He counted his breathing, in and out. Then he counted the fan blades, and the space between them. One- two- three- one- two- now! And he jumped.Air whirred behind him as the blade sliced past. He landed hard on his palms and knees on the far side, untouched but panting hard. He shook sweat from his hair and wiped his glasses.The ducts let him bypass the security doors. He cleared the parasites as he went, earning deep lacerations in his left arm when one caught him by surprise, and fell hard through the ceiling when the duct collapsed under him. He landed with a crash on a desk and rolled off, clutching his shin.Minor fracture detected, the suit informed him and he swore. The suit was already pumping morphine into his system, dulling the pain of a broken tibia,There was a med box on the wall above the desk.A med box in a strangely isolated, opulent little office.He eyed it with growing suspicion.Whose office was this? No name on the desk or door, no papers, nothing identifying. But someone important, someone who could afford a very personal touch to their very isolated workspace.He wondered if the thing would even heal him, or if it’d leave him in a drugged, slobbering heap, gift-wrapped for the next parasite.But his leg wouldn’t hold his weight and even through the morphine trying it left him gasping for breath. He was not going to survive the mountain by hopping on one leg, and who knew where the next med box was? He plugged in, and yes, clearly, this was the office of whatever perverted soul had designed the infernal things. That was his last coherent thought for about twenty minutes.On the plus side, the dark little office seemed forgotten by the rest of the mountain and by its new tenants, and thus his unscientific, undignified reaction to the chemical payload went unnoticed. On the minus side, this was his third hit in a few hours and while his leg now held him up with a minimum of pain, his hand lingered on the empty med box, his body drawn to its proximity by the start of a conditioned response.He searched the filing cabinet, just to be thorough, and to make himself do something not related to aid station drugs, and found a shocking volume of ammunition and two more hand guns.Now he really wanted to know whose office this was.Outside the office, he was past the high-security doors. Ahead, the VIP breakroom sat in a section of lowered floor, surrounded by walkways and tables. The chairs, he noted, looked considerably more comfortable than the cheap plastic folding ones in the resonance laboratory’s breakroom. Wood-paneled halls and tasteful beige floors –no checkerboard and garish green here- led him to a coffee alcove. A collection of scientists had tried to barricade themselves inside, but half were parasitized, and the other half had been messily dissected by their former comrades.One parasite-headed figure saw him and turned, clawed hands outstretched, chittering a warning. He blew its head in, then bludgeoned the other to death with the crowbar.He had the door unlocked and half open when he stopped and looked back.That was an automatic espresso machine in the alcove, splattered with human and alien blood though it was. He wiped gore off the buttons and hit the sequence for a cup of coffee with extra sugar and extra shots. He downed it, enjoying the sweet-acid taste, and glad of the jolt of sugar and caffeine. The med box’s synthetic cobwebs were beginning to clear from his mind.Then his boot stuck on the curve of an opened ribcage and he nearly lost the coffee. No- he told himself, hands on the counter, fighting to keep his breath even- It’s not my job to save them. It’s my job to live. And a cup of coffee in this nightmare is not an inhuman indulgence. But for a fraction of a second he’d closed his eyes and smelled only coffee, not blood, and tasted only sugar, not fear. For that second, he’d been sitting at his usual table, waiting to clock in.And now it all started over.He swore silently, cursing the aid boxes, the espresso machine, the aliens and the very nature of the universe to allow such a thing.And he wiped his nose, stepped over the body and slammed open the door, crowbar ready.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Cold storage. Of course.

Freeman hated cold storage. The place was built like a medieval fortress, byproduct of being hurriedly expanded in Black Mesa’s period of rampant pharmaceutical research and development, then abandoned in the years following their shift to nuclear, metamaterial and crystal resonance research.

Old biological samples, temperature-sensitive metamaterials, forgotten projects and unclean petri dishes, and the odd crate of cafeteria hot-pockets dotted the frost-encased shelves. The floor was slick with a layer of microscopic ice crystals. His breath fogged in the air and on his glasses.

He wondered what the temperature change did to his gun. The crowbar was more obvious, the metal becoming colder by the second. He felt it through the suit glove, and he felt the cold creep in through damage cracks and latex joints.
But the only way forward was through. He tried to remember the layout for the cold storage warrens as he brushed through the smudged plastic strip curtains, and tried not to breathe too deeply. A man screamed and charged past him. He spread his feet wide to keep from slipping on the floor. The man was not so lucky; he went down and caught his forehead on a shelf. Yellow goo splattered over the man’s white-coated back, produced by –

Freeman shot the organism before he registered it as a new alien species, a two-legged acid-spitting blob. He stepped over its body, moving quickly around the partition, shotgun ready. It was alone in its lair, but it had dragged several more bodies into the alcove behind protruding refrigeration ducts. He retrieved ammunition from the stiff frozen body of a security guard and moved on.

Was the acid spitter naturally immune to the cold? Was it intelligent enough to store the bodies for future consumption?

I am not a biologist! He reminded himself, and gripped the shotgun more tightly. If he started to wonder too much, he might hesitate. Information was seductive like that. He prodded the fallen man, but acid had already eaten through the white of his lab coat and blue cotton shirt and glistened wetly on reddening flesh. The man's pulse slowed as he watched; in seconds, it was gone.

He knew cold storage had multiple access points, reflective of both Black Mesa’s intellectual separation policy and budget cuts. One centrally located freezer was cheaper than multiple lab-specific units; just give everyone their own access point and sample coding, and make the place so cold no one would stand around and discuss work inside. So he knew the icy maze had an exit. Somewhere.

A crate exploded beside him and he hit the ground, shotgun up and firing. Another acid spitter fell limp in the splinters, its yellow payload bubbling out across the floor.

He swore as he got up, silently and colorfully. The spitters were smart.

In the next chamber, huge slabs of lab-grown meat hung from ceiling hooks. Not even the aliens were eating them, which said something about Black Mesa’s foray into culinary chemistry. He explored further, tempted to put his left hand on the wall and defeat the maze by process of exhaustion. Where were the other doors?

Yes, there was one.

Its lever was cased with ice. He wasted precious minutes chipping it off, every breath painfully cold, and found the door locked securely from the other side. The lever wouldn’t even budge.

He whacked it with the crowbar as hard as he could, and regretted it as the sound rang through the steel-plated walls.

“Are you there?” someone whispered.

A stack of ancient produce boxes, their contents long since destroyed by frost, moved a fraction of an inch. He trained his shotgun on it, just in case the spitters had learned how to talk.

But just one thin, white-skinned hand, fingertips blue with cold, emerged. “If you’re human, please help me!” the scientist cried. “I can’t take this any longer. I’m going to die in here!”

Freeman scooted the boxes away with his foot. The man crawled out from under the shelf. He was old, but the cold aged him further. His body shivered uncontrollably and his teeth chattered. “I thought I’d escape them here. No idea they liked the cold…” he shoved his fingers in his armpits and hugged himself, rocking back and forth. “So cold. I’ve been hiding for hours. Has help come yet?”

Freeman shrugged, and wondered what on earth he was going to do. The sense of fellow humanity with this lone begging scientist was growing, but he tamped it down. Survival with this man in tow would be impossible. He looked up and around, searching for inspiration, and saw a vent.

He pointed to it.

The man saw, nodded, and lowered himself back down in defeat. He sat crouched on the cold floor, rocking back and forth. “I’d never make it up there. I can’t feel my hands and feet. You’d better go on without me. I’ll just stay here. At least I can sleep soon, and then it’ll be over.”

He hoped the man was right. Death by hypothermia seemed tame compared to death by acid, or dismemberment, or parasite, or electrocution…

The vent was not clean.

Blood splatter told him he wasn’t the first human to attempt it. Parasites hunkered in the shadows and clawed at his elbows. He beat them off and was relieved to find emergency power packs for the suit on a dead security guard. The guard had tried to escape the vent and been cornered, and had taken his own life before parasites had gotten to him. Freeman admired his bravery, emptied his utility belt of anything useful, then moved on.

The power packs gave the suit’s internal system enough of a boost to start repairing itself. Its nanotechnology was effective and functional; miles ahead of civilian and military tech, but still energy-hungry and slow. The suit rippled organically around him. He paused in the dark confines of the vent and resisted the urge to rip it off. The back of his mind insisted the thing had become alien, biological, dangerous.

No. He gripped the crowbar in both hands and hissed as the suit’s repair function slid over the burned flesh on his side. The speed-healed scar tissue was only a thin outer layer over the underlying trauma. The suit did as it was programmed, knitting lose plates back together and reconnecting damaged joints, without any care for the thing it protected. He winced when it repaired holes left by the parasites, and as it extracted bits of itself from the scar tissue, he had his answer- yes, the speed-healed flesh was growing around the shrapnel.

Now he had a new choice. Repair the suit, at the cost of reopening old wounds.

Blood loss detected, it informed him.

No kidding, he thought, feeling warm liquid seep into the suit lining yet again.

The vents dropped him into the refrigeration system’s maintenance access room, where a very old, dusty human skull grinned disconcertingly back at him from the top of the duct work.

How long had that been there?! It certainly predated the barnacles infesting the place.

And then he was back on the civilized side of the wall, in a brightly lit corridor with only one dead body and a scattering of aliens. He had a disconcerting moment of déjà vu – were the corridors starting to look familiar, or had he been here before?- if he’d made one giant loop in the HVAC system he’d-

No. He took a slow, long breath and watched a surprisingly competent security officer, crouched over the body of his dead comrade, kill a puppetted scientist before it eviscerated another man. The man stood, careful not to disturb the dead body.

Freeman was struck with the dueling thoughts of respect for the man’s levelheadedness and skill, and disappointment that he wouldn’t get to strip the body’s service belt of ammo. The security guard wasn’t going to leave his dead friend’s side.
“Head for the surface and tell them we’re down here,” the guard said.

Freeman nodded.

For the first time in decades he regretted his silence. He couldn’t explain to the guard that there was a scientist slowly freezing to death in cold storage. There wasn’t any point, he reasoned. The guard was poorly equipped to handle a duct crawling with parasites or a cold-room with ambushing acid spitters and the man under the shelf hadn’t been in any shape to climb and yet-

-he looked back at the guard, into his bloodshot grey eyes and tear-stained face, and hoped they’d both get out alive.

He nodded once, sharply, and headed up the stairs.

And hit the far wall hard, his body reacting to movement in his peripheral vision. The cement block wall ahead cracked, buckled and crumbled, and through the wreckage stepped a parasite-headed human body.

It had battered its way through an eight-inch-thick cement block wall.

He shot the parasite off, caught movement, turned and fired into a second one. The third he pulled up and shot wide at the last moment, catching a glimpse of upraised palms. “Don’t shoot!” the terrified researcher pleaded.

He hauled the man up and shoved him back towards the stairs, hoping he’d catch the hint and join the other survivors.
The corridor ended in an elevator shaft.

A shaft with no elevator.

A shaft vanishing into the dark dozens of stories below.

With a ladder on the far wall, painted a nice bright helpful safety yellow.

He gritted his teeth, wedged the crowbar through the shotgun strap and double-checked his sidearm holster. He paced back from the door, counting his steps. He’d long-jumped once, in college, because he could. He’d landed on his shoulder and dislocated it.

If he fell, he’d die.

He imagined the dusty turf of the track field extending across the darkness. Only one way forward. Only one way up. His palms itched and his fingers twitched, imagining impact with the ladder. He'd have only a breath to grab it and hold on. The impact would fling him against the far wall. He might lose weapons. He checked the crowbar again and knew he was stalling.

It would be just like Black Mesa, to be more deadly than the aliens infesting it. But he'd survived board meetings, budget cuts, crystal insertions and too many variables. He'd survived a tear in reality and he'd stood on an alien world. He could make one freaking jump.

Do your worst, he thought, and then wondered what the psych profile for talking to buildings was.

He ran and jumped.

Far above him, someone screamed.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“I can’t hold on!” a man cried above him. And then he fell, white coat streaming around his flailing body.Freeman watched him vanish down the shaft, all twenty-seven stories of unlit gravity. He clung to his yellow ladder and shuddered in sympathetic horror. He knew how long the fall would take. Calculating terminal velocity for the average human weight was a child’s exercise.But today was not a day to think about numbers. Numbers became odds, and body counts, and exponential growth of dimensional rifts.He uncurled one orange-gloved hand from the yellow rung and forced it up. One boot up after it. Next rung. He climbed by force of will, his guns and crowbar clanking off the painted steel. Then he edged around the narrow banded safety strip and climbed again. Four stories up, he saw the ladder hanging over empty space. He had no room to back up and run this time. And only one way forward.Breath in. Breath out. Brace. Leap.He caught the lowest rung and clung, its surface sticky with blood and sweat from the fallen man. His own body was dead weight over the black pit and his shoulders groaned with the effort of hauling himself up. One rung. Then the next. He curled his body up awkwardly, getting a toe in the lowest rung to provide leverage.He rolled onto the elevator’s roof and sat panting against the cable box. His shoulders shook with strain and adrenaline. And fear.Freeman was as afraid of dying as any human, and disinclined to die by alien parasitism, but the shuffling puppets, acid-spitters and bipeds didn’t make his heart pound and vision narrow the way the black space below him did. Maybe it was the biology thing again, maybe he’d fear the visceral death more if he understood it as well as he understood the simple act of falling. Because it wasn’t the splatter at the bottom that gave him nightmares, it was the stomach-chilling wait between the last moment of salvation and the first moment of eternity, when the mind realized death was inevitable but the body hadn’t yet met earth.For a split second he was the falling scientist, grasping at open air.No. Today was not a day for empathy. On the surface, under open sun, then he’d have time to process and remember. Now he needed to move.The elevator gave him access to the secondary nuclear storage facility, behind the upper laboratories. He smelled fresh air, surface air, coming through the triple-layered HVAC filtration system. It smelled amazing.A scientist pounded on heavy safety glass, crying for the security officer to open the blast doors and let him out. But the security officer wasn’t obeying. He was standing upright because the puppet had one long-clawed hand around his throat and the other around his spine. With a sharp yank the puppet separated flesh from bone and the officer collapsed with a heavy, wet sound. The puppet bent down to feed.The scientist backed up, turned and ran, and exploded. Bits of human rained back down the corridor.Freeman froze, back to the wall. What new horror was this?Oh. He saw the black box, the pale blue light of the trigger laser, and understood. The military had arrived, and they hadn’t liked what they’d found.He crept around the corner and into a maze of tripod-mounted drone guns, crates of extra laboratory supplies, and rippling yellow holes in reality. The guns came alive at his movement but were distracted by the parasites falling from thin air.Thankfully they were easy to disable once upset, and just a fraction of a second slow to change targets. So the military didn’t want to take chances with anything living escaping the base. Did they know they still had scientists and safety personnel trapped on the lower levels? Did they care? They’d seeded the corridors with claymores and traps, easily visible and avoidable to a human eye. So maybe they did, and were hoping the average IQ of Black Mesa would be high enough to avoid the traps.Maybe they just hadn’t counted on blind panic, he thought, as he passed another dead scientist, body riddled with holes from a drone gun.He made his way through dusty, overstuffed storage rooms, the detritus of decades of forgotten, failed research experiments left to rot in peace. There were other entrances to the auxiliary storage, just like with cold storage; a place where multiple labs came together to dump their unwanted waste. He hoped nothing was particularly prone to explosions, as he dropped a grenade behind a stack of crates and listened for the telltale blat of dronefire.Two tripods spawned in the corridor behind him and were blown to bits by the claymore he’d passed. So the things were doing their job after all.But his grenade had ripped a hole in what seemed to be a drum of industrial lubricant, and when he set foot in it he went sailing across the room and into the barrel of a drone gun. It came awake with a chirp and he knocked its legs out more by accident than design, flailing for purchase on the slick floor, and watched helplessly as the second drone gun cut down two colleagues in the next room.He swore in his head, in red ink, across the page, and flung both drone guns down the open freight shaft.His moment of temper made him self-conscious, made the hair on his neck stand up with awareness. Why did he feel watched? He turned in a slow circle, gun up, scanning for movement and vibrant alien color. Above the next maze of red and green trip lasers, there, on the catwalk: a man in a suit watched his progress. Freeman sighted in on the man’s too-green, too-long face, but he didn’t shoot. The man stared unblinking, turned his back, and walked away.Red ladders connected the storage space to a series of maintenance catwalks. He climbed up to where the man had been, but he was gone.“Rescued at last!” a very human voice said in the next room.“Stay back!” another human voice said.Someone fired a gun, and someone screamed.Freeman dropped off the catwalk and into the main access stairwell. He watched the scientist slump against the lift grate, red smearing the steel mesh behind him. And he watched the green-jacketed human lower his weapon and turn away from the body.Human. Armed. Apparently male, in military fatigues. Freeman catalogued the details as he descended the stairs. He walked quietly, soundlessly, and kept to the man’s blind spot. Hostile? Or just scared?Alone. Military didn’t function alone, they functioned in pairs or squads. Lost or lone survivor? He considered calling out to the man, as one human to another. But the scientist had done just that and was now dead.Set aside aliens for a moment and Freeman was witness to a murder.He gripped the shotgun and took another step.Maybe he made some small noise, or a shifting shadow gave him away, or the military man had a sixth sense; the marine suddenly spun, raised his short, squat automatic rifle and fired.Freeman felt the sharp, heavy weight of the bullet in his chest and fired back as he dropped to his knee.The marine was dead.No, the man was dead. The human being under the uniform was a young man with a gun and a set of impossible orders, dropped into insanity and told to kill. Freeman would never know if he’d mistaken the orange suit for something alien, or if he’d been specifically instructed to kill all living organisms in the base. Had he feared for his life, or had he trusted his weapons and superiors to protect him? Did he have a family and a home on the surface, or was he a loner and this his first stop on a career path of bloodshed and war?Stop. Freeman reined in his imagination, not sure if the sudden thought path was true human empathy and regret, or just a moment’s hyperfixation as relief from the slaughter. The man was dead. Freeman had killed him. The first human life.Maybe the last. Hopefully the last.The marine had shot first, and the bullet hole in Freeman’s chest ached with every breath. The suit had stabilized the damage and he was still upright and walking, but a center-of-mass chest shot was something he couldn’t ignore. He wanted a med box, a good spiked one, knowing the opiate would wash away the revulsion in his gut and put mental distance between the act of killing and the art of surviving.He and I both had jobs to do, and I need to finish mine. Survive. Kill, climb, hunt, hide. Survive.But the wet flesh smell, the death odor of feces and stomach gasses, and the sulfur of gunsmoke followed him.He found a med box under the stairs and plugged in, glad of the squirming feel of flesh closing over his chest, glad of the rush and fog of the drugs. The sensation was calming, grounding, familiar. The nausea receded, replaced by physical hunger and chemical exhaustion. Things he could deal with. Problems he could solve.He stepped over the scientist’s body and into the elevator. Up was always the right direction.The more frequently used freight storage bay was alive with humanity. Two marines shot as they came down the access stair and a screaming white-coated man clutched his thigh and crawled for cover behind the crates. Freeman shot back, intentionally aiming for the ground at their feet. They backed up the staircase and he ran for the injured man.“They’re trying to kill us!” he panted, hands clasped over his leg. Red blood pulsed from the wound.Freeman slid his right arm under the man’s back and kept his pistol out in his left, tracking the stairs as they circumvented the crates. He’d seen a med box- yes, right there. He set the scientist down and slammed the box’s cable into bare flesh just above the bullet wound. The scientist gasped and his eyes unfocused as the cocktail took effect. The bleeding slowed immediately but the man was immobile. He would be easy prey.A suit repair station nearby closed the bullet hole in Freeman’s chest plate. He winced as it put pressure on the tender skin of his chest and wondered exactly how effective the suit was against military weapons. It certainly hadn’t been designed to withstand gunfire. Why would it have been? But he’d survived a close-range shot to the chest.The data suggested the suit would protect him.The two marines returned, boots slamming hollowly on the cement stairs.The healing scientist shuddered against the wall, fingers twitching, eyes closed. Freeman stayed between him and the approaching marines. He wanted to shout I’m human! But no sound came. He wanted to put his hands up and drop to his knees, to let the men in green take control, to surrender and be a civilian again, but he couldn’t. Surrender was death. Acceptance was death. As long as he kept fighting, he stayed alive. And these men wanted a fight.The first marine met his gaze, brown eyes locked wide on his, and took aim.Freeman staggered under the impact of two bullets, one in his hip and one in his thigh, and then he shot back. And he didn’t miss either.The marine had fired low, hesitated, shot to wound. He’d seen humanity and he’d second-guessed his orders.Or maybe he’d shot quickly and wide, overcorrected for his weapon’s kick, or simply not had the time to adjust for the change in distance.Either way he was dead.A bullet whizzed past Freeman’s head, ruffling his hair. He dove for the floor and twisted to return fire. The second marine slumped lifeless on the staircase above. He stood and realized he’d slid into the mingled blood of both the first marine and the scientist. The suit was slick with it and he smelled the warm metallic tang.Odd, he’d never considered the scent of blood before. But then it was a very biologist-oriented thing, not really in his wheelhouse. He limped to the med box and plugged in, taking what the scientist had left. He let out a long breath as the drugs went to work on flesh and mind alike. Bullet contusions were repaired and the death-flash of the marine’s last moments faded. The suit repair station sent ripples of power through the suit’s plates and nanobots. He shivered at the crawling sensation it sent down his spine and across the bullet wounds. With luck, few marines had penetrated Black Mesa down this far. With luck, the rest weren’t under a “kill everything” order.But it really wasn’t shaping up to be that kind of day.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He moved by instinct, from cover to cover, working his way through the freight delivery system. Conveyor belts intended to save steps and labor crisscrossed the newest sections of the warehouse, where mass volumes of plastic pipettes, rubber gloves and other plastic disposables were stored. He crouched and scrambled crab-like through the conveyor passages, working against the belts’ direction half the time. It was exhausting but let him circumvent the more fortified military installations. The military had a basic blueprint, apparently, but not a good idea of Black Mesa's internal layout. Otherwise they'd have stationed someone at the end of the beltway to pick off living cargo.They’d entrenched themselves remarkably fast. They had sand bags, heavy weapons, even cement barricades. The sheer volume of drone guns, ammunition and explosives strewn throughout Black Mesa suggested a powerful, organized response. Planned for. Even without the detailed layout, they’d come in prepared.They’d known a breach was likely. They’d known more than the scientists.So who had decided every Black Mesa scientist need to die? Who decided the military needed to know more than the people working in the mountain? The resonance experiments were exceedingly costly; who had the money to buy off their destruction?Freeman didn’t like his coworkers, in general. He considered one a mild sort of friend, two more were passing acquaintances, and five had been his superiors. He had no one working directly under him, though a few post-docs and some researchers had passed through his lab in the last few years. He wasn't the most personable man in the mountain, even by physicist standards; his post-docs didn't exactly call him on Christmas. But that didn’t mean he wanted the mountain’s citizens slaughtered by claws and bullets. Whoever'd designed the experiment had been short-sighted fool, but whoever'd arranged the mop-up was a psychopath. He dropped from a conveyor belt into a lofted staging area. A catwalk connected the staging area to a platform on the far side of the room, an afterthought of architecture. A sandbag bunker on the platform protected three men in green fatigues. One man shouted and another shot wide and fast over Freeman’s head.He crouched behind the corner of the catwalk and put his hand around. He knew they could see him, because they were shooting at his hand.Freeman hated signing. He hated signing one-handed, he hated signing in Black Mesa. He reserved it for the very, very rare occasion when a colleague at a conference initiated a conversation in sign language. Then he’d sign, gritted restrained politeness first, until they’d established a point of mutual interest. Then there was an exchange of business cards for formal conversation, and, often, an exchange of sarcastic symbols as commentary on the presenters.But he signed, letter by letter, don’t shoot.They kept shooting. He signed again. He waved, open-handed. He put both hands around the corner, empty, open, and they still kept shooting. He sighed. And signed again, the simple rude gesture anyone would recognize. It summed up his thoughts on the day as a whole.A bullet clipped his glove. He felt the tug and sting of broken skin. Blood loss detected, the suit told him. He resisted the childish urge to put the cut in his mouth, an instinct not yet drummed out by years of laboratory safety practices. The gloves were filthy and stained with alien fluids and who knew what else.He pulled the pin on a grenade, released the handle and paused, then threw it. It exploded in the bunker before it hit the ground. He moved on, methodically working from cover to cover through the freight sorting and staging docks. He watched a marine so intent on picking off a white-coated scientist cowering behind a crate that the marine didn’t see a barnacle’s deadly fishing line. The marine was hauled up, screaming, his dropped gun on the floor far below.Freeman had no military training. He didn’t like competitive games, combat simulators, loud noises, concussive force or camo-colored clothing. He knew how to use a gun because his undergrad apartment building had been in a bad part of town and he, at the time a skinny, silent teenager three years too young to be there, had decided he’d rather kill than be shot, stabbed, robbed or beaten. I'm a physicist, he remembered thinking back then, not a victim. Not a coward.

He’d never had occasion to use the stubby little purse gun, but he’d practiced with it. And with other guns at the range, and with soft-spoken men who agreed a silent, dark-eyed kid needed to know how to defend himself. Firearms were just applied physics, and tactical movement through an enclosed space just another kind of vectoring, with a little optics and some basic knowledge of the more aggressive subset of humanity.
  I am a physicist, not a soldier. I choose to live. I kill to live.
He reloaded the shotgun.The benefit of military incursion was the sudden plethora of ammunition and explosives. The marines were clearly armed for war, with each bunker and enclave holding many times the supplies necessary for the three- and five-man groups he was encountering.He fought through the final freight warehouse to the extra-wide, extra-slow elevator used for moving heavy laboratory equipment and shielded nuclear samples down into the mountain. Fresh, desert-warm air wafted down the shaft. The lift groaned and heaved its way up, and killed any hope he had of sneaking out through whatever perimeter was now established around Black Mesa.He sighed, swore in red ink, and gripped the automatic he’d taken from a dead marine.Four men and an angry black helicopter waited for him.They were aggressive, quick to fire, sure the helicopter would keep him pinned while they finished him off. They never took cover and they died quickly.And he was outside. The desert evening smelled earthy and bright after sterile, processed scents of cement and acetone and the stink of human and alien death. But the helicopter was still up there, still angling for a shot between stacks of cargo, bales of munitions and high cement walls. It covered the only viable surface exit too well. He tried, made an aborted dash, and hissed when its high-velocity large-caliber automatic nicked his heels. The suit could stop a handgun round with minimal lasting damage and the automatic fire slowed him but wasn't lethal if he could reach a med box. This? No. The helicopter would cut right through the suit like tissue paper. Luckily the gun couldn't keep up sustained fire without overheating and the pauses were becoming predicable. Freeman was good at estimating. He mentally paced the open space to the next patch of cover, the overhang on the bay door across from him. And he admitted defeat. Too far. Far too far. He'd be shredded.   The thought of descending again made his stomach clench. His hands were slick with sweat in the gloves and his breath tight and shallow. He was angry with that helicopter, angry something as petty as a man with a scope stood between him and freedom. And then he realized this was his first encounter with an enemy he couldn't just kill.  He wasn't going back down the elevator, not with the helicopter waiting between him and it. Options were limited, but there was a narrow service hatch behind the crate stack where he'd taken cover. The shaft was dark, narrow, poorly lit, dropping into a shadowy, forgotten maintenance walk. Dust was thick on the ground, and an outdated med box gleamed dully from a rusted wall. He’d been grazed three times, just tears in suit and skin, so he bypassed the box entirely. No point in subjecting himself to whatever decayed chemical mix it held.A hatch let him into a cooling tower’s main ventilation shaft, where far below a massive fan pulsed overused dry air up into the night sky. Catwalks ringed it, rust spotting their bright safety yellow, with side vents opening in and out.He stepped onto the catwalk and out of the corner of his eye saw something dark fall past.Only reflex saved him; he crashed back into the maintenance shaft and slammed the door down as explosions rolled through the cooling tower. The helicopter was dropping bombs.The shaft stilled and he reopened the hatch. The copter was still up there, still watching. He was trapped between the loading dock and the cooling tower, no way forward or back.And men were sliding down cables, ready for a hatch-by-hatch search for him.He took a deep breath, then another. Every sweep of the fan blades below vibrated up through his boots. If he fell, the suit wouldn’t save him. If the men cornered him in a duct, the suit wouldn’t save him. He'd live through the first dozen shots but eventually polymer plating would buckle and shatter. And on open ground, the copter waited.He threw himself into open space.Marines shouted above and bullets traced his trajectory, spattering fragments of hot metal as they ricocheted off steel and cement. And then his toes hit the ledge and his body curled on impact with the unforgiving wall. He clawed for the crowbar, for the HVAC vent, and slid head-first into its dark confines.No room to maneuver, but with luck they wouldn’t follow fast enough to sink bullets into his rear. And with luck, the ducts weren’t infested. Ahead, another fan pulsed. Vibrations sang through the suit gloves into his palms, through the knee pads into his thighs. He expected a bullet with every breath, a sweep of fan blade through armor or the skittering claws of a parasite on his neck.The duct opened into another shaft, this one an intake. The air seemed to haul him downwards, into the fan blades below. He could see the next opening, the only way forward, dark and yawning under the fan. And the only way to reach it was through the narrow gap between blade sweep and duct corner. A blessing of a round fan in a square shaft, the space was only a hair wider than he was. And while he wasn't the skeletal frame he'd been in grad school, he wasn't wide. He pressed himself into the corner, back to the wall, and slid down first hip-level, then chest-level, then nose-level with the deadly blades, eyes shut tight against the whip of air. The thrum was overwhelming, drowning out all other sound and sensation.And then he was through, into clear, rapid air. He dove for the darkness of the duct work and prayed the shadows weren’t occupied. His standard-issue suit-integrated LED penlight illuminated a pathetically small spot of galvanized steel.The duct spat him out, via a channel slicked with blood and fatty tissue, into the security room at the inner edge of the freight delivery maze. He’d watched the security guard die, the man whose blood now coated his chest plate and elbows.He leaned against the wall below the duct and fought to control his breath. He’d seen the surface, he’d made it to open sky, and he’d been forced back in and now he was right where he started, and a lot of men were dead between.“You started this,” a man said.He looked up, momentarily too exhausted to bring up the gun; a colleague, white hair frizzed around comically thick glasses, a white lab coat draped over thin shoulders, clothing a noncommittal shade of mute pale blue. The man was a relic, a wise but tottering figurehead of a past era in science. Freeman recognized him. Dr. Aimsworth, the head of Archives, former head of the Resonance lab, and before that, rumored intellectual power behind all their applied nuclear physics work. But he’d aged, and he hadn’t aged well against the progressions in popular scientific thought. His mind, still sharp, still perfect, was too valuable for Black Mesa to release, so they’d imprisoned him in the skeletons of his past lives, waiting for him to die and take all his proprietary knowledge into their carefully controlled, predug grave.“And if anyone can finish it, you can.” Aimsworth’s voice was steady and solid despite the trembling in his blue-veined hands. He gave curt, calm directions for a path to Lambda, involving several decommissioned wings of Black Mesa. Lambda. What dark secrets and alien horrors lay hidden on that road?Freeman nodded to Aimsworth. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, looked him in the eye, and then left.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“You can trust us,” Aimsworth had said. "All the scientists are on your side. We'll do whatever we can to help you, but we can't fight them like you can. We're dying, Freeman. We're dying fast.But I can’t save you, he’d wanted to say back. Don't put your hope in me. There was power in the decommissioned, cold-war-era tram system. Small favors; at least he didn’t have to walk the half-mile to the rocketry labs. He slaughtered a scattering of parasites and ran into a pack of acid-spitters in the radioactive overflow and storage containment chambers.Because of course someone had thought it was a good idea to vent the experimental outwash from their nuclear rocket project into the old tram system. He wondered if the screamers congregating on the catwalks above the massive skeletal silo were drawn to the radiation.He heard voices, human voices, beyond the containment door. The silo was manned.Was. He opened the door in time to hear the last wet coughs of a man on the floor, in time to see a black-clawed green… claw slam through the three-inch-thick radiation-proof lead glass panel and stab another man, penetrating cloth, sternum, organs and ribs. The claw skittered over the plate steel floor, dragging the man with it over the control board and into the silo.“Kill it… please kill it…” the dying man begged. He gasped, hiccupped blood and slumped over.Freeman took a deep breath, clutched his shotgun and ran through the control room. Ruined electronics sparked and spat and the stench of burning rubber insulation filled his senses.For a split second he was back in the resonance chamber, dodging yellow lightning and watching the world tear open.Then the black claw slammed into the floor behind him and he landed stomach-first in the access walk beyond.“Shh, it’ll hear us,” a guard whispered. He cowered in a corner by a structural support, clinging to it with a white-knuckled grip. The man’s gun lay useless on the floor, discarded.Freeman wanted to throttle him for being a quivering coward but understood the feeling to well himself. He’d have loved to cower in a corner a time or two today, but that was not an option. An object in motion will stay in motion, he told himself, unless it sits down to rest.He was very afraid if he stopped now, he’d never get going again.I choose to live, he reminded himself. Even against the monstrosity in the silo.The claws screeched and slid across the steel plate floor. As with every new deadly thing, his path lay beyond them through the lower access hatch. He sprinted for the ladder and pulled the pin on a grenade. He only had four, as many as would fit on his tool belt, and was glad the military had left them laying around.The thing recoiled from the explosion and he ran through the opening to the second ladder. Down, grenade, down, grenade-And was knocked off his feet and yanked back by the claw as it raked him from shoulder to hip. It shook free of the suit and he fell to the last level, landing with a crash of gun and polymer on charred cement.Blood loss detected, the suit told him, as nerves caught up and his brain registered the pain. It had sliced through the suit, opening a brutal ragged cut down his back but missing, miraculously, his spine. Rib cage intact, he thought, breathing slowly through the fog of physical overload. He allowed himself one more breath, then pulled the pin on his last grenade and rolled it weakly across the shaft.It blew hot from far too close, but the three talons were distracted and that was enough. He crawled into the hatch and access hall beyond.He hurt. He hurt in ways he'd never hurt before, in ways the bullets and crawling lightning and sonic alien screams hadn’t begun to visit on him. Blood pooled inside his suit, his skin burned with every breath and he felt a deadly lethargy as his body protested movement. He couldn’t move his left arm well and his left leg responded slowly. Weight on it hurt something in his lower back, where severed muscles no longer transferred motion.The body was just applied physics too, in the end, under all the wet biology. Bone, tendon, muscle. Forces acting on a solid frame. Potential energy released to spring forward with every step. And that thing had cut into his system, destroyed years of carefully cultivated lean muscle fiber and trained endurance. He wanted it dead, just a little more than he wanted to give up and die himself.He raised the shotgun, a painful movement, and shot the eerily green radioactive puppet stalking across the walk towards him. The kick made him gasp.Beyond the walk, he leaned on coolant lines and inched his way forward. Set off the rocket test engine, kill the beast, get to lambda. His path lay out the bottom of the silo, through the old maintenance tunnels, according to Aimsworth. Simple. Blood splattered on the steel behind him.He needed a med box and a suit repair station but the silo predated that technology by several decades. The only survival was one foot in front of the other. Down ladders and through contaminated water and over the stinking gore of parasite-controlled human corpses.The ladder led him deeper. So did the next one. The suit had run out of morphine and his blood pressure was dropping. The cut wasn’t deep but it was long and ragged, and he couldn’t reach it to keep it closed, couldn’t risk taking off the suit to bandage it himself.And then in an alcove above a soviet-surplus munitions crate, he found a med box.A shiny new deceptively innocent med box. In a far back corner where no one would ever think to look.He knew what was in it when he plugged in and he didn’t care. He slammed the alcove door shut with his boot and sat on the munitions crate, shotgun cradled in his lap, and closed his eyes against the drug-induced vertigo.He was floating. He was flying. He was a ball of living flesh wrapped around a dead skeleton, a vine on a trellis, a coiled spring of potential energy stretched until it kinked and fell limp. The vine that was Freeman crawled up his own spine, drawing together torn muscle and flesh. In and out it wove through pink skin and pale fat, into deep red muscle and silvery tendon. The blueprint was there to follow, encoded in overtaxed cells and thinning blood. He gasped for air as his heart pounded, fighting to circulate resources and push oxygen to where it was needed.And it wasn’t enough, not enough to maintain both life and consciousness, and he heard the dry uneven scrape-step of a puppet body beyond the door, the eerie howl and scream of an infested throat and the scrape of searching claws. He imagined it tearing through the door, looming over his unresponsive body, gaping mouth seeking flesh. Loss of consciousness was death. Loss of blood was death. Loss of movement and momentum, that too was death. He’d die in a heap, sitting on a box in a closet, drugged to his eyebrows.He reached over and unplugged the med box.His body protested, a part of him crying for the warm fog that blocked and hazed the memories of crawlers and death and a part of him protesting the pain that flooded back, but he stood. He raised the shotgun, and he opened the door.The puppet took both barrels through the skull, the human body crumpling at his feet while the parasite splattered into a million tiny pieces against the far wall.He leaned against the door jam and focused on mastering his breath. Certain ways of movement, of breathing and walking and shooting, hurt less than others. His back was half-healed, still oozing and tender, and the wrong pull or twist threatened to reopen thin scar tissue and untested muscle fiber. He’d need another box, somewhere safer, and food and water to heal completely. And he needed to repair the suit. Cold air hit his back and he shivered at the unexpected sensation; he’d forgotten how much the suit dulled any sense of fine touch; it allowed only pain to penetrate.He moved forward, and forward was down. Down ladders requiring painful weight on his shoulders, down through water grey with unknown particulate matter, through pipes that set off his suit’s Geiger counter, until he ran out of tunnel.The ancient vent fan sat dormant and silent, deep in its shaft. Another relic of a different age in Black Mesa’s past, the fan had once cleared the lower silos, drawing contaminated air, smoke and fumes up and out and pushing it through laughably ineffective filters before venting to atmosphere. The fan was enormous. He could have parked a car on the blades with room to spare.Down under those black rusted blades was a kick switch, still glowing its helpful green through a Bakelite case. He looked up; the only way out was now the right direction, by the most horrible route. Actual wooden boards formed a crude lattice at the dome's peak, not even painted safety yellow. Their existence probably predated any attempt at workplace safety laws, something Black Mesa had definitely not pioneered. Up there he saw the black square of the open duct, the only unblocked, un-welded-shut-and-forgotten path to take. And to get there….He gritted his teeth and leaned on his gun, staring at the button. Then up at the fan blades, and then back at the button. Would it be enough? The blades would probably move enough air to lift a small airplane, but enough to put him in a reverse freefall, move up all the way to the ceiling in a controlled fashion? Or would he slip from the airstream and plunge down the side to be minced by the sweep?Only one way forward. Only one way out. He'd rather die by his own initiative than be eaten alive by a parasite. At least the fan would be fast.He hit the button.By the time he reached the ladder back up, the blades were too fast to pass. So he went back and turned it off and waited for it to slow down. Then on again. Then off. Then on. Each time, counting breaths until the blades passed too quickly.He had it timed. He ran for the ladder, the skin of his back crawling with anticipation of blade slicing through suit, flesh and bone.One lurch upwards, two- and he was above them. They swept by hypnotically fast, shoving decades-old stale air and dust up at him. He coughed and wiped his eyes, staggered under the wind, and fell- into the fan, and then away from it. Nausea gripped him as he spun helpless, one hand clamped to his glasses and the other to his belt of guns, and then his back hit the dry-rotted boards and he gasped. His vision went dark as the boards splintered and shattered. Fragments stung his face and lodged in the soft skin of his back but he was through and into the narrow space beyond.The tiny duct howled with vibrating resonance. Wind tore at him, tugging at every protrusion of the suit. His own blood misted and splattered red on the wall ahead of him. He slid on the metal surface as the wind pushed him forwards.The ducts narrowed into a crawlspace, dim and red in the glow of forgotten emergency lights. He slid on his stomach, his injured back brushing protruding corners of a later-generation HVAC system. The whole structure moaned in the wind. Parasites skittered through the steel jungle; he crushed two and a third leaped ineffectually at him from the far side of a boarded up channel.And then the wind died as it spread into wider halls, and he dropped down into the white-lit human side of the facility. A normal-size door, with normal-size halls… he’d never considered the psychological impact of being in a built environment so clearly not built for a human. Lighting of the correct wavelength and ceilings of correct height made his heart slow in relief. Breathing came easier, the suit’s warning chimes about blood pressure somehow both too low and too high eased off. He’d never had a problem with small spaces before, but he guessed he was fast developing one.The coolant control station contained three puppets. He shot off their parasites and stepped over the mangled bodies, wincing again at the stink. It was a smell he never wanted to smell again, but was somehow glad he couldn’t ignore. It meant a part of him was still normal, still Freeman the physicist, still a human capable of feeling horror.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Freeman followed the pipes. He liked the pipes. He could lean on them and they were both faintly warm to the touch. Each corner might hold an enemy, or a wounded colleague, or an armed marine, so he inched his way along with gun up but finger hesitant on the trigger. Eerie silence followed him, aside from the faint gurgle of liquid through the pipes.The corridor was empty all the way back to the silo, and when he got there he saw why. The bridge was gone. Only the pipes spanned the gap.He stopped himself from slamming the butt of the hand gun on the pipe. No need to telegraph his position, or that he was now trapped. He mentally scrolled back through his path; the giant fan loomed insurmountable. No, forward only. Forward it was.Forward across old pipes, over a yawning chasm of cement and sludge, without any chance of cover if he was spotted.He stepped out, keeping his weight low. The suit was well-balanced but the chest and back plates were heavy with internal equipment and extra plating, and the half-healed gash on his back reminded him of its presence with every step. The throbbing pain was still there; the suit chimed with distress every few minutes, as if afraid he'd forgotten how to feel pain. He tuned it out. It'd be the least of his worries if he fell off the pipe or was spotted by anything.His shoulders twitched with imagined danger and he resisted the urge to hurry. The pipe groaned underfoot and its tremors spread upward into his knees. He inched forward and crouched low, suppressing his own groans as the position stretched his injury. Something moved in the corner of his vision and he froze. An acid-spitter rummaged over a crate in a service bay a hundred yards away. He raised the handgun and sighted in on the beast, but hesitated. If he missed and it spat back, the acid would eat through suit or pipe or both. One shot. The pipe trembled under him and he stilled his core to counter the movement. Slowly squeezed the trigger. Dropped flat on the pipe and sighted in again.The alien kicked in its death throes and something volatile exploded next to it, ignited by its corrosive juices. He signed and levered himself up into a three-point crouch and crab-walked the rest of the way across. His back protested standing but he made it function. The pipes had held, which meant the rocket now had both coolant and fuel. One step closer. The clawed, tentacled thing in the pit was nearer a fiery immolation.Corrugated steel trembled under his boots; the monster’s thrashing reverberated through the silo, the screech of its claws on metal and cement loud enough to make him flinch. His head knew the thickness of those walls, that they were built to withstand the force of a rocket liftoff, but his body remembered how the claw had sheered through the suit. He imagined it slicing through the cement with the same ease, and crossed the hall on the far side.As if an extra three feet of empty air would save him, but still. He forced the human fear back down, recognizing its illogic. And then he saw it again, the three waving tree trunk-thick appendages tipped in carbon black talons. They writhed, searching, between silo levels. Greasy gore still dripped from two claws. He wondered how much of it was his.His feet didn’t want to move. He’d have to turn his back to the thing again. Have to cross its territory. His spine grew cold and he fingered the grenades. Would they be enough? Maybe if he threw all of them, he could kill it in one blast. The waving black talons moved with serpentine ease, their tips leaving curls of shiny steel in their wake. Half-hypnotized, he watched them reach into the furthest corners of the inner silo, scouring its catwalks for the next victim.One more run. One more drop down a ladder and rolling crash into the next hall. Only way forward.You are a physicist, he screamed at himself. Legs work. Knees bend. Control the machine that is your body, Freeman. Move. He tossed the grenade underhanded, and he ran. It blew below him, in the hole, and the tentacles shivered and dropped. He heard a shriek of twisting metal-or maybe that was the monster’s voice?- and slid down the red ladder to the next level. One black talon shot up behind him, searching the level he’d been on. He was almost there. A second talon raked across behind him but too late- he was through.Safe.The thing scrabbled against the wall, talons inches too short to get leverage on the door jam.He breathed again.The gun came up and he shot a puppetted scientist without taking his eyes from the tentacles.He made himself move away from the open door, though looking away was more difficult than he wanted it to be. Like looking away from a wasp in the room. Knowing, empirically, that the thing was trapped there was one thing, but the wet brain insisted it might be reaching after him.No. He stilled his mind as he’d stilled his body on the pipes, resisting the mental trembling. No. It was behind him. It was not following. It was trapped. There was no black talon over his shoulder and he was NOT going to turn around and check.Logical fears, of parasite bugs, sonic-screaming aliens and fanatical marines, those he would entertain. He had no room in his schedule for paranoia.He told himself this twice more before he reached the end of the corridor. As if in reward for his mental fortitude, a nice new shiny untouched med box waited for him there. He let his body relax for ten minutes while the box did its work. This one wasn’t spiked, but the eerie crawling sensation of speed-healed flesh and the burning pull of new skin was almost refreshing. His back was tight with scar tissue and the area numb to the touch, but numb was better than pain. Scars were better than open flesh. He was light-headed, desperately thirsty and had a headache, but the suit’s blood loss indicator was blessedly silent.Getting power to the control room was the next hurdle.He followed the only path available, reasoning that this sector was built to hold the silo and thus most corridors would lead to reasonably useful places. If one route was destroyed, there would most likely be other ways of getting there. Like giant fans.He hoped it wouldn’t be another giant fan.He found the conduit easily enough, but was dead. Helpfully dead, as somewhere in the building a plumbing failure had left sizable, ankle-deep puddles of murky grey water. He didn’t relish the thought of returning by the same road, once the wet conduits were charged. Knowing Black Mesa, the expense of proper grounding and insulation hadn’t been met with approval.Some helpful person had installed a maintenance access lift in the generator maintenance access shaft. He heaped blessing on their head until the lift ground to a halt half-way. There was a ladder, over on the wall. Across empty space.His back twinged in anticipated pain.The lift was solidly anchored, and not going anywhere. He sighed. Was there absolutely no chance of anything being simple anymore? He climbed up on the rail, checked weapon distribution, and jumped for the ladder. He caught it with both gloves and one toe, and held himself against it until his back stopped spasming. Then he climbed.It hurt, but less than the previous trip down a ladder.A man stood in the control alcove, studying the dials. He smiled at Freeman and waved. “You’re here too I see,” he said.Dr. Martrige.Freeman didn’t respond; he kept walking, giving no sign he’d seen the man. Dr. Martrige was considered an overly-friendly harmless oaf by most of their colleagues. By those who knew him best, he was considered a slimy opportunist with no moral compass, and when drunk would recount all the ways he’d cheated to get through university.Of course he was holed away down here, in a nice warm sheltered alcove next to a backup generator.The backup generator itself hung like a chrysalis in a second decommissioned silo. Getting to it involved wrangling two different small equipment lifts, one of which was very broken.A scientist Freeman didn’t know clung like a barnacle to the generator’s unshielded top. Freeman motioned for him to get down but the man refused. He clung, white-knuckled, head down and shaking. Freeman considered throwing him off; the drop would be a kinder death, but he didn’t. He walked away, as he’d walked away from Dr. Martrige and from Aimsworth and from the man in the cold storage, from doomed security guards and so many dead or dying marines.Survive.He didn’t want to be the lone survivor, but he couldn’t afford to stop and argue, to convince a terrified soul its own fear was its executioner. He’d mastered himself and faced the silo monster. He was not going to answer for those who failed that test.He told himself he didn’t hear the man scream when the generator energized.On his way out, Dr. Martrige remarked on how nice it was to have some power restored, and wondered aloud who might have done that.Climbing back up the ladder was just as long and painful as he anticipated. The puddles were now indeed energized, and while the suit provided enough insulation to make it survivable, it wasn’t pleasant.Facing the monster a third time, to climb back up to the control room, was somehow much easier. It had failed to kill him twice now, and twice he’d fooled it with grenades. Had the thing learned? He threw a grenade; no, it hadn’t.Somehow that realization, that it was just a blind animal in a pit, diminished it from the haunting nightmare of his mental shadows to mechanical inconvenience like the charged puddles; dangerous, yes, but predicable, fixed in place, a background workplace hazard.A workplace hazard he was about to fix.Watching the tentacles immolate was the most satisfying thing he’d done since he’d put on the suit and started his day.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Under the silo, in the place the thing had grown from, a tunnel led down through an incongruously organic layer of dark red bedrock. Freeman tried to ignore the esophagus-like curve of it. Under here somewhere the oldest Black Mesa installations built for nuclear testing joined up with the first generation of true laboratories, but clearly there’d been some extracurricular architecture along the way.And casualties, he thought, as he passed a security guard. Dead of toxic exposure; no aliens necessary. Someone had been careless with their nuclear waste.
Below the landing and its bodies, the cavern was flooded.
He was not looking forward to this.
Water compressed the suit in strange ways. It fit differently, altered his buoyancy, and though the neck seal was reasonably watertight he couldn’t banish the trickling feeling entirely. And it was wet, cold and unpleasant on his back. And he had to submerge himself entirely. He clamped his glasses with one hand and swamp with the other, and then realized he’d probably ruined half his arsenal. The damaged back plates filled with water and weighed him down, and pulling himself up on the ledge on the far side wasn’t easy.
The lurid green glow of the toxic waste swamp was an enemy he couldn’t shoot. Par for the course for first-generation (and second and third generation) Black Mesa; bury your demons and hope you die before the lawsuits find you.
The suit’s Geiger counter was very displeased.
Aimsworth had said to follow the conduits through the silo’s underbelly through to the other side. He’d said nothing of the ghosts of arms races past.
But he got through, finally, into the dry old pipes themselves, shielded from radiation by inches of steel. These would put him out somewhere near-
-the pipe shuddered and with a screech of overtaxed struts it fell. He braced himself but jarred loose and slid out the jagged end. He fell through open space, blinded by white fluorescents, and reached frantically for a handhold. His left arm caught the fall and something snapped behind rigid polymer, something that made his stomach drop.
Major fracture detected the suit bleated. Morphine depleted. Emergency medical systems depleted. It had spent the last hour trying to fix his back. It had nothing left to give.
He rolled up, cradling his arm. The pain was a limited dull throb, but it would grow. And he’d lose use of the arm and wrist.
Frantically he scanned the room’s contents. No med box, but the crates looked promising. Redundant supplies, shoved aside and forgotten. Everything was a little dusty and dated back to an era when things were shipped in wooden packing containers.
He levered the crowbar under lids and started searching. Beakers, glassware, replacement fume hood parts… wet-lab supplies. And then, the second-to-last crate, three dozen OSHA-mandated drawer-sized first-aid kits. They were just little plastic boxes with the Black Mesa logo on one side and a helpful red cross on the other, but something in them would help. Some magic of Black Mesa’s, surely; they would never trust their employee well-being to an outside contractor. That would be buying from the competition.
He cracked open a plastic box with his right hand and emptied it onto the floor. The fast-healing cocktail of hormones and steroids was present, in small injector form with a startlingly large-bore needle. A white protein block was also present, and he tore its wrapper off and ate it in three gulps. It was dry, hard to swallow, but it went down. He scavenged every protein block he could find from the rest of the med boxes, then he set to work with the needles. The little instruction diagram was made for people not wearing HEV suits. It told him to find a vein and inject carefully nearest the site of the wound, and also told him, at length, about the risks of adverse side-effects not limited to several different kinds of cancer and/or reproductive harm.
The serum was good for minor lacerations, short-term hazard exposure and chemical burns less than three inches in diameter, the paper said. For deep lacerations, internal bleeding, bone breaks, internal poisoning or severe burns, please use automated medical distribution system.
Well, as soon as he found the next med box, he would use it. But he needed to get there first. He pulled off the syringe cap with his teeth and jabbed it through the black joint in the forearm plating. It stung, and stung more when he slowly pressed the plunger down. He unloaded two more into his forearm and leaned back against the crates. His forearm throbbed and burned, his left hand went slowly numb and his stomach hurt from the dry protein bars.
But for the moment nothing was trying to hill him. He had medicine, he had food, he had ammunition. Life was alright.
So the serum had its own drugged payload, he thought. Different from the med box. Probably not opiate-derived; marijuana? He had no basis for comparison, just the growing realization that sitting down was very nice and that his arm probably hurt a lot worse than he realized.
He rolled over and vomited unchewed protein block chunks onto the floor, dry-heaving for lack of liquid. He picked up a fresh one and ate it more slowly, making sure to chew. The nausea didn’t go away but the protein stayed down this time.
One of the packs held refills for the suit’s onboard medical kit. Fresh morphine, blood serum, an antibiotics cocktail and a few other vials he didn’t recognize but swapped out anyway. Whatever they were, they hadn’t killed him yet.
Maybe in three to five years, but not today.
He was glad he’d taken the time to patch up. Outside the closet door, something roared. He didn’t want to find out what. He really didn’t want to leave the closet and continue his journey, didn’t want to find out what the shotgun kick would feel like on a broken arm or if the damaged suit could take more bullets.
Objects at rest, he warned himself sternly.
He hadn’t wanted to get up at 4 AM and take grimy public transportation into classes. He hadn’t wanted to sit through lectures he’d already memorized or be silent through patronizing sessions with academic advisors. He hadn’t wanted to learn sign language either, because that meant paying attention to other people and feigning interest in them. And he really hadn’t wanted to go through the three years of therapy and psychoanalysis as someone tried to figure out why Freeman didn’t make noise.
But he had, and he’d survived it all and come out a respected academic with an enviable job on the cutting edge of resonance research and a very generous pension plan. He knew how to get up and do things he didn’t want to do.
Move, darn it, he told himself. It was a lot harder without the immediate danger of parasites and soldiers.
Move.
He rolled over and stood, shakily, and thought he was going to throw up again. No more syringe-injected serum, he thought. Must be reacting badly to something in it.
Something shook the floor, rattling the door on its hinges. Something roared. Something big, heavy, armored and with the ability to produce fire, he saw, as he opened the door and looked down the corridor. He was a hundred yards from a cargo tram dock, a wide open space where two soldiers did battle with an enormous alien.
They shot, ran, rolled and shot again, a hail of bullets into the monster’s shiny blue-black carapace, but it didn’t even flinch. It stormed after them and poured fire across the cement floor; Freeman wondered if it produced and ignited a natural flammable gas, or if it carried a weapon his eye couldn’t distinguish. But fire was fire, and no matter what made it, it burned. There was no cover, no hope of escape, and the men never stopped fighting.
He watched it shred them and incinerate the remains.
It lurched back into the shadow of the loading bay across the cavern from his hallway. He closed the door and thought. The soldiers were brave, armored, the special black-and-white containment unit Black Mesa had helped develop. For counterterrorism and biological hazard containment, the contract brief had read.
The men were brave, and now very dead, and all Black Mesa’s best military-grade hardware hadn’t put so much as a scratch in the paint.
The suit wouldn’t hold up any better. One wrong step and he was dead as they were.
He opened the door and stepped out, slowly, carefully, creeping as best he could down a straight clear hallway.
The thing was lurking in the shadows on the far side. Its single orange eye was turned away, or so he hoped. He only assumed it was an eye because it was round and on the head, but how was he to know it didn’t have other ocular apparatus hidden on that carapace? Assume nothing, he thought. No room for trial and error.
He started moving slowly, but when the domed head came up and the orange organ narrowed on him he ran.
He wasn’t sure his back would let him, and by the sharp pain along the wound’s edges he knew he’d reopened the thing scar tissue, but he ran.
Blood loss detected, the suit said.
Heat flooded over his back and shoulders. He smelled hot polymer and charred paint, and felt the hair on his neck curl. He ran. Straight ahead, aiming for the doorway too small for it to enter. Ten steps, three steps, in- and he hit the ground in a long slide, at the last moment avoiding stacked containers with spray-painted biohazard symbols.
Fire flooded the corridor behind in in a wash of gold and blue. He rolled up and kept running as the containers exploded. The sharp stink of burned plastic and benzene filled his lungs, but the heat was receding. The thing couldn’t follow and he was out of its flame-thrower range.
He doubled over, panting and dizzy, glad of clean air, and heard the chitter of a biped down the branching corridor. He raised the handgun and shot it twice. A second bipod materialized over its body, shrieking, and he shot it too, glad to learn at least one gun still fired after his swim.
The automatic misfired and jammed when he test-fired it, so he traded it out for the fresh weapon from the body of a dead marine. The corridor ahead crawled with yellow lightning and three more bipeds materialized to screech and charge at him. He shot them and slipped on the wet innards as the corridor shook; something rumbled and the floor collapsed inches from his feet.
Of course, he thought. Crossing the ten yards of hallway to the tram control station couldn’t be simple now, could it? He dropped a grenade down on the swarm of parasites in the cavity beneath and followed it, much more slowly and carefully. He maneuvered around the jutting rebar of the broken cement floor and climbed up the far side, then pried off someone else’s attempt at a barricade.
Inside the tram control room, a wounded security guard screamed and went for his gun.
Freeman had his up and level but managed to stop himself from pulling the trigger. The guard gasped, face putty-white and dripping sweat. “Please don’t make me,” he said.
Freeman lowed his gun, slowly, and raised the palm of his left hand. He shook his head.
The guard sagged against the wall. “If you get the power on, we can take the tram to the surface.”
Freeman nodded. And then he saw the suit repair box behind the door. He made a bee-line for it and plugged in. The suit made a happy whirring noise and powered up. The nanocarbon tubes came alive around him, wrapping and writhing like a second skin under their rigid plates. He flinched and willed himself to hold still, but he was never going to get used to the effect. The self-repair function took over expelling water and repairing the under layers of the damaged back plates. Carbon fibers crawled painfully over his raw back. He wondered if it was stitching itself into his flesh; it certainly felt like it was.
Blood loss detected, the suit chimed.
He sighed.
The security guard made a pained gurgling noise and died.
He sighed again and unplugged the repair box as it completed its cycle. At least he could get the tram working again. That’d be a small step forward.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The tram switch wouldn’t flip. The control panel was dead, less messily so than the security guard; all of it was in place, just not functional.Freeman slammed his right palm onto the heavy plexiglass window, then clenched it in a fit of self-consciousness at his own temper. One did not physically express temper around delicate instruments, expensive metamaterials and impressionable interns.
He crawled under the console. All wires in place, just not receiving power. Alright, so the system’s backup generator had cut out. Simple enough. Now he just had to find it. Or find a way around it. And the beast was still out there.
Outside the tram station office, the collapsed floor lead into a more utilitarian area. He climbed down and cleared it of parasites with the crowbar. He was sliding the third one off the crowbar’s forked end when the ceiling fell.
Chunks of cement and conduit rained down as the building groaned around him. He crouched again the wall, arms wrapped over his head, and waited for the tremors to end. Black Mesa was built into stable bedrock, not near any known faults. Fault lines had just as poor an effect on delicate instruments as bad tempers. Had the resonance cascade awoken something in the surrounding mountain?
That’d be the cherry on top of the day, he thought. A volcanic eruption or major quake would neatly solve everyone’s problems.
He stumbled through the rubble, brushing sharp bits of rock out of his hair, and was glad to see a med box. His left arm was functional but throbbing; the med box’s more powerful cocktail calmed the pain and the uneasiness in his stomach. He wasn’t sure if it was actually helping his reaction to the serum or if he was developing a Pavlovian calming response in anticipation of the drugged payload.
The maintenance corridor took him to a central access shaft. It’d had an elevator in it once, but now the lower levels were a swamp of fluids and chemical waste. Maintenance areas went useful places, he thought. The generator would need regular servicing. If he followed the path a mechanic would have followed, he should end up somewhere sensible.
Something stung his ear and kicked cement shards back into his face. He dropped to the steel lattice platform and scrambled back into an alcove backed by a HVAC panel. He tried it with the crowbar but it wouldn’t give. Bullets traced a pitted line behind him, demarking the narrow safe-zone the shooter couldn’t reach.
Just to be thorough, Freeman stuck his hand over the line and signed “don’t shoot.”
The shooter shot at his hand and missed.
One man or two? Two. Military always came in pairs. Semiautomatics, inaccurate but rapid-firing. Good for keeping a man pinned in cover. Location? Most likely straight across the shaft and one level up, from the impact angle of the bullets. They could move right overhead but it wasn’t likely; that would sacrifice the clear shot they’d have of him from the opposite side. Matching the angle of the shots would be easy. Matching that angle from the place where the shots had struck the floor required a little more fortitude.
He lay on his stomach on the floor, revolver in hand, just outside their angle of visibility. Then he rolled onto his back, spine aligned with the track of bullet divots, and fired twice.
They were where he thought they were. And they were no longer shooting at him.
He went up the ladder and into the next landing. He shot before he recognized what he was shooting at; the whir of a drone gun, he realized, as he watched the tripod spark and fall.
Tables. Maps. Ammunition crates. A very large, powerful radio transmitter. Medical supplies, rosters- someone came around the corner. His subconscious registered white coat first and then gun, and for a split second he thought he wasn’t the only scientist fighting back, but no- the soldier’s bullet clipped his shoulder. He shot a moment later and the man crumpled.
Alright, no friends here, he thought. White things now got shot at too. He hoped he wouldn’t regret that mental remapping of his reflexes, but he couldn’t afford to hesitate.
Down the hall from the military staging area, he found a baffle of sandbags at a strategic choke point. Only one man was in it. He cleared the room easily enough but something felt off. This was too much work, too many supplies, to be guarded by just four soldiers.
He crossed the room and was up the ramp on the far side when someone behind him opened fire. He turned to shoot back and someone else shot from the other direction. He held his ground, shot the man he was facing, and then turned to finish off the other. He’d sacrificed for that moment of clarity, as his back screamed in agony; three impacts on the freshly-repaired plating but the armor had held and deflected the bullets. The semiautomatics were a small caliber, plenty of firepower for killing naked aliens and cloth-coated scientists, but not enough to stop him.
Not with the suit in good repair and with a half-full battery, at least.
“Get him!” someone yelled. Booted feet slammed on cement. Someone opened fire.
Freeman ran. He rounded a corner and found himself on the alcove he’d been shot from, his back unprotected. He doubled back and shot at movement. The shotgun wasn’t fast but it was thorough. He shot again, and again, but he still heard the rhythmic sound of running soldiers. He stepped over the three bodies and smelled blood, heavy in the air from the damage the shotgun had wrought on them.
Bullets tore at him, before the background roar resolved into distinct gunshots. He hit the floor and rolled back behind the corner, breathing hard and waiting for the suit to catalogue injuries. He didn’t check himself; either it would take care of him, or he was already dead. He brought the semiautomatic up. It wasn’t as accurate as the handgun or as powerful as the revolver, or as effective as the shotgun, but it made other people put their heads down and gave him a few minutes’ reprieve from the hail of bullets.
They didn’t seem very happy to see him.
These soldiers were different. Not the green-jacketed marines; these ones wore white and grey mottled camo with heavy black shielding packs. The camo was winter gear, designed to withstand hash environmental conditions in addition to active hostiles. It wouldn’t protect from nuclear radiation, but it would shed most other forms of biological waste and was more impervious to punctures.
Freeman knew. He’d consulted on the design process as a side project. They’d wanted his input for maneuverability and ease of wear, because he was resident HEV expert.
He had believed they were being developed in case of hostilities between Russia, China and the US over Antarctic mining rights.
He wished he hadn’t been quite so thorough in his consult.
The soldiers also knew how to operate in internal spaces. They used terrain to their advantage and didn’t surrender high ground as easily. They let him come to them, instead of following him out of their own ambush zones and into his. And they were more accurate.
He refused to look down at the bullet holes in his chest plate. He’d felt the heavy punch; two, dead-center over his heart. The suit was still energized from the repair station and the active nanotubes had absorbed the impacts and ensnared the bullets. But there was a cost, and the nanocarbon fibers were power-hungry. How many more bullets could he take? Two? One? It hurt to breathe. Even with the suit energized, he wasn’t immune. He’d tuned out the suit’s medical response but it was there, murmuring about contusions and blood loss from where the suit had transferred force to his skin.
And now he’d ripped into their command center, like a brick through a beehive. Every man he’d killed had friends, had family, had a whole lot of angry coworkers.
He wavered, as he sheltered behind the wall and felt the sting of shrapnel off the bricks; is the cost of survival too high? To continue, to survive, he’d have to decimate humanity’s best chance at containing the aliens to the base. Was the chance of the satellite worth it?
Was his own life worth it?
I choose to live, he thought. It’d become his mantra, his stake in his own humanity. Survival was his species’ greatest strength. To fight was to live. To surrender was to die. And Freeman wasn’t wired for suicide. Nor for bowing to the short-sighted violent fools who prioritized killing a fellow human over securing the base and evacuating civilians.
He rolled out on one knee and shot fast. The bullets bought him breathing space and he moved to better cover. He switched to the handgun for accuracy, leaned out and shot one soldier. A second moved into view, firing an automatic, and Freeman refused to flinch until he’d taken his second shot.
He stood to move and the third man was on top of him, long shiny knife in hand. He saw the man’s pale face, all jaw, thin tight lips and narrow brown eyes, as the crowbar went up. He knew where it’d gone, because he’d put it there, but he didn’t want to think about it. About what he felt from the man as strong human became dead-weight body. The knife clattered to the floor and the crowbar slid wetly out.
The corridor was eerily silent.
He stepped over the body, a familiar action, and kept moving.
A helpful yellow sign read POWER GENERATOR, complete with an arrow. The room had a suit repair box so he plugged in, wincing as the suit moved over raw flesh. Freshly energized, it gave him a new tally of his physical problems and he felt the sting of an automated morphine injection. It was losing its effectiveness. His breath was short; the impacts on front and back of his chest had bruised his ribs and sternum, making any twisting motion and deep breathing very painful. Running wasn’t going to happen at all.
He tossed a grenade down the generator’s access lift. Something else exploded too, he wasn’t sure what and didn’t care. The lift looked clear, so he rode it down.
Screaming maggot dogs met him just beyond the soot-blackened blast shadow. They were annoying and left his ears ringing but at least they didn’t attack as fast or persistently as the marines. The wet animal part of them knew fear and they attacked piecemeal instead of as a pack.
The generator room was flooded and debris had clogged the pistons. He cleared the room of junk, parasites and puppets, and sloshed his way back up the stairs to the generator control. Some wonderful person had had the foresight to install a med box in the control room. It wasn’t spiked and he missed the drugs, but he was breathing more easily afterwards.
He heard voices near the lift and froze, just around the corner from it.
“He’s down here!”
“Come on.”
“He won’t get past us.”
Flat radio static and more chatter, angry clipped voices and heavy boots. He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, grenade in hand, suddenly realizing his fatigue. He’d throw the grenade blind, listening for the descending lift. It would roll onto the lift and detonate, without time for them to take cover. The men on the lift were already dead.
I choose to live, he thought, and tossed the grenade.

He retraced his steps to the shaft. The sight of his own handiwork in the makeshift command center left him cold. Most bodies he left far behind but these he had to revisit, had to see his own tracks in their blood, had to hear the unanswered comm clicks and the hollow cry of “anyone, please respond!” over the radio.
The heat of battle and its associated elation at being alive, at the quickness and efficiency of shots and the brief flash of pride in seeing an enemy fall, that all was gone from here.

In the tram station he jogged past the beast, wincing as the movement upset bruised muscles the med station hadn’t reached. It followed and he fired back at it, letting the automatic vent his silent yell. It washed fire over him but too late- he flipped the transformer switch and shielded his eyes as its bulk bridged the gap. White fire flashed over it and he smelled overcooked meat and charred chiton. It crumpled and collapsed, nothing left but nonconductive carapace.
The tram car slid smoothly along the charged rails. He rode it around two easy curves and saw movement; he shot twice, but the warring muscle reflexes of a fast trigger finger and a subconscious recognizing blue sent the bullets wide.
“Freeman!” The security guard yelled. He dusted himself off. “What the hell? I’m on your side!”
Freeman shook his head, his empty hands upraised and his eyes down. All the apology he could muster at the moment. The guard seemed to accept it. “They’re waiting for you in Lambda sector,” he said. “Lambda team. They can stop this mess, if you launch the satellite. Didn’t know we had a satellite. Didn’t know we had a Lambda team either. Go on through, any of us you don’t shoot will help you out,” he said, flat annoyance in his voice. “But I guess I should forgive you that one, seeing as how I don’t hear any more shooting behind you. You take out that entire battalion or what?”
Freeman nodded as thanks for the information, not acknowledgement of the guard’s begrudging admiration, and sent the tram forward.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He’d known Black Mesa was vast, but he hadn’t known exactly how vast until now. Until the tram car had dragged him through decades of research infrastructure and he’d breathed the backstage dust of more than half a century of forward thinking. Progress. Loose wires, forgotten tunnels, enclaves of hostiles, and his name scrawled like a slur on the walls, written in black alien blood.
He’d waded through a drawn-out firefight between bipeds and military. Both sides left their dead where they fell to continue a running battle down the tram lines. He’d come through on the heels of their conflict, somehow always just behind the front lines, to mop up the survivors as both turned their weapons on him. The machine guns were impressively penetrative but cumbersome and ineffective against a moving target. The rocket launchers on the other hand… he wondered if he should be flattered. He knew they weren’t just for him; tunnels like this had ways of being left off updated maps and the military was, for once, showing an immense leap of wisdom to fill them with soldiers supplied for a siege. A siege that had started a long time ago; he added it to his mental tally of evidence against the shadowy superior who’d ordered the purge. But then there was the graffiti. Freeman didn’t make waves intentionally. His arrogance had set colleagues off in fits of rage, invited nasty reviews on his journal papers, and once had lead to a disgruntled former employee trying to sabotage his work, but he knew he was the better man and so he’d set the opposition aside and continued about his business. The sheer vitriol necessary to make a man go from highly trained and disciplined soldier to writing personal insults on what amounted to Black Mesa’s bathroom stall was something he couldn’t empathize with. He knew he was hated, but it was becoming clear they were reserving a special kind of hatred for him, a hatred that went beyond the simple battlefield nature of their interactions with the aliens. No one was writing parasites go to hell! or surrender biped scum! or equivalents to the harsher threats of what they'd do to him when they caught him or the hangman cartoons with the little man in the orange suit.He chewed on an energy bar and washed it down with an artificially-colored orange drink that may have had something in common with the nuclear waste. The vending machines had resisted the crowbar but succumbed to the grenade. He was so desperately hungry and thirsty he hadn’t cared how ridiculous the overkill; he had food now, he had liquid, and his head hurt a lot less as his blood sugar and hydration levels stabilized. First rule of grad school: Your brain can’t think on empty. The night air smelled cool and clean after the sulfur stink of gun smoke and rocket exhaust. He heard crickets. He liked crickets. A normal, harmless sound after hours of straining to hear the scratch of parasite claws. He sat on the sand bags and looked up at the sky, at the distant glowing trail that was the satellite. Would it help? Who knew? He found his brain didn’t want to hypothesize. Too many variables. Too many unknowns. The resonance experiments had proved twinned metamaterial crystals could transmit frequency, and thus information, instantaneously and without regard for distance. This alone would have revolutionized the communications industry with instant, cheap transmission anywhere in the world or, theoretically, the solar system. But they couldn’t stop there. No, they had to keep pushing. Vibration transmission was just information. World’s most advanced text message. Energy transmission was next, then matter. Who didn’t want a microwave that could teleport you to Mars?
Freeman had been assisting with an experiment half-way through the energy phase, merging the idea that if light was both wave and particle, enough light of the right wavelength transmitted from one twinned crystal face to the other would open both doors at once. He hadn’t designed the experiment or set the parameters, but he’d been roped into it from the start on account of the HEV. His own experiments involved studying the two-dimensional plane of the twinned crystal face to determine if they could replicate its properties with the right elements and a Hadron collider. Even short-lived artificial elements would be cheaper than the crystalline metamaterial. Second rule of grad school: Don’t take shortcuts unless they work. The satellite was indistinguishable from the background stars. The clear night looked so peaceful, so deceptively calm. He’d never smoked before -the single coughing attempt to take a drag of a friend’s schoolyard cigarette in seventh grade didn’t count- but he abruptly understood the impulse. It’d been fourteen hours since the resonance cascade. Fourteen hours of running, killing and pain. Of fear, no matter how thoroughly he mastered himself, that the next bullet would strike his unprotected skull or finally punch through worn, torn polymer and dead carbon. And it wasn’t over yet. Launching a satellite was only step 11.6 of the Lambda plan. The next step was him getting power back to the satellite control room and finding the rest of Lambda. He’d seen only dead hostiles for hours, so the massacre of the satellite control room had hit him hard. He hadn’t known that team, and he was sure they had their bad eggs and arrogant bastards just like the rest of Black Mesa, but they’d been human, physically defenseless, and bent on solving the cascade breach if it killed them. And it had. They’d died shot in the back, cowering under desks, on their knees, died of slow stomach wounds and fast bullets between the eyes. They were all men, for which Freeman found himself suddenly grateful. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened to any female scientist in the room. This kind of enjoyment of brutality leaned towards the basest denominator. What next? I choose to live, and that meant moving forward. He was breathing free air but he was a long way from getting out. He needed to get to Lambda and connect up with the team initiating the satellite patch. If nothing else, he betted they could use the firepower. Fourteen hours. Countless more to go. He’d pulled all-nighters many times but never with this much physical activity involved and it was taking its toll. His vision was blurred with fatigue and he wasn’t processing quite as quickly and it would cost him.
Third rule of grad school: Think about the test you haven’t taken, not the one you’ve already turned in. Time to move. He levered himself off the sand bag wall and crushed the empty plastic bottle. He dropped it unceremoniously between the bodies of the soldiers who’d built the wall. Maybe someday the world would have time to worry about recycling again.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The heavy-duty cargo tram was intended to be thoroughly mined. Freeman hefted a claymore from the crate beside it and added it to his utility belt. Apparently the crew in the sand-bag fort had been tasked with closing the rail line, but he’d gotten to them first.Claymores go both ways, he thought.
And when the tram ran aground in a wash of yellow fire, he was ready.
He rode the ruined machine through a hail of bullets and down the shaft, trusting blind instinct that so useful a space as a ruined silo would naturally be filled with wastewater.
He wasn’t wrong.
The trolley hit with a splash. He swam to the surface and looked up; the silo wasn’t the end of the line, by any means. Doorways lead off into ruined observation decks and systems laboratories.
Something twitched in the shadows and he froze, treading water, until he heard the grating howl and saw the long claws of a puppet. Relief flooded through him as he climbed out of the water and gripped the crowbar. He killed it with a single practiced blow.
He didn’t like how his heart rate stabilized when he saw it was only his own parasitized colleagues moving in the shadows. But they didn’t move too fast, and they didn’t shoot from a distance. Biological response, he reminded himself. The wet body isn’t distinguishing former friend from foe, only prioritizing threats. He didn’t have the mental energy to argue with his subconscious.
The water was icy cold and oily, but not irradiated. Small blessings. He followed the flooded corridors out of the silo and into what appeared to be a decommissioned marine biology lab. He was confused until he remembered this was cold-war era. Someone had probably been testing missiles on sharks. Or sharks in missiles. Or shark-mounted missiles.
The dank, rusty pool still held something. Something large, by the churning black water, something hungry- he fired twice on reflex as the thing breached, the torn body of a scientist in its jaws, and saw his bullets spark and deflect from its armored hide.
It might have been generously called “deep sea,” by someone who only saw a photo. By the shiver running up Freeman’s spine, by the utter lack of reaction to his shots, he was certain it was extraterrestrial. He was not a biologist, he didn’t like animals, he didn’t watch deep sea exploration films and he never went fishing, but the thing’s double-jaw, iridescent ocular array and metallic plated armor didn’t look like anything his colleagues had bragged about catching.
He skirted the pool, staying well back from the catwalk’s edge.
The observation laboratory above the pool was occupied. A man he’d never seen before was peering through the plexiglass and madly scribbling notes. “Did you see it? They said it was from the Challenger Deep, but it isn’t from earth. It can’t be! A whole week and still no word on the genetic sequencing results. I’ve got a hundred dollars on it being extraterrestrial but Jamison says it’s from Baikal.”
A week.
Freeman dislodged the scientist from the lab notebook and flipped back through.
The triplicate pages fanned a rainbow of white, yellow and pink. Notes, drawings, records of tissue samples for DNA sequencing… all carefully dated back a week, and further. There were other specimens, other notes, other experiments…
He slammed the notebook down and glared at the man.
“What do you want me to do about it? I can’t make it go away, so I might as well study it!” He protested. “If you need to cross the pool, you can get through using the old diving hatch. There’s a tranquilizer gun in the shark cage. It may work, it might not. We hadn’t gotten that far yet.”
Freeman stormed out.
A week. More than a week.
He’d known someone had known from minutes after the resonance cascade, when he saw the parasites in their containment chambers. But this…? This beast was clearly hostile and clearly alien, yet the intellectual segregation in Black Mesa had prevented anyone else working with the metamaterials from being properly equipped to handle an encounter-
-no, a fight for survival with an alien species. The parasites were bad enough, but at least they could be defeated by a swift boot.
The resonance cascade was only an extension of an existing line of research. Business as usual, writ large.
The shark cage was old, rusty and unstable. He had time to grab the tranquilizer gun and load it before it dropped, but barely.
Cold briny water crashed into the suit, dragging him down with the cage. He looked around; where was it…?
The long brown serpent body undulated around him, almost lazily. Then it snapped towards him like a snake, faster than he thought possible. He shot once and the thing barreled into him, teeth catching on polymer. The suit jerked around him and he felt something tear in it. Cold water rushed in, flooding along his ribs and chest. Teeth grazed skin on his side. He fired the crossbow again into its head and struck soft tissue beside the eye. The jaws slackened and released, outer set first, then inner set. He swam for the shadow of the diving hatch and slid through.
He paused on the stairs to catch his breath and let the water drain out of the suit. The thing had bitten through polymer like it was a chew toy. He saw his own white skin through the jagged holes.
Don’t get shot on the left side, he thought.
He had to swim once more before he reached the generator room. The sensation of icy oily water in the suit and against his chest left him gasping and chilled.
The enormous backup generator for the satellite labs restarted smoothly. Navigating past it provided more of a challenge.
He could see where he needed to go, and it was going to involve pistons.
Very, very large ones.
He backed up, ran and jumped. Water sloshed in the suit, throwing him off-balance and he skidded across the black insulated top. He threw himself forward, because that was better than falling, and caught the next by his finger tips. He scrambled up and, mindful of its descending mate, watched for his chance.
His hair was on end with static, reaching for the upper piston, when the far set separated enough to let him through. He jumped and jumped again, and landed on top of an acid spitter as it materialized. He slammed the crowbar through its head as the yellow lightning of the rift died down around it and it collapsed.
A med box at the end of the corridor caught his attention. His heart was still pounding from the generator run, not to mention the fish beast before it. He didn’t know if the teeth had penetrated skin, or if the blood loss detected chant was just routine now.
As he reached for it, yellow lightning splattered in his peripheral vision and he spun, but too slowly. Wet, warm fluid hit his back and ran down the suit, searing through joints and into flesh. He pumped the shotgun and killed the spitter, then slammed the med box umbilical into the suit and hoped its regenerative serum was strong enough to counteract the acid.
This one wasn’t drugged.
He wished it was, because he felt the acid eating into him, and he felt the forced flesh regrowth chasing it back, layer by layer, bit by bit. At first the serum seemed victorious , but then something in the carbon layer gave way and the wet burning fluid slid down his bare skin.
He was on one knee under the box, head down, just making himself breathe. He’d thought the claw down his back had been as much pain as his mind could handle, but he’d been wrong. The suit hurt him where it touched the chemical burns. Nanocarbon kept out lots of things but apparently not alien stomach acid. The back of his neck was worst, unprotected, the skin there a painful open wound. The acid had eaten through shoulder joints and down his back, and gotten into the torn side plates as well. Every movement aggravated something, as if the carbon skin had been replaced by ground glass. The med box did its work, regenerating flesh for the acid to burn away again and again until the acid was used up. But by then the med box was empty, leaving him raw.
He stood, because he had to, because the tearing sound of teleportation was coming from the next room. He limped to the doorway and shot into a gauntlet of bipeds. They spat electrical energy at him and he rode the discharge, firing methodically back. The suit insulated him just enough to keep him from losing his grip on the shotgun for the thirteen seconds it took to clear the room.
The repair box there helped. The nanocarbon realigned itself, very painfully over raw flesh, but once complete it held its weight better and expelled the remaining water and accumulated acid and pus. The tears over his ribs patched themselves from the inside out. The orange plating was mottled with old and new color, but it was solid enough.
The HEV repair boxes were rarer than med boxes and for good reason; the components and power demands made them expensive, but Black Mesa had wisely opted to install them at strategic points throughout the complex concurrently with HEV development. Parts of the suit were already in widespread use; the gloves, easily manufacturable without the electronic interface of a full suit, were used in nearly every wet lab, while the chest plate and its biorhythm monitoring systems were becoming more popular among scientists working with hazardous materials. Naturally the mass-produced components didn’t have the full self-repair and injury diagnostic capabilities of the full suit, but there was only one full suit and he was wearing it.
He wondered how many of the others would still be alive if they’d completed the HEV research and put it into general production. The full suit was stupidly expensive, but irreplaceable for personal protection in a hot lab.
Or a combat zone.
If they’d finished, would the military have been the ones wearing orange?
A white-haired scientist waved at him from behind the thick glass of a security door. Freeman limped through when the man opened the door. “Freeman! Thank God it’s you. We’ve been tracking your movements through the suit. So has the military, I’m afraid.”
Freeman swore, silently, in red ink. That explained a lot.
The man told him what to do. Keep going, stick to the industrial areas. Work quickly. The next room was cold storage of some sort, very cold. Much colder than the freezer. Arctic microbes? Cold-stable metamaterials? Why would Black Mesa need a room kept at forty degrees below zero?
Freeman didn’t care. He limped through, shivering and hurting. The suit kept giving him morphine but it just wasn’t effective anymore, and especially so against burn damage. At least the aliens there seemed cold too, a little more sluggish, a little easier to kill.
Beyond the cold room he found a lift into warmer spaces.
A security guard greeted him by name, took one step and died.
Freeman slammed himself into the darkest corner of the lift and gasped as pain from the burns reddened his vision. He couldn’t see or hear until the pain receded, and then all he saw was the dead man. He hadn’t heard a shot or seen an alien, but the man’s head had a distinctly projectile-like injury to it.
Sniper.
Cold fear gripped him. He needed to move. He needed to get out of the lift. Whoever shot the guard would have seen the guard turn, known someone was approaching. Move. Move!
He inched forward, into the cover of stacked crates. He’d shot with a sniper, once, back in his I’d-rather-kill-than-be-mugged days. The man had been as quiet as he was, and very very good. He couldn’t remember anything useful from that time, as a sniper rifle had been as far from his practical little revolver as one could possibly get, but he’d remembered the man’s methodical thoroughness and iron confidence in his ability to hit exactly and only what he wanted to.
Freeman imagined that man now, hunting him from somewhere in the crate maze. He didn’t know who or what was on the far end of the long-range weapon, so giving it a face he recognized helped him grip the fear and push it aside. All the other enemies had the decency to show themselves and come running at him; how was he supposed to kill a thing that could kill him from eight hundred yards away or more?
Angle. Vector.
Physics.
He studied the guard’s head. The exit wound was, luckily, on the underside. The entry wound was high, behind the ear. The bullet had gone diagonally through the skull and exited the forehead, above the left eye.
And the guard had been standing… he imagined it, reeled his mind backwards. The man stepping towards him, speaking… yes. He had it. He crossed the corridor and hugged the wall. The shooter would be on top of the far crate stack. They had distance, but a poor range of fire. They could cover almost the whole corridor, but they couldn’t cover the visual shadow of the wall or their own stack of crates.
He crouched and clamped his jaw as the motion rubbed the burns on the suit lining. There would be a med box up here somewhere. To his right, around the corner, something moved.
Something black, bipedal, shiny, almost liquid in his peripheral vision. He shot it with the revolver, and by the red blood knew was human. Or maybe it had just started its day that way. A new parasite? New military? New enemy? Or a newly dead friend? He couldn’t move to check the body, it was out of his shadow space.
He heard a quiet thwat and felt a gut-punch blow to his left side. He sprawled back, shifted the revolver and shot in one motion, ignoring the screaming pain as the burns caught his full weight. Another black-suit crumpled, a long-barreled gun falling from its hands.
major fracture detected, the suit told him but he already knew.
Ribs. Left side, two breaks? Three? Breathing was not going well. Neither was sitting up.
And a third black-suit rounded the corner.
He shot, because he had to. Because his ribs hurt but his elbow and wrist didn’t and his fingers worked just fine and somehow all he could see was the other gun. He shot right at it, piercing the thing behind it dead-center.
It seemed surprised as it fell.
The night-vision goggles were dislodged, the face-mask crumpled. Human. Female.
The second had been his sniper, by the type of weapon, but he didn’t want to assume they came in sets of three.
They were all women.
Somehow that made it more terrible.
Black Mesa was a male-dominated work environment, for reasons dating back to its founding as a private institution in the dark ages of male opinion on female accomplishment. He’d seen a few female scientists dead or parasitized, but they still numbered less than a tenth of Black Mesa’s whole employee roster because Black Mesa’s board of directors were a bunch of small-minded old men. None of the security guards were female because that same board thought their cloistered population too weak-willed to resist the chance of seduction by a disguised corporate spy.
And if any of the military had been female, well, he hadn’t recognized them as such.
So why were three women running around in skin-tight oil-black cat suits with silenced pistols and sniper rifles? A third layer to today’s disaster, or just a third player in the game?
He hurt, and the suit couldn’t take another sniper hit. The repaired left side had shattered under impact and the nanocarbon lining was driven into his skin. He felt it twitch, trying to repair itself, and grasping him instead. True fusion of man and machine, he thought, as he hauled himself upright.
Move, or die right here. Risk the open ground, or just sit down and accept fate.
He risked it, step by step, across the shipping yard.
No more shots.
There was a med box on the far wall. He made it there and plugged in, and found it nearly depleted. The little bit was nice though, and gave the burns enough of a boost to stop screaming in his ears. After he unplugged from it he noticed the crude little drawing beside it, a stick figure with glasses and a lambda symbol, and a bullseye all around. Die Freeman! written beside it, in childish lettering.
Oh well, there would be another med box soon. He just had to get there, without being shot or stabbed or parasitized or poisoned again.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He found a lever that said “Surface Access.” It sounded hopeful. The ache in his left arm was at the bottom of his pain list, far below the acid burns and broken ribs, but it reminded him of its existence as he tried to throw the lever without using any muscle above his shoulder. His right hand held the pistol and didn’t seem able to let go. Everywhere his eyes went, the barrel went too.The lever went down, and the big rolling door went up.
Behind the door was a nice clean grey hall smelling of night-fresh desert air. No bloodstains, no aliens, no black char marks from teleportation discharge, no scuffs from military boots.
He eased through the rolling door and into the hall, gun up and waving, but the hall was clear and well-lit, wide open, silent; no cover, nothing to hide behind, but nothing hidden from him either. At a glance, he saw he was alone, but his mind wouldn’t accept it. Surely an alien was about to materialize behind him, or a soldier drop through the ceiling above him, or a-
Stop it, he told himself. He was too busy for paranoia and in too much pain to put up much of a fight if one was called for. Focus. Act on what’s under control, he thought, mentally walking himself through the basic laboratory setup exercise. A simple way to gather thoughts and start to frame an experiment when working with too many unknowns. Establish base parameters.
He was still breathing. Still walking. Had ammunition for the automatic, shotgun, handgun and revolver. Had three grenades and a claymore. Was in pain, yes, but wasn’t life-threatening. He had to keep telling himself that, because every time he took a breath and a step, the broken ribs sent his brain a signal that said he was in fact dying.
He ignored it like he ignored the suit’s constant blood loss detected refrain, set it aside in a box on a shelf to deal with later.
Establish variables. Move forward, choose direction. The hallway turned a corner and he eased around it, gun up. Nothing. More clear, empty well-lit space. It seemed to mock his caution. A door to his left, a dark opening.
A variable.
Anything might come out that door.
He unhooked a grenade, pulled the pin and was about to release and roll it in when he saw the glow of the med box on the far wall. He put the pin back.
He needed the med box. He needed it because he hurt and the pain was distracting him and damage to his physical systems was making him slow. And because he very, very much wanted the chemical distraction it promised. The opiates would give him mental distance from the three dead women and the punch of the sniper round, from the way the guard’s eyes had gone blank as the bullet passed through his skull. They’d give him relief from the tension in his shoulders and the twitching feeling of being watched, of the enemy about to attack from where he couldn’t see.
That’s what he told himself, as he wavered in the hall, facing the door. It wasn’t true chemical addiction, not yet. His body just craved the relief from physical pain and mental strain like anyone would. He could walk away but he couldn’t afford to. Not in his current state, not with his hands shaking and his breath shallow and short.
His flashlight didn’t make much of a dent in the dark room, not with his eyes narrowed for the bright hall fluorescents. Some crates on the wall, but pushed back against it. Ceiling whole. There would be a blind spot as he stepped through the door, though.
He hesitated. Variables. He couldn’t control the space, but he couldn’t control the pain forever either, nor the mounting paranoia threatening to trap him in a corner as it had trapped so many of his colleagues. He listened, counted to ten and heard nothing. So he counted to a hundred, and then stepped through.
As he turned to check the blind spot on his left, static caught his right side, traveled up the suit and burned flesh on his neck and ear. He dropped the gun as the discharge seized his muscles. It charred through the carbon knee and hip joints and his body went ridged, then collapsed when the discharge ceased.
He saw the med box, glowing faintly, the little red cross on it winking in and out as his vision failed. He tried to bring up his mental index of known enemy weapons. He tried to reach for a gun. He tried a lot of things but none of them worked. His hands spasmed and his breath hitched against the broken ribs.
Variables. Things he couldn’t control. He’d set up the experiment and this was the result.
Someone laughed.
---
“He’s still alive.”
“Good. Don’t let him die yet, it’s time for a little payback.”
“Long as I get my turn. He killed Jefferson, Tony and Smalls.”
“He’s killed a lot more than them. Man’s a mass murderer.”
“Is he still human?”
“We’ll open him up and find out. Nice and slow. Piece by piece.” The voice was low, gravelly, and iron hard, hard as the hands gripping his arms and the back of his neck, hard as the asphalt tearing into his limp knuckles as they dragged him.
He faded in and out, the suit softly chronicling his injuries. Three broken ribs, chemical burns, electrical burns on his neck, hip and knee, blood loss, head trauma. Head trauma was new, he thought abstractly. Wonder when that happened.
All about to be very irrelevant if the men in uniform had their way. His heart beat slowed and his body sagged in his captors’ hands. He’d done his part. He’d fought hard, a one-man army of bloodshed and destruction. He’d seen the sun, through human eyes, his mind and body intact, his gun arm steady. He’d taken out hundreds of parasites, bipeds, maggots and barnacles, and a few dozen overzealous soldiers as well. How was he to reconcile his vow to live with their orders to leave no survivors? Whose were the superior ethics, the government decree to contain the breach and risk no further outbreak, or the human drive to persevere against all odds, to claw success from death itself?
I am not a murderer, he thought. I am a physicist and I choose to live. The words were in red, underlined and circled, rewritten a dozen times in his mental lab notebook. But what good was intent, robbed of action? Wishing wouldn’t make the data.
A body at rest tends to stay at rest.
Darkness came and went. Static noise filled his ears, the voices fading like a bad connection behind the sound of the pain. His body fell limp on the ground, discarded. Someone kicked his broken ribs and he gasped and went rigid, seeing red.
“Bastard’s breathing.”
“Bring him here, I got the perfect end.”
“Want that suit off?”
“No time, we’re moving out. We’ll drop him on the way.”
“Man, I’d kill for a suit like that.”
“Wouldn’t we all. Brass is going to strip this place bare. They find more of that tech, all us alien hunters should be first in line.”
“You see how many bullets he took? I’d be invincible in one of these.”
They hauled him up, dragging him behind them. One hand on the collar, one hand under his armpit, wrenching the shoulder socket and grinding the chemical burns against the lining. He hissed again but didn’t have the energy to struggle. The suit was distraught at its lack of morphine and told him he was bleeding again, and that his blood pressure indicated possible internal trauma.
He didn’t scream.
Freeman hadn’t spoken aloud in almost thirty years. He had vague, distant memories of having a voice, but now wasn’t sure if those were his own true memories or something manufactured out of internalized media and other people’s narratives. Words never seemed to have much effect on his reality. Then he’d learned the path of research, of academia, where battles were fought on the printed page and reality determined by documented proof. Spoken word was redundant, a waste of time and energy. It meant nothing in his chosen sphere and he’d never missed it. Silence became his trademark, his protection against distraction and competition. He was well-published, well-respected in his research niche, liked his projects and with his reputation for efficiency, arrogance and disdain, no one bothered him anymore.
And thus, Freeman didn’t speak.
It was a law as deep as gravity.
“Beg, bastard,” the marine said.
He didn’t beg. Not when they put the gun to the bare patch of flesh below the hairline and just behind his right ear, tender from the electrical burns. But as the cold metal met skin, biology took over. Cold dread shot down his spine and he tried to arch away but his movement aggravated the broken ribs. Pain lanced through his chest and he gasped, trying to hold himself still.
"I think he likes it," the marine growled.
Freeman breathed slowly through clenched teeth. His vision returned and the deep internal stabbing receded from all-consuming to a background roar. Breathing hurt. Heartbeats hurt. His shoulder hurt. The gun barrel slid down the protective rubberized fabric of the suit collar, digging in to his neck. He closed his eyes and waited, breath shallow and heartbeat slow. How oddly fast the body surrendered, he thought. Control. He wouldn’t go out in a panic. He was man enough to accept the end of the line and he’d take the execution with body broken but dignity whole. His face and fingers were cold, all the blood draining inward, withdrawing.
“Through the spine, good and low. I want him alive in there.”
The gun moved down, clicking faintly over each overlapping plate of reinforced polymer armor. In the suit he shivered with the psychosomatic sensation of cold metal on bare flesh. It stopped on his lower back, just above his kidneys.
And then it fired.
He didn’t scream. Not when the impact drove white static across his eyes and a banshee shriek through his ears, not when they rolled his body over the edge and he fell twenty feet into the trash compactor, not when he breathed in the first breath of sun-warmed, rancid fumes.
Not when the warning sounded, and the walls began to contract.
“Damn, we gotta go.”
“I want to watch.”
“Boss says now, so we go now.”
“Don’t you want to see him pop?”
“Yes, but Gamma Squad’s pinned by some big alien tank thing. They’re being slaughtered. Move out!”
Steps receded, at the tap-tap dog trot of formation.
Freeman rolled over, gasping. He’d have retched if his back had let him. Instead, he just gulped for air. The suit had absorbed the shock and spread it, so he’d traded a shattered spine for a contusion from shoulders to hips and, by the nexus of pain in his lower back, the bullet had still penetrated. The suit helpfully informed him he had minor internal bleeding as well, where the force of the shot and fall had dislodged his broken ribs.
He rolled over again and onto his knees, his arms around his chest. The guns were gone, the crowbar was gone, the grenades and the extra protein bars and everything else was gone, except the suit and the flesh inside it.
His body hurt with every heartbeat, but he got up. He limped to the first crate and sat on it, then swung his legs up and levered himself onto the next crate. One by one, backwards first, careful of his ribs, trying not to bend or twist.
The walls inched inwards, metal screaming on metal, klaxon personnel warning droning on. Of course Black Mesa wouldn’t install a safety shutoff, that’d be too much work, and an insult to the clearly superior intellect of all their staff.
So he climbed, until he could see over the walls. Until he was sitting on the cement edge, until all limbs were out of the pit. The walls slammed shut beside him, grinding the crates to splinters.
He saw the crowbar five feet away and crawled on his belly to it. His hand gripped the hexagonal shaft and he closed his eyes, forehead against the rough, stained stinking concrete. They'd left it behind, thought it useless. Their mistake.

I choose to live.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The compactor drain pipe was almost too narrow for him to fit. The ribs in the pipe jostled his shoulders, rubbing painfully against the burns. It dropped him out in a shallow cesspit surrounded by natural rock; the sun was creeping up, and above him the cliff glowed pink.He sat on the cool sand and watched the sun rise, relishing a moment when nothing was trying to kill him. Knowing he’d been left for dead, knowing the soldiers thought they’d succeeded, left him with an odd feeling of detachment. He’d failed, been caught, hauled out and thrown bodily from Black Mesa.
He could walk away.
Well, creep and crawl away, until the burns festered and killed him, or until he ran into a military perimeter.
Suicide wasn’t an option. Survival required reentering the mountain, continuing the experiment, seeing it through.
There was no bad data, only bad design. If you set up the experiment correctly, you couldn’t complain about what it gave you. You just kept going. Alter parameters. Change the variable. Try again. And again. And again. Graph your results. Make your prediction. Revise the setup and start again.
It’d been his life since sophomore year of undergrad, twelve years ago, when he’d discovered a physics professor who didn’t care how young he was or that he didn’t talk, just that he did his homework, excelled in experimentation and theory, and could keep a proper notebook.
Start again, Freeman. He got up. He walked. He killed parasites with the crowbar and inched his way painfully up a ladder, climbing with his right arm to spare the broken ribs. He crawled through rust-red ducts and dropped a painful ten feet to the cement floor of an interior space.
Inside again.
He took a hand gun off a dead guard; the guard had been scattered into a collection of bone and blue cloth, the offal of a ceiling barnacle.
The stench of acetone and benzene burned his nose. Liquid sloshed through the immense settling vats, turned by debris combs clogged with foam, disposable gloves and discarded plastic pipettes. The halls were narrow, too tall and too dark, their corrugated metal walls chipped back to show three layers of paint under a slime of condensation. Meant to shield the porous native stone should something catastrophic occur, but decades out of repair.
He worked his way gingerly around the facility and found every door securely locked. Some form of lockdown existed in this forgotten bowel, probably meant to keep prying safety officers and health inspectors out, not aliens in. But it walled him off like a medieval baffle, forcing him again into tunnels not meant for human occupants. He was crawling up the outflow tubes, a piece of reverse debris worming its way back in.
Then he reached a ledge, where liquid waste was redirected from solid waste, and saw his only way forward.
He glared at the murky brown water. At least it was tepid and not icy cold like the silo water, but it stank far worse. He did not want to get in it. The suit was compromised, he had open burns and puncture wounds, and the tank was the business end of a wastewater system serving a town-sized compound of mad scientists.
Freeman was not obsessive-compulsive but he knew people thought he was. He just had a healthy respect for laboratory safety procedures. He'd seen what got tracked around by gloved hands and had watched a colleague's sandwich crumbs ruin four months' mass spec work. And he had a pretty good idea of what went down the drains. The treatment plant was cold-war era and Black Mesa paid a lot of money to make sure environmental groups never got near it. It was the biological equivalent of the nuclear cesspit he'd already seen.
But it was also the only path available.
I choose to live he thought, and decided he'd rather be facing an HVAC duct full of parasites or another tram battle than take a swim in the brown scummy pond. He could shoot an enemy and be done with it; this, he had to exist with. Had to keep dealing with it, smelling it, tasting it, feeling it trickle in and flood places that ought not be wet. The med boxes might clear his system. Maybe. Hopefully. It'd be a contest of carcinogens; would he mutate from the tissue-regrowth serum or the concentrated lab waste, or would a flesh-eating bacteria or drug-resistant fungus get him first? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.
He slid in. The water felt as disgusting as it looked and smelled. Its texture was wrong, almost viscus. He couldn't see the bright orange suit more than three inches down. Something squirmed against his foot and he ground his boot down on it, then refused to imagine what it it was. No time for paranoia. No time for slimy crawling things, no time to imagine what it would feel like if it swam into the suit breach.
Control. Move. He found it took more willpower to make progress in the water than it had to accept his own imminent death.
The third door he tried, the third time exiting and reentering the brown stream, he found one that opened.
And there was a med box.
He sloshed to the box and let as much of the sludge drain out as he could. He could taste it, the permeating rotten-organic sewer stink, and saw through a film of it on his glasses. He had nothing to clean them with.
The box wasn’t drugged. No surprise, it being so far down in the bowels of the building, nor was its cocktail as effective. He was a connoisseur of speed-regrowth formulas, and this one must have been an early generation.
The burns on his back hurt fractionally less, but the skin around them felt tender and tight, like it was growing back on two sizes too small. The bullet in his lower back twinged angrily as muscle fibers grew around it, tightening into an angry knot that wouldn’t close. His ribs ached, and refused to heal at all.
He let the med box drain into him, taking everything it had. He’d deal with the side effects later in life, once the breach was closed.
The suit was still porous and breathing still a chore, but most of the burns were closed.
He slid back into the water.
The suit filled again, making him slow and awkward. The water went under the wall; he felt the current swirling around his legs, tugging at the suit. So he took a deep breath of reeking air and ducked under. How deep? Something surged in his ears, a piece of rotating machinery. He felt it pull in the water, pull in him, and he slid in the heavy muck. The wheel grabbed on the suit and punched him through the gap, its torque nearly ripping the shoulder plating off. He rolled in the water, coughing and gagging for air, and slammed against unyielding cement.
Ribs hurt. Ribs said no air, but lungs said air. His face breached the surface and he gasped, coughed, tried not to breathe and failed, and gasped again- the need for oxygen at war with the sharp deep pain in his side. He grabbed desperately for the wall and felt up it for a ledge, a groove, anything. Yes, there- a walkway six inches above fluid level. He floundered onto it, gasping again as the movement dislodged the bullet.
Blood loss detected, the suit said.
He rolled onto the ledge and vomited. He wanted to be clean of the filth, wanted it out from his hair and ears and eyes, wanted it gone from his mouth and lungs. He scraped his head, sluiced what he could from his hair and beard, and blinked around desperately through the oily lenses for something to wipe them on. The world was at a tilt and started tilting further, so he closed his eyes and waited for the vertigo to ease.
Head trauma, he thought. Hitting the wall. There’d been previous head trauma, but he didn’t know when or what. Something with the soldiers. The med box wasn’t strong enough to knit bone, maybe not strong enough to fix heads either. Or fix bullets.
His back twinged again. The ribs were a deep pulling, knifing pain while the bullet was like a sliver under a fingernail, a knot of raw nerves he just managed to forget before it woke and screamed.
"Hey you alright? You look like you could use some help."
His head snapped up and he blinked through blurred vision. The glasses were there but his eyes wouldn’t focus. The gun tracked the sound of footsteps across the room, his right arm steady and his head cocked to listen.
"Wait, don't shoot, I'm on your side. You're Freeman, right?
He lowered the gun but didn't holster it. Not a scientist. Security? Yes, there was the blue blur with two pale splotches of upraised palm. He gripped the handgun, palm damp in the glove. Point of no return: trust or kill?
"I saw you crawl out. Did you come in through the pipes? You're a mess, man. Lucky you made it though, the floors above are crawling with military." The man was prattling, but his voice was carefully modulated and calm. He wasn't approaching any closer either.
Freeman took off his glasses and wiped across his eyes with the back of his left hand. He blinked and replaced the glasses, trying to focus. Slowly the room stopped tilting. The guard was talking like he was a time bomb. For the man's own safety, Freeman was glad he was. He'd have shot anything that moved too fast or made a loud noise.
"My name's Johnson. I can help. I have some medic training. There's a med kit in the office back here. Do you need help standing?"
Freeman shook his head and waved the man back with the gun. He was still deciding if his instinct to trust was based on intuition or wishful thinking. He stood, stiffly, and water drained from the suit joints. He motioned for the man to walk ahead of him, keeping the gun steady on the blue center mass. The man lead him to a small office over the wastewater channel. It didn't offer much in terms of fortification, but the windows would let him see anything coming down the walkways. A dead acid-spitter lay deflated in the corner by the trash bin.
"You know you're bleeding?" Johnson asked.
Blood loss detected, the suit said.
"Yeah I suppose you would," Johnson said. "If you'll let me, I can help. Med kit’s not as good as what's upstairs but it should patch up whatever's leaking."
The office was a relic of Black Mesa's waste disposal monitoring system, another cold-war stopgap against sabotage and corporate espionage. It hadn't been used since Black Mesa switched to an internal digital network twenty years ago, and now a heavy layer of dust and cobwebs frosted the desk, chairs and windows.
Freeman set himself against the desk, trying to find a way to prop himself up without dislodging the bullet. The man's face was coming into focus, bit by bit. Pale skin, blood-splattered uniform, side-arm holstered. Eyes wide but not manic. Mid-thirties, older than Freeman. Not much bigger, though. Same lean, decidedly un-security-like build he'd seen in a lot of white coats lately. Dead white coats.
"Look man, you going to trust me or not? You are bleeding on the floor. You're not going to last forever just standing there. Let me help you. You're my best chance at surviving this mess but right now I might be your best chance of surviving the next twenty minutes."
Freeman considered, then lowered the gun. He jerked his head and winced-yes, definitely head trauma-but it was all the invitation the guard needed. Johnson circled him, hands still partially raised. "I'm getting the med box behind you. Just stand still and let me take a look."
Freeman stood still. He tended to avoid overly helpful people, but right now he didn't have much choice. He was unlikely to find a decent med box in the sewer system and he couldn't reach the bullet himself. He couldn't move or breathe easily. Combined with the blurred vision and vertigo, he couldn't react fast enough to survive an encounter with a soldier.
An object at rest stays at rest, unless someone else is there to set it back in motion.
Something poked the damaged part of the suit and he hissed in pain. “Sorry man, it’s still in there. That must be hell. Listen, I know a little about how these things are put together. I can take off that back plate and get the bullet out for you. There’s no suit repair station in the area, and man alive what have you done to this thing.” He was tracing the damaged back plates, where black nanocarbon tubes knit together the long gash left by the talon monster. Freeman felt the pressure of his touch and clenched his jaw, about the only thing that didn’t hurt. The last thing he’d felt through the suit was the gun shot and his back tensed with anticipation of more pain.
“That alright with you? I take off the plate and get that bullet out?”
Freeman made a ‘get on with it’ gesture and blinked rapidly, still trying to clear his vision. He wanted very much to trust the security guard, but what guard knew that much about the suit? It was proprietary tech, more closely guarded than state secrets from prying outsiders and corporate competition.
Oh.
Freeman tried to twist around but failed, and hissed again. The bullet wasn’t in far, but it was interrupting muscle movement in his lower back. That, combined with the stiff burn scar tissue and the damaged back plates, meant he couldn’t look over his own shoulder.
But he could raise the gun. He had it up under his elbow, dead center mass on Johnson, before the man noticed it.
Johnson put his hands up. “Come on, Freeman. Either trust me or shoot me but make a decision.”
Freeman raised one eyebrow and fixed him with his best keep talking glare. It worked on questionable interns, and it worked on Johnson.
“Fine. Yes, I’m corporate. I know about the suit. Till all this happened I was angling for a piece of it myself. Got a big paycheck back home at Horizon Labs if I bring in some of that self-healing energized nanotech. But listen man, Black Mesa’s broken and if you die, my chances are about zero. I keep you alive, you bring me and that fancy suit back to my place, and we’ll treat you better than this hellhole ever did.”
Freeman rubbed his jaw with his other hand and thought, then nodded. Why not. Odds were Black Mesa wasn’t going to survive this. He’d need a new laboratory, a new research base, and right now he needed this man’s help. He put the gun down.
“Thanks man. You won’t regret it.” Johnson prodded the damaged back plating again. “Hold still, I’m going to take things apart back here.”
He held still, leaning forward as far as the damage would allow. Feeling someone else working on the suit was surreal. Maybe it was the injury, maybe it was that Johnson was the first human being to offer something more than fear or violence; he wasn’t so sensitive when he got routine wear and tear checks in the lab.
There was some tugging, some swearing, and then the plates came free. The scale-like overlapping spine armor slid off and the two articulated plates over his shoulder blades folded out, leaving his back exposed. He’d had a shirt on, at some point, but it had lost structural integrity a long time ago. Cold air hit his back, rippling a sensation almost alien down his skin. How long had it been since he’d put the thing on? His skin felt unnaturally numb and sensitive all at once.
“Hey I can see the bullet pretty good. Someone really tried to do a number on you. I think they didn’t account for the suit, or they’d have shot an inch farther over. Looks like it wasn't your first rodeo.” The man did what people always did when discovering a new scar, and traced the talon's path from his upper back down his spine. Freeman stiffened, winced and twitched away all at once- and gasped as his vision darkened. All his natural reactions to getting touched only aggravated the pain.
Freeman didn't do physical contact, just like he didn't do mind-altering substances or relationships or voluntary sign language or loud music. He did not appreciate how his nerves focused all his attention on the place another human being touched. It was distracting, disorienting, and altogether invasive. While he tolerated the academic back-slapping that came with grand discovery and the routine, sterile medical checkups that accompanied his work with the suit, and while he would offer a particularly trusted colleague a hand-shake on occasion (there were exactly three people in his life for whom that honor was reserved), he did not offer, invite or permit other physical contact. Physical touch gave someone else too much control, even if they didn't know it, over his attention and intellect.
“Oh sorry, I didn't think," Johnson apologized. "That's probably still raw under the skin. Those med boxes don't deal with deep tissue damage very well. I’m going to try and get it out now. It’s not in far, but this’ll hurt."
Everything hurts, he thought. And it did, and the sharp pain of the bullet being manipulated back out of his flesh by Johnson's dull med box tweezers hurt differently than the contusions of its impact, or the twinging under the scar tissue, or the pain in his ribs.
"Just like popping a zit," Johnson laughed. He handed Freeman a small damp metal object, still warm with his own body heat. The bullet had deformed on impact with the suit, then penetrated the top layers of skin and lodged in the flat muscle of his lower back, beside his spine. He weighed it in his gloved hand, remembering the marines who'd put it there. They'd been murderous, under their dry comradery. Murderous with fear and anger, full of hatred for the orange and black devil slaughtering their brothers.
He felt the cold of alcohol wipes, gauze and tape being applied, and the sting of an injection antibiotic. It wouldn't do much in the sewer water but it was a nice thought.
Johnson cleared knots of nanotubes fused by the acid and realigned the back plates. “Your suit’s out of power now but if you can find a repair station, it should go back together with better movement and without digging itself into you. That bruise on your side looks nasty but this med kit doesn't have anything for internal trauma. The plates over it will realign though, they aren't shattered and driven into you like the back was. Don’t suppose anyone’s around to do a full service on it with all this going on.” He muttered what sounded like an oath of admiration. “I hate Black Mesa’s guts, Freeman, no offense, but man they can make a beauty of a HEV. Stay alive for me. I’ll be hereabouts when this is all mopped up.”
Freeman nodded once. He cleaned his glasses with gauze from the med kit and stashed an extra sealed pack on his belt. He'd need it after the last sewer swim. He looked Johnson in the eye and extended his hand. The man blinked at him in surprise, then shook it.
Horizon Labs. Freeman knew the place. They'd poached a few interns over the years. They weren't anyone's idea of cutting edge, but after this he was alright with a little less cutting. Maybe he'd look up Johnson, find the man if they all lived through the day, and talk about that job offer.
Move, he thought, as he slid back into the sewer water. It wasn't as hard, with that tiny sliver of normalcy behind him, and maybe a little in front of him now too. He let himself think forward; life after Black Mesa. Life after the slaughter. Was it possible?

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Black Mesa was a broken, dying beast above him but the waste reclamation system was still functional. The conveyor belts that fished floating debris and metals from the sewer system were greasy slick and the walls splattered with rust and organic matter. The atmosphere was heavy and feted and grew worse the deeper he went.His eyes tracked movement and his body responded; inanimate machinery could crush him, but it wasn’t going to shoot and its motions were limited and predictable. Metal slammed on metal, the sound torturous. His head rang with it. His ears ached. Blood pounded in his temples, reminding him with every heartbeat that he’d hit his head very hard sometime recently.He twisted under a steel bar, designed to shove oversized debris into another chute, and gasped as the broken ribs shifted. Johnson’s medical attention had made the journey through the reclamation system possible but still far from pleasant.There would be a med box up above. The box would make him feel better. Endure the pain, get the carrot. Let the wet body want what it wants.He rolled under a pulverizing piston and jumped for the next conveyor, this one rough with metallic fragments. The system was designed to be hostile to life; radiation, biohazards, incinerators, mechanical sorters and crushers, all crafted to reduce the laboratory’s industrial waste to its most minuscule possible form. And here he was, a full-size human being, forcing his way through the system.Jaws reached for him. He swung and caught the parasite mid-leap, its pincers wrapping around his forearm and its beak clenched on his wrist. It couldn’t penetrate the heavy joint where glove met sleeve and he crushed its back against the wall. It left a wet streak as the conveyor dragged him forward.Steel slammed on steel at the belt’s end. The serrated edge ratcheted back and slammed again.Just like the fan, he thought. Just like the fan. Count, breathe, leap. Human-like, he wanted to close his eyes against the oncoming pain, against the image of that serrated edge catching him in the belly and cutting him clean in two.I am a physicist, he thought, clenching his teeth and working backwards against the belt’s motion. Predict. Act. Like pendulum motion, knowable and controllable. He stilled his breathing, counted the seconds and fell.Steel clashed above his head. He rolled down the last chute and saw the sickly glow of irradiated chemical waste below. A glimpse of safety yellow and -yes, ladder- he jumped, arms out and praying the broken ribs wouldn’t cut him to pieces.His gloves closed on steel rungs, the right size for human hands, the right spacing for human strength. And he nearly lost his grip as his mind registered the searing pain in his side. Something stabbed where it shouldn’t, bone and muscle unaligned and at war. Breath wouldn’t come. His vision went dark as he clung to the ladder. He hadn’t come this far to be defeated by mere injury! No. Broken ribs were for people who fell from ladders and did foolish things on bicycles.No. The body wanted what it wanted, but the mind was its master. The body wanted to fail. Wanted to crawl into a dark corner and wither away and die. But the mind had chosen survival.Survival meant pain, more thin breath between his teeth, more dry-mouth panting as his hand closed around the next rung. He pushed up with his legs. Pulled with his good side. Worked his way upwards into the red glow of an emergency access hatch.The red light was pleasantly dim, almost warm. He lay flat on the clean steel for five blessed minutes and let himself feel human.Was Johnson still alive? He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to imagine him as a parasite or a military casualty. The bullet wound was the most superficial of his injuries but he felt the skin-level tug of medical tape holding the gauze in place, and remembered the man’s touch on his back.His ribs hurt but with stillness the pain receded to a level he could work around and breathe through. He’d get through this, and he’d find Johnson and drag the man out of this mess if it killed him. If nothing else killed him first.The red corridor ended in another ladder. He silently swore at it, then started climbing.He pushed the access grate up and heard the chirping resonant shriek of a maggot dog. Their screams would hurt, but they wouldn’t hurt any more than he already hurt. He knew how many of their sonic attacks he could endure, and he knew the bullet count to kill them.He rolled up onto their level and fired from the floor. Four of them, more than he thought. His ears rang with their cries and he switched guns from the automatic to the handgun, counting down until the clip emptied then slamming in a new one, trading slower firing for faster reloading and greater accuracy.And then they were dead. He rested, smelling their alien gut stink, waiting for his hearing to return.Outside the energized cage, a med box flickered red and white. He limped to it and plugged in, and sat on an empty dog crate while it worked through him. The payload was fresh and heavy, and for a long moment he floated somewhere up near the fluorescent lights, free of the suit, free of the broken ribs and ringing ears, free of gunsmoke and sewer slime.The box chimed and he sank back into himself. The body was still broken and battered, but the ribs no longer bit into him. Breathing was easier than it had been since the sniper’s shot and the dark weight of the guard’s death, the shot and his own attempted execution seemed a little farther away.Don’t forget Johnson, he told himself, dragging the man’s face back to his memory. The one thing in this place he wanted to take with him.He walked down the corridor, away from the dog kennel and its implications. This section of the lab was entirely foreign to him, and disturbingly new. This was no repurposed cold-war silo. This was millions of dollars in state of the art containment systems, he realized, as he rounded the central pillar and saw the soldier behind thick steel-webbed glass.The alien soldier stared back at him.Five limbs. Heavy mandible, powerful three-fingered claws, squat hooved legs, and dark armor plating. It shook itself and roared at him, claws sliding down the glass. A challenge, or a salute?He searched the room for an access panel but it was sealed from the outside. A double layer of containment. Smart, but now his path was blocked.Unless. He stared at the control panel for the cell. If he broke its containment, the room would release as well, assuming the sample was dead or gone. No living scientist would open the door for a living enemy.He raised the shotgun and stared the thing down. I won’t shoot if you won’t shoot, he thought, but he aimed for its unarmored belly anyway. Then he slammed the release.An alarm blared and the thing shot at him. A projectile buzzed past him like an angry hornet. He pulled both triggers and the alien crumpled.It had died a captive, but at least it had died fighting. Maybe that’s what it wanted. The gun it carried was as alien as the rest of it, almost indistinguishable from its own limbs and claws.Captive. A prisoner.In a cell designed to contain it and its weaponry.Which side of this war am I on? Is humanity on? The implications ran down a hundred dark veins. He didn’t want to think about them. He liked the enemy better as dumb beasts, feeding on human flesh to sate a biological imperative. A unified force? Capable of teamwork and coordination?He reloaded the shotgun as he walked down the hall, all smooth modern greys and faintly metallic paneling. Utilitarian, but sleek and expensive, like renderings of a space port. Futuristic.Alien.His mind flashed back to the grey-skinned inhuman he’d caught watching him.What didn’t he know? Too much.And all at once the lingering guilt was gone, the sense that somehow he’d pushed the wrong button and the whole disaster bore his name. He had pushed the thought so far back he’d forgotten he had it, but had been there, working like a splinter in his subconscious. The experiment had been flawed from the start. He’d known that much, listening to the laboratory chatter, but still, he’d had his hands on the controls at the moment it all went wrong.But now he knew better. He’d been a pawn, a brilliant, skilled pawn locked into the resonant chamber. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else, and if not someone else, then another day, another lab, another fated moment for reality to tear itself apart. Whoever built the containment chamber knew they were summoning an enemy. Knew what they risked in beginning the resonant research. Knew what lay on the far side of the curtain.Knew the risk. Chose the path. Changed the experimental procedure. Altered too many variables. And put Freeman in the suit and handed him the keys to earth’s end.He slammed open the next containment door and stalked through, anger washing over the pain.Two black-and-white armored marines spun and shouted, and he fired. Their bullets went wide but his did not.He was in a lobby.White-lit and sleek, wood receiving desk, high ceiling and monogrammed floor. Red blood pooled over the smooth white tile and broke the ring of the Black Mesa insignia.This was no dusty yellowed laboratory of old men and white coats. No, this was a place of financial power and national vision. A place where introductions were made and hands were shook, where money became power and drove the future forwards. Someone was selling something. Someone didn’t care about the cost.He tracked red across the lobby.Someone would be alive in here, somewhere, and they were going to answer him.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Old blood marred the shiny white walls. The soldiers had become complacent; despite their body armor, they died easily.”He’s alive! The bastard’s still alive!” a radio on a dead man hissed as his cohort retreated around the curve of the hall.Oh yes, he was supposed to be dead, wasn’t he? Ambushed. Shot. Compacted into bits. Sludge to water the desert. Their data was incomplete. Their experiment had failed.He looked at the goggled, masked faces shooting back at him and felt no kinship.The laboratory wing’s front entrance was an atrium of heavy glass and pale grey cement, domed and skylighted to give a feeling of wide-open space and, subliminally, limitless possibility. And it was sealed from the inside. The retinal scanner beside the door blinked a mocking red light at him and blatted a denial; he knew it wouldn’t work, but he tried anyway. He’d need a live body with the right clearance or a lot of explosives. One of the two ought to be lying around.He scanned the area and considered the floor plan he’d come through. The building appeared sealed, with its shiny walls and security doors. It offered few hiding places. But it was Black Mesa, and that meant it was built on the bones of something older. If he could access it through the waste containment system, there would be other forgotten rooms, maintenance halls and quiet dark places where Black Mesa’s less picturesque staff performed essential duties.He opened a utility door by prying the door jam back with the crowbar, hoping for a survivor, and found a sanitation closet with its OSHA-mandated eyewash station and mop sink. New laboratory wings had their benefits, like greater oversight and a requirement to conform to code.He washed his gloved hands free of sewer residue and alien fluids. Then he washed his glasses and did his best to wash his face. He used half the roll of rough brown paper towel to get the worst of the gunk from his hair and neck. The soap was a bland bulk pearlescent stuff scented with artificial lavender but the smell was viscerally familiar; every morning upon arrival, the small ritual of washing before donning the HEV. At day’s end, wiping damp glove sweat from his hands and face. He watched the sewer oils and suds circle the mop drain and felt some of the otherness wash away with it. Reentry into civilization, into the human side of the equation. He was alive again.In the next containment chamber, he found soldiers teasing an armored alien in a cell. They made rude gestures at it and spoke a language it couldn’t comprehend. He broke the containment seal from a distance and let it have its revenge. When it turned on him, he killed it. It probably didn’t know the differences in human factions. If its sole experiences with humanity had been first on the business end of Black Mesa’s curiosity and then the military extermination efforts, no wonder it shot first and asked questions later.Across its body he saw the suit repair station he’d been searching for. He plugged in and felt the suit thrash around him, realigning and repairing the underlay and plating. It tightened over his ribs, then complained about his increased heart rate. It pressed into the bullet wound, now a knot of tender scar tissue, and told him about his minor blood loss. When it settled and sat correctly again, he closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cool orange box on the wall. It ticked off his heart rate, lowering to acceptable levels, and told him his blood pressure was normal. Stabilization. The body wanted safety, and his was placing its instinctive trust in the orange shell around him. How small his world had constricted, to where the only “normal” was the scent of cheap soap and sensation of the energized carbon fiber on his skin.The box had been built to repair the suit components in use in that wing, not a whole suit, and his extensive repair drained it quickly. But it moved with him now, not against him, and the knee and hip joints balanced properly and helped distribute the weight of the back and chest plates.Above the box, a heavy yellow conduit crackled with static discharge and then went quiet. He followed it around the corner, into a small laboratory space with an optics array and a power junction. Someone had been running a very interesting optics experiment. A very large, powerful optics experiment. Something quite like a photon version of his own resonance work. He turned on the junction box and watched light flood the array.Certain metamaterials could enhance energy output. Crystals of specific configurations defied physics by releasing more energy than they were given. Shine a laser at one, and-Boom. Pieces of door, wall and soldier came flying through the hall ahead of him. He flattened himself against the wall and waited, heart pounding. Claymore accident? Missile launcher? Dropped bomb?He waited until the debris settled, then slowly moved to investigate. That much firepower might make a dent in the front door. The weapon behind the explosion had survived relatively unscathed, but the curious pair of soldiers who had wielded it had not. And yes, he saw the flash of metamaterial lemon yellow, like an oversized sulfur crystal.In his home branch of the complex, weaponization of metamaterials was a taboo subject. No one touched the idea. Too powerful, too unstable, the world wasn’t ready, absurdly expensive… the list rattled on. But of course, with the intellectual segregation between research branches, he should have expected this. Black Mesa was built on the Cold War weapons race. Someone, somewhere, would pay for a handheld cannon powered by a crystal worth the gross domestic product of several small nations. And if they wouldn’t, their enemies would.He activated the next optics array, just to see what it would do.Quite a lot, apparently, he thought, as the dust cleared from the wall it had blown. But the space behind the wall interested him. It was older, more utilitarian, lacking the fine salesmanship of the front labs. If someone was hiding, they’d be hiding back here, not out front where the soldiers played. He climbed down the ductwork, mindful of his ribs, and reached the bottom panting and sore. He looked up the jagged cement hole and hoped he wouldn’t have to get back through it.As he’d suspected, there was a maintenance door into the back of the labs. And also, as he’d suspected, there were voices.Scared, squeaky scientist voices.He kicked open the door, glad of its weak modern lock, and found four white-coated strangers cowering on the floor, their arms over their heads. “We surrender!” one shouted. “Please don’t kill us!”They thought he was a soldier. He lowered his gun and crossed the room; they were behind a robotic dissection lab, and by the state of the equipment, it was a surprisingly effective security system. He turned back to the scientists. One of them would have the security clearance to open the door. And if they didn’t, he’d use the crystal gun.“Oh, it’s just Freeman,” one said. The man stood and dusted his hands off. “You gave us quite a scare! We’ve been tracking your progress but you disappeared out by the waste processing station. How did you get in here? The door should still be sealed. Oh, of course, you can’t answer me.”“He must have come up through the old sewer system,” another one said. “He smells like the drains in the canid holding area.”“Astute observation! I said those drains were a security risk last year.”Freeman shot once into the ceiling. The four men jumped back, eyes wide but focused. He opened the door to the dissection lab and watched the machinery rotate. Once around, twice, and he had its rhythm. It moved slower than the big fans, with more sharp edges but less torque and no irritating blast of wind. He walked through the lab, shut the system down, and motioned with the gun for the men to follow him.They did, in a protesting, trundling line, and one of them bent a proud head to the retinal scanner and opened that absurd door. “It’s hell out there,” he said. “Completely under military control. We haven't had word from anyone who has gone out that door. I hope they made it to safety but the data suggests otherwise. If you make it, go to Lambda Complex, where the Lambda team has taken shelter. We’ll let them know you’re coming. Best of luck!”He left them in their domed, sunlit atrium, standing on the blood-splattered Black Mesa seal.The revolving reinforced airlock door annoyed him with its pretentiousness. It sealed nothing but company reputation. A useless piece of expenditure, and it delayed him the fast exit he needed from the exterior blind spot. A drone beeped its warning and he pressed himself against the sun-hot concrete, but a soldier firing from the side pushed him from cover. He prioritized soldier over drone and felt the sting of shots on his right shoulder.Dronefire was small caliber; they hadn’t punctured but they had added another layer of bruising. Administering morphine, the suit said.Then he stepped around the curved concrete wall and into the mass grave.Fly wings resonated. Their high-pitched vibrations keened pitifully in the hot sun, a grating sound. He isolated three different species of fly by sound. Two kinds of wasps. He didn’t know their nomenclature and he didn’t care. The air was loud with insect scavengers. Bigger things would approach soon, when the violence died away.The flesh was silent, its decay too old for liquid flow and too young for gas escape. The skin was a strange color, its true color, he reasoned, without the pressure of a beating heart behind it. Fly eggs splotched yellow around vacant eyes and open mouths. Blood had pooled and crusted, black on the surface and mapped with crimson between the bodies, like molten stone.This was old death. Not the fresh running battle, nor the mausoleum of the murdered within Black Mesa’s walls, no, this was the first death, dozens of deaths, days old. These slack empty hands were intended to shake the great. These minds built the palace of the future, mastered material resonance across space and guided Black Mesa to its prominence as the world’s foremost metamaterial research facility.These men and women ought not have been dragged out and shot on their own doorstep, then left forgotten for the world to eat.He hated them for their role in Black Mesa’s destruction and the violence now tearing through it, but he wanted them alive to be hated, alive to see their reputations as scientists be shredded in print, alive to watch their place in the future fail. This was… hollow. A butchery.The battlefield of the inner laboratories might be excused by virtue of the alien violence and the order to contain any potential contagion. Sealing off the facility and firebombing it would be a justified action, if it meant freeing Earth of the threat. But this…? Over thirty-five bodies, piled in the shallow pit beside the wall. The wall was splattered with their blood; the afterimage of where they’d stood for execution. He didn’t know forensic biology but he guessed, by the dried black blood and sunken skin but lack of heavy decay stench, at least two days.He was an intellect attached to an organic system, he reminded himself. He dragged his body around by will, not it his mind by want; he had mastered it long ago. It was his machine, obedient and reliable. He fed it and kept it clean and fit, tuned and repaired like any fine instrument, and it in turn obeyed his commands. The crystal resonance work required incredibly precise calibration of frequencies far outside the human sensory range, but his fingertips knew the correct warm hum of the sensory equipment and his ear knew the faint rhythmic click of a steel frame vibrating badly against a loose screw. His research benefited from his ability to catalogue all sensory input as raw data pertinent to the experiment at hand. He’d eviscerated lesser scientists’ careers by proving their data flawed by resonant contamination from the poor plumbing in the bathroom down the hall.Everything in life, everything in reality, all matter, resonated. Humanity had long been ruled by the yelling of the body, whose hungers, fears and lusts drowned out the sublime song. It was just the trick of knowing how to listen that separated the mere flesh from the true intelligence. Once found, one experienced the world free of the body’s biological dictatorship.Or so he’d believed, until the human and gut response overwhelmed him and he retched in the dirt beside the pit. He and they were human together. He recognized in them the same demand for the superior song, for something beyond mere flesh, but they’d been cut down to it all the same. All were equal, and silently, uselessly lost, in death.Why them? Who paid for their murders? Who gained? This wasn’t containment, it was coverup. Again, he sensed the motions of some greater force, some architect of the breach, the fallout, the war. Someone wanted Black Mesa dead. But was it the same someone who had opened the breach via Freeman’s hands? Or were the white-coats and soldiers just the proxy battlefield?He drew a difficult breath that had nothing to do with the burn scars on his back and the soreness in his ribs.No. Human horror rose within him and threatened to snare him there the way no other thing he’d witnessed had. Objects at rest. At least they had found theirs. He got up and turned away from the blood-smeared wall and rows of corpses.I choose to live, he reminded himself. Move. Walk away. Shove it aside, put it in a box on a shelf and close the lid. Turn to a fresh page in the lab notebook. The carbon proof would be there forever but the work must go on.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Lambda.Was it worth all this? Or was it already another graveyard?He needed to cross the dam, enter the door, take a tram line and another lift, cross the new wet bio lab and the old animal testing chambers and then, somewhere past the biology loading docks, he’d find the freight entrance to Lambda.Black Mesa was coiled like a serpent through the red desert rock from its oldest cold war tail chamber to its bright new shiny fangs. The chasm in front of him with its grey cement slab of a dam had been brainstormed as a “community benefit” project to control flash flooding and provide reliable irrigation to the tiny desert civilian town on the flats to the west. In reality, it provided Black Mesa with its own fresh water source, nuclear cooling ponds and wastewater lagoons. Very little of it trickled out into the sand again. Research laboratories, storage and containment and old forgotten maintenance access crisscrossed the channel, through tunnels, tubes and flooded waste chambers.He inched out onto the dam. His feet expected it to shake like the pipes over the silo had. Wind tugged at his suit and kicked up ripples on the reservoir. He had the automatic up and ready, just in case the yellow and black door across from him opened with unfriendly intent.The very lack of resistance was disconcerting. Someone ought to be shooting. This was a choke point. Where were they?But he had to continue. Move forward. He checked above both sides; no sniper nests. He checked below the rail; no enemies on cables ready to spring up. Move forward. It’s a trap. Move forward. His side ached as his back stiffened in anticipation.The heavy WHAP WHAP WHAP of the chopper blade almost covered the sound of its high-caliber gun. It rose like a vulture over the canyon rim and came straight at him.His mind sequenced together -security camera, loading dock, down-wind, ambush- as his body took the only path off the dam. He had a moment of open air as the bullets traced across cement above him, but few gunners could track terminal velocity.Water closed over his head and poured into the suit through cracked seams and buckled plates. The lining held, but compressed against him. He fought to keep air in his lungs as pressure around his chest increased.Internal blood loss detected, the suit said as fragments of rib bone moved out of place.Then stop trying to kill me! He shouted back at it as he fought for the surface. The chopper followed him; the water rippled the splayed mushroom pattern of air displacement as it hovered. The gunner wasn’t firing; conserving ammo, or hoping Freeman would surface and make an easy confirmed kill.He fought the water and the suit until he reached the edge, where sheer red rock met water and grew slick with algae and scum. Control. He wanted air badly. His ribs stabbed and his vision went dark. Control. He inched up, face upturned, until only his nose and mouth were above water. He gagged against the heavy pond scum but made himself breath through clenched teeth. The scum was wet and cold and told his body he was still drowning; his nose closed reflexively as water trickled in.Control. Breathe. The body obeyed. The pounding in his chest receded. The suit adjusted to the water weight and the nanocarbon relaxed its stranglehold. He clung there and counted heartbeats until the helicopter moved up, then away. He held as it returned, moving slowly up and down the water channel. It passed four times.On the last pass, the gunner spat a tantrum of bullets down the channel and along the red rock sides. Freeman froze as rock shards pattered into the water around him, but the chopper moved away and silence returned, save for the lapping of water on rock.Freeman eased himself out of the pond scum and moved slowly up the channel. The suit’s livid orange was no camouflage. Any spotter on the rim would see him, any pair of eyes in a parked chopper or any living monstrosity in the water below. He felt horrifically exposed.A day ago he’d have given anything to be under open sky and daylight again, but now he longed for the enclosed walls and controlled space. Out here, there were too many variables. Too much space he couldn’t guard. Too may vector angles of visibility and approach. Now he couldn’t even trust the space under him; he remembered the water monster and refused to imagine it lurking in the channel’s depths.Memory was biological. It could be controlled, edited, trained, repressed and reshaped, but it could not be deleted save by the mental equivalent of cutting off a limb. The burial ground was in a box, in a locked room deep inside his mind, but it was not the only box in that room.And with every memory added, the wall of separation between them and his conscious grew a little thinner. This was not the first time he’d broken ribs. Not the first time he’d felt water close darkly over his head and fought with pain for oxygen.He held the door shut with half his attention and searched for a mental map of Black Mesa with the other half. Not the time to be derailed by a past life. If he lived, maybe he’d do what normal people did and find the right kind of therapist. Admit to the biology and ask for help.Broken ribs were for people who did stupid things on bicycles.And people who couldn’t run fast enough. And who chose silence over safety.He worked his way through the flood locks under the next dam and crawled out onto cool, shady sand. It stuck to the wet suit and gritted in the joints. Water poured from the cracks and he sloshed when he walked.Parasites heard him. Three chittered and swarmed from the shadows. He killed them and stood there, regarding the splats of chitin and innards for too long. They almost looked… edible. The body was very, very hungry.The helicopter was still up there somewhere. Somehow they knew he hadn’t drowned in his plunge off the dam. He heard it but he couldn’t see it in the narrow slot of sky above. Then he came around a ledge of rough rock and spiny aloe and it filled the sky above him.He pulled up the only weapon he thought might make a dent in it and let the livid yellow crystal charge. The gunner on the helicopter traced the sand at his feet, working upwards- Then he pulled the trigger.The weapon slammed him back into the rock, knocking the breath out of him, but the helicopter bled black smoke and fell below his horizon. The suit chimed a radiation warning and the weapon chimed a heat warning, but the helicopter was gone.He slung the heavy clunking thing back over his shoulder, suddenly glad he hadn’t ditched it in the water. He wasn’t sure if it would shoot again, or if he wanted to; the bolt of white-hot energy had bisected the chopper and just… kept going. The odds of causing horrific collateral damage were very high. As were the odds of getting blown to shrapnel like the curious soldiers.“Hey! Over here!” Someone yelled.A radio crackled, and boots crunched on sand. The blast had alerted other, equally curious soldiers. He pressed back against the rock and checked the shotgun. Enough rounds. He killed them as they came at him in the narrow stone corridor, until they stopped coming.But there was one more. He could hear the rough breathing, the faint static of a covered radio, the creak of sweaty leather boots. He could smell the stink of fear.The soldier cowered against the rock, behind an aloe, as if it could hide him. No more than a boy.Freeman looked at him, and he looked back, pale skin tight on a clenched jaw and knuckles white around his gun stock. The gun clicked empty and impotent.Freeman batted it away. He hauled the boy up by his uniform front and tore off the radio and supply pouches. He dropped the boy, who crumpled into a heap, while he smashed the radio and searched the packs. Yes, one of them had food. High-protein granola bars, three of them. Kid hadn’t had much stomach for lunch, apparently.He stashed them and trained his gun back on the boy, then motioned with the barrel for him to get up and go back the way Freeman had come.The kid scrambled to his feet, eyes darting, hands trembling. “You can’t send me back without a gun. They’ll get me. I saw what they did. The face-eaters. They’re in the rocks. Come on, man, give me a gun! I promise I won’t shoot you. I swear! But if you’re gonna leave me here then just shoot me! I don’t want to go like that. Not like- like an animal. You’re killing us too, right? Shoot me. Make it quick. I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be eaten alive!”He was a sniveling, sobbing mess, but he was a living human mess and he'd absolutely failed to be a credible threat. Freeman was certainly capable of killing him, but the image of that young scared face flashed past the memory of the mass grave and he lowered the gun. He couldn't give the kid a weapon- the kid would either try to kill Freeman or just kill himself- but he could just walk away.The road he’d come by was clear, because he’d cleared it. The kid would be picked up by the next squad on Freeman’s trail, and they’d be coming fast to track down what had killed the chopper. He hoped. He'd seen plenty of unarmed humans lose their battles with the alien fauna. He knew what the kid was facing, and the fate he was consigning him to. But at the same time... he couldn't shoot the boy. Not when there was a chance.I am not a murderer, he thought. I choose to live, not to kill. It was just that, today, living required an awful lot of killing.He shook his head, pointed back the way he’d come, and walked away.“No!” The boy yelled. “No! No!” He was on his knees in the bare sand, in the clear, not a parasite in sight. Yelling like the sky was falling.Freeman kept walking.He worked his way through the rocks to an overflow outlet and went down. Lambda was somewhere, but he’d lost his bearings in the rocks and now just wanted to get clear of the maze and catch a Black Mesa landmark. The overflow looked promising; it was newer, and ought to lead to another holding tank that tied into existing infrastructure--it ended.In a cliff.Half-blind by the sudden sun, Freeman clung to the pipe’s edge and fought vertigo. Something roared and he watched the sullen grey arrowhead of a fighter jet pass under him, as its engines drowned out the world.He hung over empty space, where the red rock desert ended and the river valley and flat land began.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Wind whipped up the cliff face, tugging at him. It blew dust and grit into his eyes and sent vibration through the drain pipe. He was reconsidering his options when bullets tore a line of bright pinholes through the thin steel wall; how they’d found him so fast he didn’t know. He backed up and heard radio static echo behind him.Only way forward was down.He swung out of the pipe and clung to its lower rim, his toes finding purchase as two bullets trimmed the rock at his shoulder. He let go of the pipe and skidded down the rock, coming to a stop on a narrow ledge.Bullets would hurt, but gravity would kill.Soldiers had rappelled down the cliff and were ensconced along goat paths, drainage pipes and the dam overflow. Freeman heard the alert run through them, heard the echo of static, shouts and gunshots. Most bullets went wide, but a few were getting uncomfortably close.He was a blotch of bright orange and black on a shaded rocky background; a massive target, though the angle was in his favor. They were shooting up, into the bright sky, while he had the benefit of picking them off from above. Until the tunnel team caught up him, at least. He worked his way down the cliff by finger-tips and feel, using the crowbar like an ice pick to dig into the scree and cervices. He didn’t like nature on a good day; he did not appreciate hiking, he did not go exploring the desert like the security guards often did on days off, and he definitely didn’t rock climb.Though the soldiers must have had training for all-terrain conditions, they weren’t any more eager to challenge the cliffs. They worked the trails and access walks, but for every soldier he picked off two more seemed to replace them. They were slowing him down, stalling him. Letting their people gather above him. He scrambled to the broad dam overflow pipe. From a distance it looked almost gentile, but from above it had a wicked angle. He hesitated, and a bullet clipped his shoulder. The pipe team had arrived.No time to debate- he kicked his feet out and went down it on his back, catching the lip with his heels in a tooth-jarring impact. Bullets traced his path and he flung himself off the pipe. He cleared the nest of soldiers at the overflow maintenance hatch but the access was locked. Now what. He scanned the cliff up and down, and caught sight of another drain pipe far above. A way back in, if it wasn’t crawling with soldiers. The bulk of the team after him seemed reluctant to take his path down the overflow. Maybe they’d lose him in the rock, if he moved fast enough.Moving fast was not an easy thing to do.Climbing the old, rickety rusted ladders up the previous generation of drain systems was also not an easy thing to do. A rung split from under foot and he was left dangling over open space, over the river hundreds of feet below. Wind roared up in a sudden gust and the ladder hummed with its force. He clung, waited, and climbed, spreading weight between hands and feet, testing each rung and bolt as he went.He crawled inside the pipe. Empty. Quiet. No boots, no parasites, no radio static.It led into a maze of old storm drains stinking of fuel and solvent. He must be under the vehicle bays or the staff parking lot. A square of grated light showed overhead and he lifted the drain on cautious, silent fingertips. If he could get above ground and get his bearings--a shout, the clatter of a grenade.He dropped the grate and rolled back down the pipe. The explosion kicked shrapnel and washed fire across his shins but the suit held the worst of it back. He scrambled into a cross-pipe and up a different drain, into the vehicle bays. They’d been segregated into a little maze of sandbags, each with its own private duke of a soldier. The man in the foxhole he’d emerged into died as he turned. Freeman pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it into the next hole, then sprayed automatic fire over the last two. Five soldiers poured out and split to flank him. Three caught the grenade and two ran.He followed them, swerved around the bulk of a tank, his mind said, as he saw the swivel of its gun in the corner of his eye, but the anomaly of how it got there and why was shoved aside for more immediate concerns. The soldiers turned at bay and shot back. He cleared the vehicle bay and found a large catch of weapons and ammunition, stashed in a corner the tank apparently couldn’t reach. Its gun screeched in protest against the metal wall, unable to cover the area.Physics. Vectors.Freeman had no experience killing tanks, but he did have a rocket launcher and at that moment, it sounded like a very good idea. He had never been the kind of physicist who liked destruction for the sake of destruction, but watching the thing burn, he thought he understood them a little bit better.But he was back in Black Mesa’s coils, and he had an idea of where Lambda was in relation to the vehicle maintenance bays. He worked his way through cover to the old end of vehicle storage, where past generations of delivery trucks, forgotten proprietary prototypes and patented but poor-selling engines lay in a walled, guarded graveyard.A shadow passed overhead. He looked up, heard the unnatural screech of a portal and saw the yellow discharge sear across the underbelly of an alien flyer. The blocky, bulk silhouette of an armored alien soldier appeared under it, fell, and landed on its two stump legs.He was shooting at it as it fell; he was still shooting when it raised its living gun and shot back, and he kept shooting until it died. Half a clip from the automatic, and he’d been watching the bullets hit. Whatever they were, they were incredibly tough.Around the corner, someone moaned.A security guard had been left on the pavement, both legs broken. The man was alive, barely, dying by inches in the hot sun. The soft dirt around his patch of pavement looked freshly turned. Freeman felt the human tug to go help the poor man, but he hesitated. This wasn’t right. This was too perfectly posed, too intentionally awful. He shot into the soft earth and was rewarded with a small explosion of pebbles and sulfur. Mines. The man was bait. But he needed to move forward, and that meant getting across the mine field and to the wounded guard. He pulled the pin on his second-to-last grenade and rolled it gently out into the dirt, then crouched behind a forgotten crate. It wasn’t much cover and splintered under the combined impact of grenade and mines.He crossed the cleared field and knelt beside the guard. The man moaned again, his lips cracked and bleeding, eyes unseeing. He’d been there all day, maybe more, delirious with pain and dehydration. It was worse, in some ways, than the slaughter in the launch tower or the mass grave. Few humans had the capacity to intentionally engage in premeditated torture of complete strangers. Freeman hoped he’d have the fortune of killing the ones who’d done this.He dragged the guard into the shadow of the warehouse. Its doors were secured, of course, and there were no external med stations, but at least he could get him out of the sun. He had no water to offer. No medical aid. Nothing more merciful than a bullet, but he couldn’t bring himself to murder the man. Not when there was a chance. Like the young soldier, left wailing on the sand in terror. There was a chance.He got inside the warehouse through crumpled corner of roof sheeting, peeled back in some aerial blast. Alien or military, he didn’t care. He lowered himself through and nearly shot the scientist who lurched out from the shadows. “Are you here to rescue me?” he demanded, his pale fingers clawing at Freeman’s arms. Freeman stepped back and detached himself, shaking his head. He pointed back at the man’s hiding place and wrenched open the door with the crowbar.The warehouse was festooned with claymores, set at odd angles and around blind corners. Whatever team had set them was long gone, trusting them to do their work against aliens and noncombatants alike. He avoided the ones he could and set off the ones he couldn’t, from a safe distance, and worked his way down. Back in, back under, through the Black Mesa spine.A guard ran yelling down the curving internal delivery corridor, bullets chipping concrete behind him. Freeman held his ground and shot the three soldiers chasing him. Had they been the ones to set the trap outside? The guard, white with terror, had been disarmed and beaten before he’d run. “I wanted to die quick,” he said, between panted breaths. “Thanks. I’ll rest here for a while and follow you when I can.”Freeman moved on. He watched as the alien brutes tore through a group of soldiers, and were shredded by a tank in their turn. He killed the tank with the metamaterial gun, minding the angle of fire, and worked his way through the newer industrial warehouse complex. Manufactured materials were shipped out from these buildings, little inventions of Black Mesa intended for militaries and corporations around the world. Their main manufacturing plants were overseas, but anything they didn’t want to risk copied or pawned was made in-house by a legion of underpaid hourly workers in a section carefully segregated from the more sensitive labs. As Freeman’s work had never transitioned to mass-production, he wasn’t familiar with the warehouse layout but he trusted the insane coil to follow pattern. Keep working inward, deeper, towards the thing marked warning, hazardous materials or known carcinogen, handle with caution. He slid around a shadowed corner and found four black-and-white armored soldiers crouched around a radio and a table full of blueprints. One turned, by chance, in his direction to reach for a pen.All four snapped up handguns and opened fire.Freeman shot back as he threw himself into cover, around the corner, and they pursued. He backed up to the door he’d come through and couldn’t get it open. Small-caliber bullets slammed into the suit. Warnings blatted from it, something about structural integrity and blood loss, but he didn’t listen over the sound of the gunfire.He kept shooting a long moment after all four were dead.Somehow, none of them had hit him in the head. The human face was a small but attractive target, but aiming for it required acknowledging your enemy’s identity in ways shooting at center mass or limbs did not. It required conscious I am going to kill this specific person level of intention. Whether they’d all shot for center mass in preference to the face by subliminal reluctance, or if he’d been saved by blind luck he didn’t know.He was alive. They were dead. Move forward. He stepped over bodies and worked his way through the empty building. Their bullets had not penetrated but they had transferred force, layering bruise upon bruise. The suit read his blood pressure and breath rate and gave him morphine, which did little to ease the discomfort. He’d have to live with it. Set the pain aside, to deal with later.Lots of things were in that category.He’d been bruised before. He’d gotten up, wincing, arms wrapped around a damaged body, breath difficult and shallow, and he’d walked away, and he’d done it without the benefit of a HEV.He could do it again. He’d keep doing it, until someone aimed for his skull instead of his heart.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Outside the little command center, he walked into a fragment of true battlefield, a skeleton left behind by an aerial bombardment. Half-high walls and broken cinderblock crisscrossed the footprint of what had been another manufacturing building. Plenty of cover. Too much cover. Too much bright sun and dark shadows, shapes that didn’t add up. Walls that didn’t align, ceilings that didn’t cover.There was movement in the rubble. A very dusty security guard was crouched behind a broken cement wall. He waved at Freeman, then made a flurry of motions that Freeman belatedly recognized as an attempt at sign language. He saw an A, an M and a lot of gibberish not helped by the man’s black gloves. He shook his head.The man made a series of frantic motions, then finally pointed towards the roofless corridor and mouthed Ambush. That message he understood. He nodded once, sharply, and the guard nodded back. The guard was vaguely familiar, but between the dust on his face and the dust on Freeman’s glasses, he couldn’t be sure. He’d seen a lot of blue uniforms and scared faces; they were blending together.Ambush.This was military playground. Bombed-out bones of infrastructure, rebar spidering out of cement walls, floors becoming gaping pits. He heard soldiers moving, the crunch of dry gravel underfoot and the muffled static of radio chatter, but it was distant and several floors below. If the guard was right though, a party lay in wait. The guard’s little rat maze of rubble was a closed space; the doorway straight ahead was the only way forward.He inched towards it, bent almost double to minimize the target he presented should that doorway suddenly fill. He had the shotgun at ready and was drawing breath to spring their trap when the black needlepoint of an automatic was shoved through over his right shoulder. He snapped his arm up on it and wrenched. The shooter pulled the trigger and the bullets bit into cement behind him; he gripped uniform, twisted his hip and dragged the man through the doorway, then kneed up the soldier’s chest. The man gasped and lost his grip on the automatic. Freeman threw it behind him blindly and hoped the security guard would take the hint. He shot down left-handed, catching the soldier lower in the body than he intended. He felt a stab of pity, knowing death would not be fast, but the next soldier was already on him.The soldier was immense. Broad shoulders filled the doorway above him and huge hands reached down for Freeman’s throat. The man was screaming something but Freeman didn’t hear him. No room to bring up the shotgun; he dropped it and shoved the crowbar straight up into the heavy red neck. He had the curve in the palm of his right hand, the left on the shaft to steady it, his right elbow braced inside his hip. All the augmented force of the suit and his own core strength at ready to drive it through.The soldier froze, his throat working against the point, and went silent. His hands spread wide, palms up. His eyes searched Freeman’s face. More soldiers clustered behind but the man was too big and they were too close together. No one was shooting.Freeman felt the man’s pulse through the steel. He saw it in the flutter of skin on his temple, the way his eyes darted and jaw tensed. Weighing chance of speed versus likelihood of that crowbar penetrating soft tissue. Freeman watched him back. He avoided the grey eyes and scanned the pockmarked skin around them for the tension of inadvertent narrowing, for the flare of flat nostrils and the curl of lip that would signal a break in their standoff. The animal body would protect the precious eyes and bare the sharp teeth, miniscule muscle twitches inherited from a more savage past.He held himself perfectly still, still as on the pipes above the silo, still as on the cliff face, watching the river three hundred feet below. His life was stillness, silence, control, observe. The split second between one breath and the next drew thin.The man was a career soldier, skin weather-beaten and tough, body broad and powerful, eyes steel-hard and jaw set with conviction, but Freeman knew pressure. He knew the late-night weight of millions in equipment cost and investment riding on a scant few pages of research. He knew the bone-deep hum the moment before a priceless metamaterial exploded in its test chamber.He knew how to push a mirrored synthetic crystal, six years in the growing, within a hair’s breadth of fracture and hold it there until its shielded twin resonated in synergy. That was his life’s work, his greatest triumph, the reason why Black Mesa paid him. His purpose. Draw a bow over a string and create a pure note, and the universe would sing with you. Shift it the width of a horsehair and watch the world break. He existed in resonance with the soldier, their lives locked in feedback loop of mounting tension. He looked into the face opposite his own and knew the moment of fracture would kill.The soldier wanted him dead. There was no true surrender in him. The empty hands were a bluff. He too was a man who saw his body as an extension of his will, a weapon. Had he participated in the slaughter at the new labs? Was he enjoying hunting aliens and civilians through the ruins? The flat fingertips did not tremble. His eyes did not search the horizon behind Freeman for escape.Freeman held himself still. He had set his will to live against the soldier’s will to kill; incompatible frequencies. Control. A variable to be pruned from the experiment. A liability. Cut it away and move forward.The solder twitched. A barest movement, but the long dark knife that appeared in his left hand flashed as it came down into the joint between Freeman’s shoulder and neck. Freeman saw it fall and let it come. He bore the weight of the knife, felt it deflect on plating and bite into carbon underlayer, heard the muffled blood loss detected as it buried in skin over his collarbone, close to his neck. He held his core steady and moved only once, the slightest twitch of hip and thigh to send the crowbar up into the throat. The soldier had put his whole life into that thrust, believing Freeman would flinch from the knife, believing wrong.The soldier shattered.Dark lifeblood poured from the gaping neck wound. The man was dead, the body unaware as blood drained from the brain. His death grip wrenched the knife and Freeman gasped as it pivoted against bone and plating.“Get down!” The guard yelled and Freeman dropped to his knees. The dead soldier piled on him, warm wet blood washing the suit front. He felt the muffled impact of bullets into the dead flesh but they did not penetrate. The guard sprayed the automatic over his head; two more soldiers clattered to the ground and the doorway cleared.The guard shot the first soldier in the head as he passed, then heaved the dead body off Freeman. “He got you good, huh,” he said. He wrenched the crowbar from the guard’s neck and offered Freeman his hand.The ground didn’t want to stay flat. Freeman braced himself against the ruined wall, what had once been a beige-painted hallway of cinderblock and tile, and let his equilibrium settle. He’d been out of himself and now he was returning, and the knife pinned his attention to the physical body in a very painful way.He didn’t want to think about the soldier’s blood flowing in the gap, into the wound.“Come on, there’s a med box back here. I think it still works.” The guard lent him a shoulder and together they hobbled into the little rat maze. Fragments of furniture, a shattered whiteboard, crumpled steel filing cabinets lay in a hodgepodge. A broken sink burbled water and Freeman stumbled to it to drink. The water tasted metallic and dusty but he didn’t care. Beside the sink, the med box was dented and discolored but its use light still glowed green. He fished out its delivery umbilical, then nodded to the guard.“What do you need?” The guard asked.Freeman pointed to the knife. He couldn’t get the right angle to pull it out smoothly; the guard would have to do it, and he’d have to trust the med box to keep him from bleeding out inside the suit.The man nodded his understanding and gripped the knife. Even the faint movement was enough to send white flecks across Freeman’s vision. He connected the box and the guard drew the knife in one solid motion. It grated across bone; he felt it in his chest and shoulder, up the side of his throat- his body telling him he’d cheated death again, but not by much. The knife had gone deep into muscle and tissue and very narrowly missed the artery. The suit had saved him for the hundredth time- a small piece of orange polymer connecting the chest plate to the shoulder had deflected the point away from his unshielded neck.The guard rinsed the knife and balanced it. It was a narrow, wicked-looking black piece with a four inch symmetrical blade, a sleeve knife. Not standard issue by any means. There were four marks crudely etched into the handle. Freeman wondered, seeing it through the haze of the regrowth serum and opiate cocktail, if those marks were for humans or aliens, if the soldier had filed them for killing fellow warriors or for cutting the throats of cowering civilians.He’d lost a lot of blood. Distantly he worried about blood pooling in his chest cavity and causing problems down the road, but he wasn’t sure how much road there was. His lungs worked. Breathing hurt, but breathing had been hurting all day. He could swallow. It hurt to move his right arm and shoulder and something in deep tissue pulled painfully, but it was possible. He could bring up a gun and shoot back. Manipulate the crowbar. Keep fighting.The guard brought him more water. The box ran dry but he didn’t get up. Not yet. The sun was warm on the cement and he very much wanted to keep sitting there, in the quiet back corner under blue sky, with a nameless fellow human being who wasn’t trying to kill him.He didn’t like people in general. He also didn’t trust people, as a rule, to see much past their own noses. Security guards could be trusted to open doors and make small talk, to not touch things that didn’t belong to them and go about their predictable rounds, but few of them had any applicable skill-set for all-out war. He didn’t want them at his back, shooting over his shoulder or becoming a puppet the moment he looked away.“You alright? Don’t die on me now. Calhoun said he’d can me if I didn’t get you through here. He’s been working his way over to the jump lab but sending us back to get you through. Lambda wants you real bad. Said they’ve got a way to put everything back together, but they need the HEV and you in it, alive and functioning.”Calhoun. The name rang a bell. Oh yes. He fought through the haze of drugs, pain and fatigue and brought up a face; round, flat nose, black hair. Always grinning. Had shared the tram ride to work and back for three months, now considered himself Freeman’s friend. Was he? Freeman didn’t know. Hadn’t thought about it; just another blue uniform, marginally more responsible than the rest. Talkative, but didn’t mind when Freeman ignored him and napped through his monologues about fishing trips and lady friends. Had figured out the sign language for a mildly profane way to say good morning.Easy voice to listen to.He got up. Stiffly, like an old man. Blood had congealed into a dusty sticky mess, turning his front from orange to rusty red. He’d have to thank Calhoun when it was all over. Go find Johnson too. Don’t forget Johnson. Little spy down there in the sewer somewhere.“I’ll go with you far as I can,” the guard said. He moved in step with Freeman, his voice held low to not carry, but by the lack of immediate gunfire no one was in hearing distance anyway. “I got a wife and a kid. I came to work today -yesterday now, I guess? I don’t know. I came to work, my biggest worry was were we gonna get her the barbie playhouse or the purple bicycle? She turns six in a week. I’ll go with you until something gets me, but you gotta go all the way. Fix this. I want her to have that birthday, Freeman. You hear me?”Freeman nodded. He didn’t want someone’s faceless, nameless kid on his mind right now, but the guard would live longer and fight harder for the hope. For barbie playhouses and candles on a cake. He ought to take her the knife, Freeman thought. Give her a weapon and teach her to use it.There was no fixing this. The gap would close, maybe, but what had been opened could be opened again. He thought of the armored soldier in the containment chamber. Life, intelligent, hostile, opportunistic life, inventive and ambitious, had crossed the threshold into a world fat with resources. There was no going back to before, any more than there was going back to a time when he didn’t stink with fresh blood, when he didn’t know the force per square inch necessary to penetrate skin and muscle, when he hadn’t watched the light die in a man’s eyes from mere inches away.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The guard stayed at his shoulder through the bombed-out rat maze and kept up his steady stream of low-voiced anecdotes. He cleared the doorway to their left and Freeman advanced, around the next pile of rubble. He shot two soldiers hunkered behind it and collected their ammunition. He handed half the clips to the guard.“Thanks. Yeah, we do seem to be going through these, huh? Suppose someone ought to come along and collect all this for scrap. Speaking of which, my old man used to sell scrap for cash on the side. Said it was his fun money, you know, money for a Friday night. Thought he was being all secretive but we all knew…”Freeman let him talk. The guard’s voice was just above a whisper, and with the man in his blind spot the prattle helped him keep track of where he was. Which was, Freeman realized, a very intelligent thing for the guard to do. And if the guard could talk, aim and shoot at the same time, that was fine with him. Working in tandem with a competent individual brought him an unexpected measure of relief.They worked through the alleys between the ruins, heading for the vehicle repair facilities. Lambda’s heavy freight lift would be somewhere on the other side of the repair bays. Black Mesa didn’t manufacture vehicles but it wasn’t above testing its own fuels on employee hardware, at, often as not, employee expense. Happy chemists downstairs kept many mechanics employed upstairs, and the reports of whose questionable new biofuels did what to whose engine were a thing of breakroom legend.The bulk of the battle was beyond them; they were cleaning up stragglers among the crates and corners, but the jets and the heavy artillery were engaged beyond their sightline, deeper in the maze. Cover was good, and enemies scattered, until they reached the helicopter pad.The only way forward was across the great square of yellow-painted cement.Freeman hesitated. Instinct said to hug the wall, but logic said the cover it offered was an illusion, and the only danger would come from the yawning garage ahead. The guard hovered at his shoulder, automatic trained on the door they’d just come through. “Sprint across it, maybe? Make a good dash? I don’t like it either,” he said, echoing Freeman’s thoughts.As if in cue, the copter breached their horizon. Its rotor noise was covered by the constant boom of artillery and echoing scream of the jets. He had a fleeting hope it would pass them by, but no- the bloated belly opened and disgorged soldiers on belay lines.Freeman dropped to one knee, his armored body providing cover for the guard. The guard’s automatic barked in his left ear and two soldiers fell from their ropes. He shot three more, and the last three hit the ground alive.They had no more cover than Freeman and the guard, and less armor. Freeman was aware of bullet impacts, one in his chest, on his upper arm, on his braced knee- they hurt, but he didn’t flinch. Didn’t stop firing until all the uniformed bodies were down.He took a breath and gathered himself to stand. The suit had protected his knee but it wasn’t wanting to bend.Then the wall blew out of the garage and two armored alien troopers stepped through.The guard swore and switched targets faster than Freeman, and didn’t stop as the swarming living ammunition howled around them. The tiny patch of cover he created with the HEV wasn’t enough. He knew it wasn’t enough, but the guard never stopped firing. He heard the hitch in the man’s breath but couldn’t stop to look.The troops were killable with a shotgun at close range, but at a distance, they could absorb half an automatic clip before they stopped shooting back. He felt like he’d fired twice that before both the creatures were down.The guard’s weight was heavy on his shoulder. Freeman didn’t stand, just pivoted around the protesting knee and let the man roll off. The buzzer had caught him under the armpit, a lucky, one-in-a-million curve shot through soft tissue and between ribs. The man’s eyes didn’t focus. He tried to speak, twice, then coughed and died.Freeman sighed. He took the knife from the man’s belt and placed it on his chest. He hadn’t bothered with any kind of courtesy for the other dead, but somehow the small act seemed fitting. The guard had known he’d die following Freeman. He could have stayed bunkered in the rat maze, with plenty of cover and water and a med box, but he’d chosen to come.Chosen to die.
And still I choose to live.
And living meant standing up. Keeping going. Walking away from yet another dead ally. He got to his feet and stretched the knee. The armor plating was cratered and black underlayer showed through a fracture ring in the polymer, but the bullet hadn’t penetrated. His kneecap felt like it had and didn’t loosen up until he’d limped the length of the landing pad.Through the bay doors, he found the corrugated steel huts of the vehicle maintenance facility, and the main part of the battle. Six sheds housed the bulk of the equipment and lifts but unconnected outbuildings for storage, parts, fuels and administrative support created a nightmarish model village for soldier and alien both.This battle wasn’t his. He skirted the fighting whenever possible, knowing full well he was the common enemy of both armies.He loitered on a catwalk in the shadows and watched the battle unfold under the vehicle lifts. Heavy alien troops slammed into armored soldiers. The soldiers’ bullets did more damage, but the alien living weapons tracked around corners and behind cover. Soldiers flushed one after another, fleeing the stinging hornets, and were slaughtered in the open.Then two soldiers pounded up the metal staircase, seeking a vantage point. Freeman hesitated before bringing up the shotgun; this was a war between human and alien, not between soldier and Black Mesa. They’d transcended the murder of the scientists and emerged onto a bigger battlefield. Every soldier he killed was one less defender of greater humanity.But they barked in anger and brought up weapons, so he killed them.More came, up the other side. He missed his footing on the fresh blood and rolled down the stairs, body tucked in. He knew how to take a staircase without breaking his neck.Knew how to hit the last step, unfold and run.That was a skill he’d learned a long time ago.He found a nook in the cement wall, shoved a red steel tool caddy out to make a visual shadow, and shot them as they came down the stairs. The paper-tear sound of a jet rolled through the bay and the structure shook. He crossed it at a sprint, breathing controlled and low in his belly so as not to expand the ribs. The knee held; no structural damage, just swelling and bruising.But it hurt. He didn’t like running. He made himself run just enough to stay in good condition, but he didn’t enjoy it. And controlled breathing or not, it jarred painfully on the damaged body.Running was a memory.He slammed the lid back down on that box in his mind. Now was not the time. There never would be a time. Organic memory drew its own parallels. It had its own retrieval algorithm based on physical sense and chemical emotion. Get close enough to the biological baseline of a memory, risk remembering. The body’s way of saying we’ve been here before, we’ve done this before, here’s your previous experience; learn from it. Useful, on an exam. Useless under fire.The aliens had installed their own form of transportation. He saw a soldier step on one by mistake and go sailing into a wall and thought they were a trap, until a line of heavy troopers used them to take a rooftop three stories up.He watched their steps, watched how they controlled momentum in the approach. When their rooftop battle was done and they’d moved on, he followed them. Run up- three steps, into the organic ring and airborn! And down, in a controlled freefall. He tucked his shoulders and let the suit absorb the impact. The fall wasn’t as bad as he had anticipated. This was workable. Functional.Alien technology.The things were alive. They pulsed and breathed out faint gasses, and when shot by soldiers, they healed. Like the guns. Like the parasites and barnacles and screaming walking maggot dogs. Light troops and land mines, to soften up the enemy. Heavy troops to establish a beachhead.His breath caught. The suit hadn’t absorbed everything. His diaphragm wasn’t happy with him.Nothing about this was accidental. This wasn’t native fauna of another world wandering through a scattering of breaches and ending up in the sewers instead of the test tubes. It had been the first wave, and this, the organized incursion of heavy troops pushing the soldiers back, was the second.An automatic gun on a turret sat unguarded, surrounded by soldiers dead a few hours. He heard the sear of a teleport and made a decision.For humanity, he thought.He didn’t like humanity.Fine then. For Johnson down there in the sewer somewhere so I can get a decent job in a nice laboratory after this. When the war was over. And for the dead guard’s kid out there somewhere, whom he hadn’t wanted to hear about and really didn’t want to think about now.His mind wanted to race forward, calculate the expanding ring of containment. How soon before the front reached the small desert towns? How long before the local military gave up its smash and grab and called in reinforcements? Before a news agency saw helicopters racing across the desert and decided to follow?The gun blatted and jumped under his hands. He cut through the troops as they materialized from the yellow spiderweb. The soldiers around him had tried this and been overrun. He had a finite amount of time before the troops changed tactics or drop-sites and flanked him. The moment the yellow lightning cleared and portals closed, he moved on.Lambda was out there somewhere, on the other side of the bays. It would have a vehicle lift. He just had to find it.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The road through the vehicle repair bays ended in a wall of green corrugated steel and wrecked cement, smeared with red military blood and black oil.Radio static echoed behind him. He glanced back. Too many hiding places, too many ruined half-walls and open second stories. He needed to find a way over, under or around. And fast. The hiss of the troop projectiles and rhythm of gunfire was growing louder. The battle line was moving.He used an alien jump pad to get half-way up a ruined building adjacent to the wall. The cement of the building next door ran up another two stories, unbroken and unbreachable, but a rooftop drain line appeared to connect. He pulled the grate and looked. Watery, unpleasant, but large enough to get through.Rain was uncommon in the desert, but when it did come, it tended to come rapidly. Black Mesa’s drains were built to channel flash flood waters away from sensitive laboratories and expensive prototypes, which meant the upper end would be nearer to those things.Radio static.He froze, shoulders in the pipe, heels in the scummy water.The grate at the far end opened. He saw optics and a flash of green, and something landed in the pipe with a heavy thump.He landed on his back in the drain water, held his breath and sank. One heartbeat, two- three- and the surface boiled orange with fire.The pipe was scored black and hot to the touch. With luck, they’d think they’d gotten him and not check again. With luck, and a shot gun trained on the grate.He inched along on one hand and his toes, working as silently as the suit and arsenal he carried would allow. Luck was on his side; no one checked the pipe, and he caught the soldier on the other side by surprise.The storm drains let him into the repair division’s guardhouse. He shot a soldier in the locker room and another on the stairs, and worked his way through the building to what had once been the roof.A bullet hit him in the shoulder.Small caliber, painful. He spun, fired, and saw the blue-grey blur of a security guard drop behind what had been the ceiling.The man was alive. Freeman had shot over his head, by subliminal instinct or by luck, he didn’t know. He didn’t care. The man was shaking all over and trying to apologize. Freeman waved away his words and hauled him upright by the uniform front. He handed the man his handgun, spun him around and gave him a push.There were doors Freeman couldn’t open. Doors that would bypass the ruined sections and get him back inside the coil. Security guards operated like old-world servants, with their own locker rooms, passages, housing, parking lots and cafeterias. Another layer of paranoid social security. Their heavy steel doors were too well-built to be opened by crowbar; they were bio-locked to the security personnel assigned to each section. A hand print or retinal scan was required, as was the owner of said physical key’s living heartbeat.Doors wouldn’t open for a dead man.When the guard opened the door, Freeman wished he hadn’t.The livid red eye of an alien living tank gleamed back at him from the darkness of the parking garage.Only one way forward. He shoved the security guard back through the door to relative safety, slammed it shut and ran.The beast charged after him; he felt the searing heat of its flamethrower on his back, felt the vibration of its steps underfoot. He ran as he hadn’t run in a long time, through darkness smelling of car oils and exhaust smoke, breathing through bruises and broken bones, his own weight a torture on his right knee.This too was a memory.
Not now.
When he wasn’t stupidly tired he had better control over the biological background noise. In the usual course of his workday he didn’t get chased through dark garages.The shriek of torn metal became angry screams. The rattle of its armor, the rattle of the bat along corrugated steel. So quickly childhood nightmares resurfaced.Memory said run.He’d been caught last time. He’d been caught many times, until he’d learned to run just a little faster, ignore a little more pain, control his breathing and watch the road ahead.There’d been one, at first, one single tormenter who’d figured he’d cheated his way into the advanced track. She’d spread the story. Others had gathered. They’d wanted answers. Revenge. Catharsis at seeing the one they deemed unworthy left beaten and in your place, trailer trash deep in the parking garage behind the dumpster where the janitor parked.Freeman didn’t speak. Not then, not now. No purpose in fighting when he couldn’t win. Get up, move forward. Run.He stumbled into late afternoon sunlight, saw the wall ahead and turned along it. Ladder- yes, up- shoulder and knee screaming, ribs cutting deep, HEV warning him he was bleeding internally yet again- pain would be acknowledged at a later date.He rolled onto the water tank roof and closed his eyes against the glare. Breath was shallow against the ribs. They’d been partially healed by a med box before, but apparently not enough. Things moved that shouldn’t move. Broken bone against soft tissue. He’d need another med box and soon.The monster roared below him and the tank shook with its fury. He sat up and saw the dead soldier beside him, blue eyes staring vacant into the blue sky above.Two jets seared overhead. The radio crackled. “Forget Freeman. We’re getting out of here. Mark your last targets and get to drop point B-19. You are there or you’re a parasite, you hear me?”He picked up the radio and gave a double-click acknowledgement, then he used the targeting laser to paint the beast.The jets did their job. The thing died in a hail of fire and he watched it burn.He navigated through the water storage silos and into a garage ramp painted fire-lane red. In a stroke of practical intelligence, Black Mesa had meshed their internal emergency response system with their flood control system and stored water for tanker trucks to use when necessary.The tunnel ought to lead somewhere useful, he thought. Somewhere Black Mesa didn’t want open flames.The tunnel shook. Cinderblock cracked and fell.He hugged the wall. Apparently his hadn’t been the last targets after all. Had someone seen him on the water tank? Were they going to flatten the building as one last grasp at their orange-skinned nemesis?Forget Freeman, the radio had said. As if he was the thing they were fighting, not the second wave of an organized alien invasion.At the end of the tunnel he saw the orange ring and glyph.Lambda. Almost there.Then the ceiling fell in.He dodged back, tripped on the bad knee and rolled into a corner, making himself small as the tunnel crumpled in on itself. Boulders rolled in, crashing around him and he gasped in the heavy dust. Smaller pebbles trickled down, clattering over his armor. Silence, finally, descended. He’d been protected by a projecting stair rail, now a twisted lump of unrecognizable steel just inches overhead. Above it rough native rock in vehicle-sized boulders clogged the passage.Light glimmered from a side hall, miraculously still passable. He unwedged himself from the boulder crush and worked his way towards it. The boulders were precarious and his path was equal parts crawling and climbing, but he was able to squeeze through the narrow gap between the top of the doorframe and the last boulder.He fell four feet and landed in a heap, wincing on the knee, ribs, shoulder, head, everything.The ground shook again.
Get up.
He didn’t want to get up. He’d made it, hadn’t he? This was Lambda. The Goal. Someone here would help. His job was done.He heard the sear of a portal, the roar of alien troops. Gunfire. The war wasn’t over just because Freeman wanted to clock off for the night.
Get up.
He got up, using the boulder for support, and limped down the hall.Lambda’s lobby and security checkpoint was overrun. Black Mesa drones were losing their fight with the heavy troops. The ground was slick with yellow alien blood, except where it was sticky with red human blood; Lambda’s guards were dead.He cleaned up what the drones missed, wary of their targeting parameters. Thus far Black Mesa’s automated systems hadn’t recognized him and he had no reason to believe that had changed. The security office itself was small, comfortingly well-fortified and had a med box.It wasn’t spiked.He felt the twisting in his chest where flesh curled around rib bone and demanded it be still. He felt the pull in his knee as tissue pulled tight on tendon. He couldn’t breath as the speed regrowth serum attacked the damage in his chest. His vision went dark as he fought it for control.Breathe. Not deep, just in and out. Like in the water. Just breathe.Through clenched teeth, against the rapidly-forming scar tissue. Another choice of the med boxes, another hidden side-effect. He hissed as he made himself stand. The knee worked better. The ribs were no longer tearing into him. The shoulder where the guard had shot him wasn’t stiffening up anymore.Air was a little easier to get. He hoped he wouldn’t have to run again.Lambda had been a battlefield. The security office had military flotsam scattered about; maps, ammunition, explosives, a radio eerily silent. Past it, he found only alien enemies, no living soldiers, but they’d left plenty of traps behind. The retreat had gone surface-side, he hoped leaving Lambda unbreached.He hit a dead-end in security doors and took a maintenance shaft to the surface. He came up nearly staring down the barrel of a tank. But it had other things to worry about; he’d found the war again. Heavy troops skirmished through the Lambda vehicle entrance. They were slaughtering the human soldiers with too much ease; they were learning, and they were better armed, now with their own heavy guns at strategic points.He came through behind the enemy line with the shotgun, surprise on his side, and cleared the gun emplacement. And not a moment too soon. There, the Lambda vehicle lift he’d been looking for, just through the double doors.“Help me, please.”The voice was young. Male. Scared. Human.He turned back.The soldier wore the white and black of a hazard containment unit, but it leaked patchy red over his side and shoulder. His skin was pasty and grey.“Please,” he said. “I can’t move my legs. I need a medic.”Freeman crouched by the soldier. A med box might save him. There was one, in the operator’s alcove by the lift. He wasn’t sure if the soldier would survive being hauled over to it but he’d give it a try.First, though, he disarmed the soldier as if he were a dead body. The soldier tried to protest, tried to swear and spit at him, but Freeman contained his waving hands, took away the automatic, grenades, spare ammunition, belt knife, and boot knife, and then finally dragged him to the med box.He unstrung the delivery umbilical, made a face of flat sympathetic apology, and stabbed it into the soldier’s thigh.The young man arched, gasped and made a noise like a balloon losing its air. Freeman didn’t know if it was the drug cocktail, the regrowth serum hitting his chest and constricting his lungs, or the man’s last gasp for life.He didn’t stay to find out. Lamba was close. Very close. He grazed the orange symbol on the wall with his fingertips as he stepped onto the lift.And heard, with sinking heart, the chitter and scratch of parasites, and the muffled tap-tap of gunfire below. No matter how far he went, the battle flexed with him, chased him, followed him like ripples in a pond.
Only one way forward.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The swarm met him at the bottom.In ones and twos, the parasites were easy to ignore. They had a specific leap height and range and he’d long since mastered a swatting blow with the crowbar that would dispatch them mid-air. But the dozen or more skittering towards him sent shivers up his spine.He sprayed the swarm with the automatic. So much for a quiet entrance; now everything in the loading dock knew he was here. Their ranks were thinned but they kept coming. They were so thin-skinned a bullet passed right through and didn’t always stop them. It took a full-body blow, a crowbar or a boot, to destroy them outright.Two leaped for him. He batted them down and a third latched onto his arm. He felt its claws through the gaps- like the knife, their needle claws slid through the carbon fiber joints and dug into skin. The pinpricks stung disproportionate to their size.He crushed the parasite against a stack of crates, stomped on another and impaled one mid-leap for his face. He knocked it off the crowbar and felt one land with a thump and scratch on his back. It crawled for his neck and he backed into the wall. He felt the squish of its fat body between suit and cement. Then two jumped from the crates. One caught his shoulder and he grabbed it off; it bit down on the glove, jaws closing over his fingers. The other sailed past his head, landed and turned to leap again. He kicked it back and killed the one on his hand.The last one circled him, looking for high ground, and as he tracked its movement he nearly missed the acid-spitter in the gap between two crates. It belched its payload at him and he flung himself to the side, remembering very well what that acid felt like. The parasite sprang while he was down and caught the collar of the suit. Its claws dug into his neck, just under the ear, and he felt the rasp of its jaws opening and the hot wet vapor of its innards. His methodical slaughter of the bugs became a sudden get it off get it off as he tore at the fleshy back. He got three fingers between its jaws and his skull and wrenched it off. The thing’s claws were deep; it took skin and flesh with it, but it was off him. He slammed the crowbar through its body and watched the claws scrabble for escape until it died.Blood trickled down his neck. Minor wounds, comparatively speaking. He shot the acid-spitter as it bloated itself for another attack and climbed to his feet. He was breathing hard, heart rate high, suit warning him of minor lacerations.His ear throbbed where the parasite had torn it. Why a part of him as small and anatomically disposable as a bit of ear cartilage needed to hurt so horribly was beyond him; maybe a biologist would know. Or an anatomist or some other branch of wet science. He clamped his dirty glove over his ear, putting pressure on the gash, and moved on.He swept the loading dock. The place was a shadowy maze of catwalks, shipping crates and plastic-wrapped palettes of chemicals. It smelled of metal, alien and benzene, and of gunsmoke. Blood splattered the floor and parallel red drag marks trailed off into the maze.Something shifted. Black, liquid, fast.Assassins.His body twitched involuntarily, as if pursued by a wasp. Flesh memory. The impact of the sniper’s bullet. The guard’s face as the shot went through his skull. Freeman flattened himself against the crate, between crate and wall, the place with the least visual range but greatest safety.Forward meant going through them. Killing them.He slowed his breathing and focused on lowering his heart rate. Why couldn’t they have been decent enough to kill the parasites, if they were going to lurk around Lambda’s front door and wait for him?They preferred high ground. They’d be trying to get into position to corner him. Two would be high. One would be low. Triangulation. He could break in two directions, so the snipers would be… there and there. He visualized the shipping containers. Double-stacked farther back, places shadowed but offering good vantage points. The third would flush him, ensure he didn’t spend all day in his narrow little patch of safety.Hers was the dangerous job. He wondered if she’d volunteered to face him on his level. He imagined where she’d come from. Vectors. Angle of force. She wanted him to move away from her and into her companions’ scopes. To the right, the vehicle lift offered a tantalizing escape route and the angle of its shaft created a significant visual shadow. She’d want him farther from that.So that’s the direction she’d come from, forcing him left. Deeper into the maze, so if the first shot missed there would still be opportunity.Gun? Shotgun? Revolver? Crowbar? He ran through his mental list of options. He’d have a split second to shoot as she came around the corner.He heard her out there. A faint rustle. A quiet footfall. His ear hurt but through the pain he heard her. Momentum. She was coming for him.He pulled the pin on the grenade and held it, waiting, eyes closed. Patience. Control. The black-clad, optics-faced women where the things of nightmares and paranoia, lurking in the shadows and raining sudden death. He held off his own subconscious and made himself think on paper. He couldn’t afford to let biological fear dictate his timing. It had to be perfect. It had to kill her before he could see her.Another step. Another muffled clink of metal. She was good, but she’d let him kill the parasites and her best source of sound cover. All three should have come for him while he fought the aliens, instead of waiting in the maze.Their mistake.And her last step.He released the lever, paused, and tossed the grenade. It exploded in mid-air, at the end of the crate. He heard the heavy sound of a body fall.And he got up and ran. Into the lingering heat, through a burning chemical palette’s black acrid smoke, and through the first branch of the maze. Now he was between two walls of double-high containers. Three points of engagement- front, back and overhead- but with luck they hadn’t seen him in the smoke. His eyes watered with it and it tasted foul on the back of his throat. He clenched his jaw against the desire to cough.Something moved. The second assassin was shifting position, trying to get around the smoke by moving along the tops of the shipping containers. She was angling for his previous position, and she was crossing into his sightline.He tracked her across the loading dock, measuring her stride, anticipating her velocity and squeezed the trigger-Something punched through his left thigh. He felt the impact, the brittle sound of the armor giving way, and the tugging sting of penetration. The HEV absorbed just enough impact to knock his leg out from under him. He hugged the steel wall and waited for his body to register the pain. Blood loss detected, the suit said.There it was, the deep throbbing blood-pounding ache in his thigh. The wet body caught up and nerves discovered they were torn, muscle tissue found itself slack. Blood pooled under his legs. He tried to remember if he’d seen a med box in the loading dock. He thought he had but couldn’t bring up a picture of where it was.Moot point anyhow. Two assassins left, and him unable to stand.He heard light footsteps. Catlike. Whoever they worked for, the female assassins were as cartoonish as they were deadly.She rounded the corner, a wicked little long-barreled pistol trained on him. That wasn’t what had pierced the HEV, so her companion must have the vantage point and sniper rifle.“You got him,” she said. She aimed the pistol at his forehead. "This is for-"The shotgun blast caught her dead-center. The barrel was clamped between his good knee and thigh, his hand on the trigger hidden behind his leg. The blast knocked her on her back, spread-limbed and limp.Someone screamed. Someone high up, on a double-stacked crate, in a place they couldn’t reach him. Three bullets kicked up flecks of cement eighteen inches away, the limit of the last assassin’s sightline. He saw the splatter pattern of blood just beyond it; he’d been standing only fractionally into her sightline when she’d shot him. She could keep him pinned there all day, let him bleed out. She could wait until he was weak and walk up and kill him slowly. She had options, but she also had anger.He heard it in her voice, in the rapid metallic click of her reloading. Had he killed a sister? Friend? Lover? He slid to the edge of her sightline and put his hand down between her bullet holes. A taunt. The narrow sliver of orange in her scope was just at the wrong angle for her to hit.He hoped.A bullet bit a centimeter back from his glove.He didn’t flinch.Blood loss detected. He had his other hand over the hole in the suit, much good that did. Blood leaked through in a steady stream. Come down here, he thought. So I can kill you and move on.Forward. Another life to be paid.She came. He heard the clink of her descent off the containers and the faint rustle of fabric and metal. She would be ready; she’d seen his grenade and the shotgun trap. She wasn’t going to fall for that. But he needed her to come to him.
Blood loss detected.
He set the shotgun down and slid it just out of reach, then he slumped over the pooling blood and let himself go limp. It was so easy it scared him. The blood loss was taking a toll. He had minutes, maybe more. And he was taking the enormous chance that she wouldn’t simply put a bullet in the back of his head from ten feet away.“Hey! Get out here with your hands up and I’ll take you in alive!” she yelled. She was lying, her voice strained and hoarse. “I’m giving you ten seconds, then I’m coming in there after you and I’ll kill you, you piece of scum! This is your last chance!”He closed his eyes and exhaled. His diaphragm hurt, demanding air, but he didn’t breathe.”You bastard,” she said. She had come around the corner, into his little alley. She swore. She kicked him and he didn’t move. “Don’t you be dead on me. I need to kill you for what you’ve done. Don’t you be dead.” She was muttering through clenched teeth. She bent over him, leaned in and reached for his throat. As she touched him he angled the little handgun up and into her ribs. He should have pulled the trigger at that moment but he didn’t. He didn’t know why he didn’t. A mistake, like her mistake of not shooting from a distance, of not killing him while he fought the parasites. They were all getting slow and stupid.He couldn’t see her face behind the optics mask but her body tensed and froze, and her hands slowly went up. The big sniper rifle on her back was useless to her but he knew she’d have other weapons. “What now, smart guy? Can you pull that trigger before I slit your throat?” she snarled.He had no idea what now. He needed the med box now but he couldn’t move the gun off her, or take his eyes away, or she’d be on him and he didn’t have the strength for another fight. But he also couldn’t shoot her with her hands up.Her surrender was mockery. He knew that. But still he couldn’t.All that separates me from you, he thought. The last fragment of mercy he clung to, to keep himself distinct from his enemies. He’d dug his own mass grave and filled it with the dead he left behind, but all of them were soldiers taken in combat, human and alien, not captives. Not civilians, and not in even her parody of surrender.His clock was running down, but so was her patience. Her anger was her resonance. Wait for her to shatter. His vision swam but he kept his eyes on her. It was harder, with her face concealed; all the little human signals were blocked. He had to watch her shoulders and neck, her hands. Unlike the big soldier, her knife wouldn’t go somewhere useless and survivable.She twitched and he shot her twice.The knife that had appeared in her hand was like the one the soldier had stabbed him with, similar narrow double-edged blade and slender handle. A sleeve knife, razor sharp. This one he kept.Med box. There would be one. A loading dock that handled shipping containers and chemicals on this scale would be required to. He limped through the maze, searching for the glowing red and white. Logically, it would be near an exit or door. Illogically, par for the course, it was on a back wall. He almost missed it between the stacks of crates.He was leaving a trail of blood. It wasn’t dripping as fast, the femoral artery had not been hit, and neither had the bone. Small favors. He could feel the bullet under the skin on the back of his leg; it had gone almost all the way through but the combined thickness of armor and flesh had stopped it just short. He wasn’t getting it out either. No, it would ride there like a bur of sharp-edged deformed metal until the job was done. Another souvenir.He sat under the box, unstrung its delivery umbilical and plugged it into the suit. The sharp jab of the injection system bit into his forearm and neck. He twitched involuntarily as the gash on his ear knit closed. Torn cartilage overrode the bullet wound in immediate, sharp pain. The world spun as the synthetic opiate did its work. He felt the bullet in his leg move as scar tissue curled around it, imagined it encased in a hard knot of flesh. His vision swam with black figures like spiders with glass lenses for eyes, crawling down the walls towards him. He knew the drug was responsible, and knew he had no choice but to ride out the hallucinations, and on paper he catalogued them by size, shape and direction. His mind took refuge in the data collection, scrawling lists that bled off the mental pages but gave him a linear train of thought.The bullet moved as flesh closed over the hole. He winced as the sharp stab of it cut through the opiate haze, and when he blinked away the white noise the black spiders had resolved into just one.Crawling towards him. Gunless, half maskless, showing bloodied skin where the black suit was torn away. One glass eye, one human- brown, narrowed. Sometimes more, phantom eyes hovering in a halo around her head. She was on two knees and a hand, he saw, leaving a trail of red. Her legs were jointed wrongly, spider-like. Her side was torn open and her other hand clamped against it. The grenade had caught her badly, and he saw what he’d taken for a spider leg to be her broken shin, trailing uselessly as she crawled forward.And still she came for him.He got his uninjured leg under himself and braced the revolver on his knee. She was only a few yards away but she swam between the sights. He didn’t pull the trigger, half because he didn’t want to miss or risk just wounding her further, and half because some part of him watched in horrified fascination, scarcely believing she wasn’t a product of drug-hazed imagination.“Why can’t you just die?” she demanded. Her voice was rough with pain, low but echoing, duplicated. “You’re not supposed to be alive. You have to die. Everyone must die.” She faltered, her legs gave out and she sat propped on one arm, two yards away. “That’s the mission. It wasn’t personal. But it is for you now. We’ll come for you. Everyone knows your name. You’re a walking dead man, Freeman. You can’t run. We’ll find you and we’ll kill you for what you’ve done.”He flicked his fingers from his forehead out, the ironic little parody of a military salute that meant I have no idea what you’re talking about. He didn’t know if she understood.She coughed. Blood frothed around her mouth. “We can’t contain them. You opened a door to hell, Freeman, and we can’t hold them back. Everyone must die. You must die. They’re inside you all now. We can’t let them-you-spread.”What was this, a complete misunderstanding of how the alien parasites worked? Some kind of twisted atonement? He didn’t know. He didn’t care to know. The resonance cascade was a disaster on a potentially global scale, but it was not his accident to be blamed for and there’d been no indication of subtle biological hazard to warrant human extermination. Had he been painted as humanity’s betrayer, the agent of an alien apocalypse? It would explain their hatred and tenacity, a radicalization beyond mere military go-and-do orders.He was the bright orange carrot dangled on the military stick. Kill the Freeman. And everything else you find along the way. By the time Freeman’s dead, the mission will be complete. Earth saved. War over.It wasn’t going to be that easy. He pitied them- they didn’t know what they faced. The carrot was blocking their view of the real enemy, and he wondered who was to blame for that. Which faction of the shadow powers behind the resonance cascade and its aftermath wanted Earth’s best defenders distracted by the most unkillable cockroach of a physicist?She died, sprawled on the floor in front of him, while the regrowth serum twisted his flesh back together. He blinked away the last of the opiate haze and saw the body on the floor. Had they truly spoken, or were the last five minutes hallucination, his own mind trying to establish order? The mental lab notebook dripped ink as black as her suit.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The big steel roll-up door at the back of the loading bay was closed. He heard the shuffling, grunting movement of alien soldiers, but no whir of projectiles. Perfect, they were standing around waiting for him. Round three of the gauntlet.He had one explosive pack he’d picked up from a supply cache hours ago and been saving for a special occasion.He keyed the door’s up-arrow, slid the pack through the gap, slammed the reverse button and detonated the pack. Metal screamed and the door buckled outward. Dust and smoke hazed the air, carrying with it the stench of burned flesh. He stepped through the gap, shotgun up, and finished off the last two wounded grunts.The next loading door had been hastily welded shut, but there was a light on in the bay office, and he saw movement. White-coated shoulders, grey hair. Human. He climbed the ladder and rapped on the door.A stranger stared at him through the observation window, then opened the door. “Freeman!” he said. “You’re alive!” He was trembling all over. “I heard the explosion and I feared the worst. Those… things have been out there since yesterday. Just waiting. I’ve been hiding here since then. I am supposed to wait for you and let you in. This is the last entrance, you see. I was to let you in if you made it. Yes. Open the door.” His eyes darted over Freeman, outside, to the windows, and back to Freeman’s face. He sat down suddenly in the office chair before the little observation desk and put his face in his hands. “Let Freeman in. Just let him in, and that’s all. Short straw, you see. Three of us. Three short straws. Something else… let me think.”Freeman waited. He sat on a laboratory supply crate, glad to take weight off his feet, and let the man work through his anxiety attack. The explosion may not have been the most subtle entrance, but it had been effective. Freeman could hardly blame the man for coming unglued around the edges, if he’d spent the last twenty-four hours hunkered in a fishbowl of an office while the grunts prowled outside, sent to wait and die for a man who might never show up at all.Three men? Yes, there was blood splatter on the walls. Drag marks. Parasites, maybe. Or suicide.“The reactor. It’s powered down. Emergency protocols. As you go up, flood the tanks and turn it on. It’ll open the door. Yes. That’s it. Open Freeman’s door, then Freeman opens the reactor door. Find the teleportation labs. Upstairs. Not authorized. You are not authorized. But you must go up.” His eyes went wide, white-rimmed and bloodshot, and he deflated like an empty sack into the chair. “That’s all,” he said. “That’s all I have.”Freeman nodded his thanks to the man, but knew he didn’t see it. The eyes were unfocused, staring up at the cheap tile drop-ceiling. The man had existed in a state of panic for days, been sent to do one job that would almost certainly kill him, and now he’d finished it. Maybe he’d sleep for a few hours and wake up better, or maybe he’d walk out the door and off the catwalk and let himself fall.A job to do. A door to open. A reactor to start. Unlike the man in the chair, Freeman still had work in front of him. He slid off the crate, rearranged his arsenal for best access to the shotgun, and followed the drab grey corridors out of the office.He found a suit repair box, a surprisingly advanced one, at the lift. The suit tightened around him as the fibers energized and reorganized themselves. He winced as it moved over scars and tugged on half-regrown flesh, but it was worth the small discomforts to see the hole in the leg armor close. The orange plating was still ruptured but at least the underlayment was solid again. He felt more secure, being unable to feel air on his skin below the neck.The lift took him down to the reactor basement. He followed yellow arrows towards maintenance and auxiliary tank access. He saw blood splatter, brought up the shotgun, and dodged the searing green flash of a pentapod discharge. Two of them crouched over a dead technician, claws and jaws bloody. They’d been feeding. He shot them both as they recharged their strange energy weapon.He found a map of the reactor in the maintenance area. The design was obtusely complex, not like any nuclear reactor he’d ever seen before, and certainly not the cold-war relics or the power-generation machines he’d already come through. This one was significantly larger, and if he was reading the map correctly, it was largely unshielded. Cooled, yes, but not… radioactive?They were using metamaterials to generate obscene amounts of power. Crystals like in the big yellow gun, like he’d been using. Add energy, get more energy back. Safer than nuclear, far more powerful, far greater risk of blowing a hole in the continent the size of another Yellowstone super-volcano. They’d have to dump the energy into something. No power grid could handle it, and unless there’d been a parallel leap in battery technology, there wasn’t a way to store it either. So where was it going?Doors. Teleportation. Two-dimensional resonant fields in twinned synthetic crystals took enough energy to create as it was. Matter transfer, not energy transfer, would take exponentially more. He knew they’d been traveling off Earth, and this was how they’d been doing it. The satellite he’d launched had some purpose in this too, but he didn’t know exactly what. Black Mesa’s intellectual segregation at work again, making sure no one person had the whole picture.The reactor was turned off, but aliens were still coming through. What, exactly, was Freeman supposed to do about that? They wanted it on, which meant they wanted to reopen the door that had probably started the whole mess. He hoped someone in the building had a cohesive plan.He wanted to wipe sweat off his face but his gloves were rough and filthy.Step one. Flood chamber. He retraced his steps towards the tank access room and heard the sear of teleportation. Two more five-limbed aliens materialized over the coolant tanks, and a heavy grunt dropped on the catwalk. Its living projectiles came faster than the energy discharge, but he made himself ignore them until he’d killed the pentapods. The bullet bugs hurt, but he could survive more of them.He worked the halls to the coolant pumps. Alien soldiers continued to materialize, one after another, no matter how many he killed. Twice he was too slow and the yellow energy caught him, making his heart skip and muscles convulse. A dozen times the living bullets embedded in the suit, the impact first knocking him back, then their sharp jaws burrowing for flesh.Fatigue was becoming mania. Sharp white phantoms played on the corners of his vision. He aimed at empty space, startled by phantom sounds of teleportation; once, he pulled the trigger, wasting precious ammunition on a shadow. The suit chided him for his racing heart and high blood pressure.He came around the next corner and didn’t register the dark mass of an alien trooper. It’s brown chest plate against the wood of the crates behind it was enough camouflage to trick his tired mind for a second too long. By luck, he surprised it as much as it surprised him, and instead of shooting it lashed out at him with the living weapon on its forearm. The carapace caught his jaw, ripped upward across his face and snapped his head back. He slammed into the far wall and his vision went white. Instinct made him stagger for his feet but he controlled it and fell flat, firing upwards with the shotgun as the alien raked the wall above him.He shot into its belly and it staggered and fell, crumpling nearly on top of him.Blood dripped from his chin. He wiped his face and spat, and tasted the foreign acrid tang of its fluids. His lip was split where it had been mashed on his teeth and his glasses were splattered with both its blood and his own.He took off his glasses and wiped them as best he could, and tried not to think about how close he’d come to having his face ripped off. They were custom-made by a rival optics company, nigh indestructible with a molecular-bonded scratchless polymer film over synthetic crystal lenses, and were proving to be worth the very high price he’d paid. He specialized in resonant crystalline materials, and he knew enough about his own field to leave the optics fabrication to someone else. The alien’s blood left a shiny oily smear across the lens, tinting his vision yellow.Theoretically, there had been a way to get from the pump rooms to the reactor control chambers via a series of lifts, but structural decay had blocked off that route behind piles of rubble and twisted girders. There was another way up, he recalled, from looking at the plans. Another clear path to the very top. He could climb.Why? his body wanted to know. Sore knees, painful ribs, an aching head and a constant underlying hunger as his body cannibalized itself to meet tissue repair demands. Why climb a tower? Why try? He’d made it to Lambda. Wasn’t that far enough? Someone else could go through the door and stop whatever was on the other side.Because I want to live, he reminded himself, as he slid down the ladder into the coolant pool. And I don’t trust anyone else in the mountain to do the job correctly. The two pumps were started. The cooling tanks rumbled and the pipes groaned in the walls around him. Water was knee-deep but rising quickly. He worked his gloves together, letting the water clean off dried blood, fluids, dust and everything else he’d touched. The suit stained the water brown as it rose around him and he gasped as it worked through the fine cracks no amount of suit repair stations could fix. It was cold! But he felt more awake, cleaner, than he had in hours.The way forward was through the pipes into the bottom of the reactor silo. He ducked under and swam through, and came up shivering. He sluiced water from his hair and shook it from the suit joints. The reactor towered above him. Its central core was a polymer puzzle work of moving parts six stories tall. Looking up as enormous crescents of shielding circled around him, he wondered if this was possible.Only one way to find out. Act on the experiment, get the data.The puzzle moved around him. Hair on his neck stood on end as the machine built static. It discharged in a cobweb of arcs, not at all unlike the pentapods’ weapons. He watched them break and connect and climbed ladders between them. He couldn’t stop flinching away from them. The body knew too well how bad the discharge hurt, knew also an enormous electrical discharge had been the only weapon to incapacitate him so far. The reactor wasn’t a weapon, he reminded himself. It was a machine, dangerous and demanding respect, yes, but no more actively trying to harm him than the rest of Black Mesa infrastructure.Which wasn’t saying much. He jumped for a moving platform and clung to it as it circled the reactor core. He moved from it to a stationary catwalk, went up a red ladder, and caught another platform. This one hummed with energy, enough to tingle through the gloves. He moved to the reactor core itself, climbing superstructure, and encountered an anomaly.A yellow-green glowing nimbus of energy hovered in the alcove of the reactor. Plasma? A ball-lightning formation caused by static buildup? He didn’t know, and he didn’t feel up to finding out. It wasn’t essential to the moment, so he ignored it, until he lost his footing on the alcove edge and got too close.It grabbed him. He was falling-a blink of nothing-and he was rolling across yellow-striped cement, in an observation alcove one story above where he’d been.Another ball of energy hovered over a marked square on the floor.Teleportation.He wanted to throttle whichever scientist had though that would be a good idea. He breathed in and out slowly ten times, waiting for his heart to slow. For a split second he’d thought it all over, but no. It was resonant-matter teleportation being used in place of scaffolding. He looked up; four more miniature reality-warping spheres hovered up the structure. It would be interesting to find out where they all led. Hopefully, like OSHA-yellow ladders, freight lifts and catwalks, chances were they all led someplace useful. And Black Mesa arrogance demanded base functionality from most of its flashy little tricks, so he could be somewhat confident a teleport ball wouldn’t send him plummeting back down to the coolant pool below.He worked his way up the structure to the next ball. It dropped him onto a moving platform. And so on, until he reached the pinnacle. A final jump put him onto a catwalk leading away from the reactor core. Once he was on solid ground, with nothing moving and nice safe enclosing walls all around him, he stopped and let himself breathe and think. He’d climbed the tower without looking down, without thinking about what was next. The only thing that mattered was the next handhold, the next piece of steel or flat spot on the churning mechanical shielding mechanisms.But he was here now, and he was looking up at the Lambda glyph on the wall above the door. Through there was the last job.
Finish it.
He pushed off the wall and walked to the door and pounded on it.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Someone opened it. He stepped through, and felt the cold steel of a shotgun barrel against his neck. His core went still as his stomach went cold. Blind spots. Always the blind spots. He completed the mental calculation for likelihood of getting his head blown off while redirecting the barrel to the ceiling, deemed it worth the risk-because he was not going to accept capture-and was halfway through the movement when someone shouted “Stop! It’s him! It’s Freeman!”He flipped the gun up anyway and yanked it away from his would-be attacker.Two women, dressed in the grey work uniform of lab techs, were backed into the corner just inside the door. He shook his head and handed them back their shotgun. The door sealed itself behind him and he was in Lambda.“Freeman! You found us!” A man shouted from behind a stack of crates. “Give me just a moment. Yes, there. We’re still packing up all these specimens. Some were destined for your laboratory, of course. I do hope they can be salvaged. The collections team was bringing them back for us when they started to be collected for themselves.”The scientist emerged. White-haired, white-coated, white-skinned, eyes pale blue and watery. Hands wrung to raw-knuckled red. A security guard followed him, or herded him, out into the open. “Freeman. Glad to see you. Sorry for the harsh welcome, we knew there’d been some black ops activity in the area and someone,” he glared at the women, “proposed they might take the suit and try to impersonate you to get through the door.”Freeman dismissed his comment with a wave. The women had been braver than most of the guards he’d encountered.“The collections team is all dead now, I’m afraid, but they said they encountered alien life on the other side.” The scientist paced across the room and back. “We believe the connection between our planets is being held open by an organic power source, a life form, if you will, able to create a resonant-matter portal. Freeman, we need you to go over and kill it, whatever it is, or form it may take. You’ll know it when you see it. Oh, organic technology on that level must be astonishing! It’s such a shame, but it must be done. They do seem intent on their invasion.”“There’s spare ammunition if you need it,” the guard said. “And power for the HEV. I’d go through myself, but they said the HEV’s the only hope someone’s got of staying alive over there long enough to make a difference.”Freeman found the ammunition and suit repair station. He found a med box too, but didn’t touch it. Self-consciousness and pride both stopped him; no need for them to see the effects the opiates had on him.The women moved past him through the next door and he stopped himself from flinching at their passing. Four non-hostiles in a room was a crowd. He kept trying to mentally track their movements, not wanting them behind him, and finally gave up. They were civilians, not threats.He followed the women and security guard into the Lambda-complex laboratories, where data from this “other side” of theirs was recorded and studied. Banks of computers lined the walls, while more sample crates were stacked in the center like a primitive temple. More than twenty people were sitting, standing or sprawled around the perimeter: lab techs, security guards, even a handful of janitorial staff. They’d withdrawn farther and farther until they were here, barricaded into a single laboratory.They all looked at him as he entered.“I’ll go let Dr. Ryken know you’ve arrived,” the guard said. “It’ll take a few minutes for the reactor to warm up.”Freeman looked back at the ring of human faces. Wide eyes. Bloodied clothing on some, pristine pressed lab coats on others. Weapons clutched or near at hand. They’d survived Black Mesa’s fall. Fought their way through to Lambda, or started here, and heard the mountain die around them.The ground shook. Bombardment? Decay? Distant collapse of yet another chamber? Glassware rattled in the cabinets. Coats and clothing were strewn around for makeshift beds. Chairs had been pushed together to make little barricades. The snack and soda machines had been cracked open and a guard stood over boxes of foodstuffs, labeled “day 4,” “day 5” and “day 6.” Boxes one through three were empty on the ground at his feet.Freeman crossed the room and raided box number six. The guard protested and waved his shotgun. Freeman gripped the barrel, pointed it at the ceiling, and scooped up three granola bars, a pack of cookies and a livid yellow electrolyte drink. If they got to box six, they had bigger problems then running out of food.The ground shook again and dust fell from the ceiling tiles.“Oh good, Freeman, you’re here,” a man in a white coat said. His clothing was rumpled but the coat was clean. “We have a small assignment for you. One more, I’m afraid. You see…” he launched into an explanation of organic resonant frequencies and something about advanced research on the alien physiology.Freeman found the granola bars infinitely more interesting. He found a seat on the countertop, ate all three, downed the yellow drink and was half-way through the cookies, which tasted like anti-fungal additives but contained a glorious 73% of a daily serving of sugar, when a woman walked up and joined them.“He doesn’t need to hear your theories, Dr. Colrich. He just needs to kill it.”“Oh yes. Most certainly. Killing the organism ought to stop these erratic entrances into our world!”The ground shook again. Freeman studied the woman. She was one of the unicorns, a female head researcher in Black Mesa. He recognized her from a staff directory photo. Dr. Amertine. Something with coded magnetic polymers. Solids to liquids and back. Ship a bottle of liquid plastic, energize it, and it’ll build itself into a doghouse or a boat or whatever you programmed it for. She was two decades older than him and by the set of her face and spine, she was handling the present crisis with as much determination as she’d doubtless exercised against Black Mesa’s board of directors.“Can you kill this thing?” she asked him.Freeman didn’t answer. Didn’t know how, or what to say. Yes? No? Maybe? Not enough data. They theorized that a life-form of some kind was holding the door open from the far side. Organic crystal resonance. Various life-forms could grow crystals. Humans had them for balance, among other things. If something living could metabolize the correct minerals and secret them in the correct way, allowing for slow growth and some kind of power source, well, why not? But killing it? All they knew is that it might be alive. He brushed crumbs from his goatee with the back of his glove and took off his glasses. They were filthy again.She seized his jaw. “Look at me,” she said, and-
Pain.
He couldn’t see her through the white behind his eyelids but he felt her there, solid against the barrel of the gun. He had it between her eyes. Skin, skull, brain. He blinked the pain away and heard her speaking. She was talking to him. People were shouting. Someone cocked a shotgun. He looked up, vision blurry and still painful.Her face was a shade paler, her eyes a fraction wider, hands up and palms out. She was still speaking, in a low voice as if not to startle him. Something small, narrow and silver in one hand, now held inert between her fingers. Pen light. LED pen light.In his eyes. Pupil dilation under bright light, a quick and dirty way to check neurological function.He put the gun down and felt a jolt of shame, chased by frustration. Of course it hurt. He was tired, running on three days of no sleep and not nearly enough food, and he’d hit his head a few times along the way. The body had interpreted the stabbing ocular pain as yet another surprise attack; she was very lucky he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Something in his subconscious must still be functioning.He took the pen light from her and dropped it on the floor, then looked back at her with his ‘absolutely not’ face.She nodded. “I don’t think he’s up for this,” she said.“Naturally. Who would be? Even the exploratory teams know there’s a risk, and we keep the door open for them! It’s a one-way journey this time, I’m afraid…”But she wasn’t talking about doors. Her eyes flicked from the gun, now in his lap, to his face, and back to the gun. He read her thought process. Damaged. “No. This isn’t going to work,” she said. “He doesn’t have the strength.”“Nonsense. If Freeman can’t do it we’re doomed. He will do it? Yes? You will do it? Go through and save the world? You’ll be a hero, of course. We’ll name the next resonance lab after you. Gordon Freeman Laboratory of Applied Resonance and Teleportation. Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?”She sighed. She looked at the gun again. “Put that away. You’ll scare the interns. I suppose we don’t have much choice. That suit is calibrated to you and you only, and I think pulling you out of it now might do irreparable harm to both you and it. Someone, one of you- Frank, yes, come here with your tablet. I want you to pull Freeman’s biometric data and what the suit’s been recording. We’ll never have another chance for a stress test like this. If any of us live, this will give us an edge over this invasion nonsense.”Freeman braced himself for Frank’s tampering with the suit. The plug for the diagnostic download was damaged and required some amount of fiddling. Then the suit itself, when running its diagnostic process, moved against him to test carbon fiber strength and again to test structural integrity.A series of error bleats sounded from Frank’s tablet. The tech was a wire-haired, dark-skinned man Freeman had worked with once before in the HEV development. He dismissed the error messages. “You’ve put it through it’s paces,” he said. “I imagine it’s put you through yours as well. It should hold up for one more job. We use similar suits for the exploratory teams, though not as advanced. Yours is still a prototype.” He looked at it wistfully. “We were going to outfit the whole team next year, once the Russian contract came through. Biometric tracking AI, self-healing nanofibers, onboard medical diagnostic and treatment… It would have saved Remy and James last month.”Freeman didn’t know those names.Dr. Amertine opened the left upper arm plate of the suit and emptied the morphine vials stored there. They’d been long since depleted. She replaced them with fresh vials and put the plate back on. “Not much good it’ll do, but every edge counts. Xen won’t be like anything you’ve encountered before. Don’t expect Earth.”He looked at her with his ‘keep talking’ face, but she shook her head. “Everyone who has been to Xen has died over there. I’ve seen the survey team notes and the recordings but they’d be useless to you. It’s an organic, amorphous waypoint in space, never the same way twice. They build with organics the way we build with polymers.”She finished cleaning and restocking the suit medical kit. Frank was still fiddling with something in the programming, making unhappy noises at the errors that kept flashing across his screen. “You’ve fried the wiring and sensors all down your left side,” he said. “When did you damage it so badly? It’s not a crash dummy, you know.”Freeman thought. Sniper bullet? Being dumped into the trash compactor? An explosion a little too close? He considered his range of obscene gestures but quashed the impulse; it was unprofessional, a display of temper, a symptom of how tired he was.Dr. Amertine tugged the bullet-shattered thigh plate off and traded it with Frank for a fresh plate. She touched the knot of repaired carbon fiber over the bullet wound. “That still in there?” she asked.He nodded, once. It was, and right now it was very uncomfortably digging into him where his leg rested on the counter’s edge. But still, sitting was preferable to standing and it might be his last chance.“No one asked you if you wanted to die for us today, did they?” she asked.He gave her a paper-thin smile, well aware of her word choice: they still weren’t asking. She installed the new plate with more dexterity and expertise than he’d anticipated. He wondered how her liquid-polymer research overlapped with the HEV, then realized- of course, the underlayment. The carbon fibers were a solid-state variation of her work. A true energized liquid layer wouldn’t knot up and tangle when broken the way the fibers did. He almost wished he had time to ask her about that.“Kiss for luck?”It was the woman who had recognized him at the door. She handed him a cup of coffee and a box of ammunition, and turned her face up to him. She was young, reasonably symmetrical and had her hair pulled back. She looked a little cleaner and fresher than he would have expected for a survivor in Black Mesa. But no, he did not want a kiss for luck. He’d had a woman’s mouth on his once; he hadn’t wanted it there but that’s where she’d put it, so he’d dealt with it and she’d never spoken to him again. Problem solved.He took the coffee, downed it in one gulp-it tasted like carbon and glass-and pocketed the ammunition. Then he glared at her with his ‘absolutely not’ face. Someone in the room snorted. There’d probably been a bet involved.The great Dr. Gordon Freeman, savior of humanity, destroyer of young women’s dreams. He didn’t care. Let them write their myth. He wasn’t going through that portal for their sake.
I choose to live.

Why?

Death provides no relevant data.
The guard came back. “Dr. Ryken is ready for us upstairs. Says it’ll be a narrow window, and may draw a little hostile attention. He wants everyone bunkered until the reactor is powered down again.”“Any messages we can pass along for you?” Dr. Amertine asked.Freeman thought for a moment. Then he got off the counter, rifled through drawers until he came up with a triplicate laboratory notebook and blue ink pen. He flipped to the first empty page and scrawled a list.
Tell Calhoun thanks for the help.

Someone go get Johnson out of the sewer.
As he cast back in his memory for details of the last three days one specter kept coming up. It was a useless memory, eclipsed by so much more death, but it wouldn’t get out of his mind. He finished the page with There’s an old man frozen to death in cold storage. Tell his family I’m sorry I couldn’t get him out.A useless list. Maybe someone would live to carry it out. More likely, they’d send him through and die themselves. He shoved the thought aside. He wasn’t doing any of this to save Black Mesa, or Humanity in general, or even that one security guard’s anonymous six-year-old.He was doing it because if he wanted it done right, he was going to have to do it himself. If he wanted to sleep at night not wondering if a parasite was going to leap from a closet or a grunt teleport into the hallway, he’d have to see the thing causing all this dead at his feet.He handed Dr. Amertine the list and nodded to the guard. He was ready.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He saw the device in the center of the room, registered the small console on the observation platform, and looked up; no, the device wasn’t in the room, it was the room. The pinnacle of reactor he’d climbed, the gateway to another world.The room was not clean. Dark blood splattered the floor and remnants of organics had been kicked to the corners. He didn’t recognize their shape. Lambda was holding against the soldiers and black-ops assassins but it was vulnerable to alien teleportation technology. He wondered how much ammunition they’d stockpiled and how many of the civilians huddled in the rooms below knew how to use a gun.The hall bulkhead door came down hard. Enormous piston bolts slid out on either side, locking them in. Steel claws descended from the ceiling, magnetic stabilization arrays at their tips. Plasma shimmered between them. The air crackled with electricity and stank of ozone. Hair stood up on his neck and he suppressed the desire to back away. The skin over his ribs twitched inside the suit, anticipating the white-hot bite of an electrical discharge.“Get ready,” the guard said. “They don’t like us knocking on their door.”A hum filled the structure, vibrating through the floor, up the soles of his boots and deep in his chest. Something was out of alignment in the reactor below. Something was resonating with the superstructure. He shoved the observation aside with irritation; designing an interstellar transportation device hadn’t been his job. If it had been, there wouldn’t be wasted kinetic energy flooding the steel and cement, causing microfractures and speeding decay.He heard the familiar tearing sound of a portal and his shoulders tensed. He turned towards it, tracking the sound up- up to where it shouldn’t be, near the ceiling. Too high. He thought the fall will kill whatever comes out, but the thing that came out didn’t fall. It was brown, it could direct its flight path, and it was shooting at them.All the relevant data he needed, as he leapt aside from its tracing line of yellow energy pulse discharge. Not a solid projectile like the wasp guns, not a bioweapon like the spitters’ acid, or the pentapods’ single electrical jolt. This weapon spat hot yellow fire-plasma wasn’t the scientifically correct term but it fit well enough-and from the way it pooled, splattered and melted into the flooring he guessed it’d play hell on the HEV.
Superheated metal? A compressed liquid with an absurdly high vapor point, ignited on contact with the air?
Data was a distraction. He tracked the brown balloon and shot through its gas bag. Two more materialized across the room. The guard was shouting a steady stream of profanity as he shot, and the scientist was yelling at them that he couldn’t be distracted, could they please hurry it up and kill the pests or they’d just have to start all over.Freeman found that tracking and shooting an enemy moving in three dimensions was unexpectedly difficult. He was used to his adversaries operating on the same horizontal plane and even the helicopters had had a predictable momentum. These things moved at will in independent arcs, difficult to predict and track with a finite number of bullets, and difficult to know what was a safe shot and what would damage the array they were within. The walls were scored with black char marks and bullet divots, testament to past battles, and now that he knew the shape of the aliens, he differentiated two badly-burned human bodies among the piles of deflated gasbags.Workplace hazards.They killed six before the portal was ready, and the guard had taken a grazing shot to the thigh that left him limping.“Hurry!” The scientist shouted.Freeman looked at the guard, who was shooting at another gas bag. “They’ll stop once we close the door!” the guard yelled over the howl of the portal array and gasbag shriek.So he went.He didn’t think about the leap. Didn’t think about the way reality curved around him, how his senses cut out and his lungs constricted-panic or lack of air or dimensional shift-or the ringing in his ears and the burn in his throat from the first lungful of alien atmosphere. About how his own heartbeat had been loud in his ears, and then gone altogether, before settling back inside his chest.The moment of pure true silence in the darkness. A flash of memory now, as he blinked back a yellow after-image of the portal’s glow. Silence without senses. Without the body’s background hum. He’d experienced it when the resonance cascade happened, when he’d been flung to Xen the first time, and for a moment then he’d thought he’d died.But he was not dead, and he still had possession of the body in the orange HEV, with all its hunger and aches and uncooperative nerves. He was here, wherever that was. Xen.The name fit.
Maybe the ground’s a fungus.
He felt very foolish.Biologist? No, they should have sent an astrophysicist and spent a few years’ budget on a telescope. They’d have put Black Mesa on the map and maybe not started an alien invasion.The sky-was it a sky without refractive atmosphere? Or was it just space?-was a nebula shot with purple and green, spangled between the clouds with more stars than he’d ever seen before. Of course there were no familiar constellations, and he had no concept of where he was in the galaxy, or if it was the same galaxy. He wanted to know the why and how of all the data his senses were giving him. His mind spiraled off into hypotheticals, why the gravity was low, but then why did it exist at all? If the terrain was organic, what did it feed on? Was this space, this Xen, natural or engineered? A thousand questions ran through his mind, but he didn’t have the baseline. Didn’t have the background to even begin formulating a hypothesis.He remembered being twelve years old, dragged to a “magic of music” performance on a school field trip. Utterly uninterested until a performer had played a violin, and the violin had made another instrument across stage play itself. And that instrument, amplified, had made another one play, and so forth, until in sequence a dozen different strings resonated, at the same frequency but each perceived differently by the human ear depending on the design of the instrument and materials it was constructed from. He’d sat there in pure wonder as he realized the power sound had.Not just sound. Resonance. When one thing here makes a note and that note travels and catches and controls the thing over there. Makes it sing, makes it shatter. Play a pure note and the universe will sing with you. Push the point of resonance and watch the world break.He could breathe the air. One really big important piece of data right there, though it was rough on his throat. The air smelled wet and swampy, warm but not desert-hot, with an undertone of organic decay. The ground had the same slight spongy, mushroom feel he remembered. Gravity was lower than Earth.Getting places meant throwing himself into open space and aiming for the next floating mushroom cap. Not his preferred method of travel, but he couldn’t cling to his first landing spot forever. He had to move. The collections team had done it, and therefore so could he. Lesser humans, he realized he was thinking of them as such, as he approached the platform edge, had thrown themselves into open space and trusted they’d land safely.How many had? How many of these secret collections team members had simply kept falling forever, out the bottom of the nebula and presumably out of whatever atmospheric bubble it preserved? Not even a fast death to anticipate if he missed, unless he turned the handgun on himself in freefall.Move. He looked over the edge and considered his trajectory. The floating lily pad of alien fungus looked awfully small. But it was the only way forward, and so he had to jump.The lower gravity meant his fall was slowed, controlled, and when his hands and knees hit spongy ground, he realized it had been much easier than he’d anticipated. More like diving through liquid than going into freefall. He could do this. He could get to the next one. Keep moving, explore, find the thing that looks like it’s making war on Earth, and kill it.Two pentapods materialized on the next platform, reminding him harshly he was still in a personal battlefield. He had ammunition but he didn’t know what he was going to face. Best to conserve. He shot one, stepped aside of the other’s discharge and killed it with the crowbar.There were no soldiers here to leave ammunition behind. No living humans. No black ops assassins and no cowering scientists. He was alone, save for the orange-armored bodies of the collections teams in their incomplete HEVs. He found one on the next platform, a woman who’d been dead long enough for the flesh to wither in desiccation.He descended to the largest and lowest platform in sight. It was girdled by a walkway, or what looked to his interpretation of structure like a walkway, complete with hanging lights and odd little pools of faintly luminescent liquid.A maggot-dog screamed from an alcove. He splashed through a pool in his way and shot it before it could ramp up to full pitch, then shook liquid from his boots. He wasn’t sure what it was or what it would do, but it didn’t seem to be eating through the suit.A flash of energy in the corner of his eye. Reflex now made him drop to the ground or plunge for cover, but he was slow. He stumbled, unsure of which direction to go, what was firing on him, and the bolt of electrical energy caught him in the forearm.He’d noticed the purple glowing fruit-like bodies dangling from the overhang, but he’d mentally categorized them as just that- glowing fruit.They weren’t fruit or lights. They were drone guns. The bolt seared through orange plating and carbon layer and skin, and though his luck had held-it had caught the flat arm plate and not the face or chest-it’d done significant damage.They build with organics, he thought, his own inner voice a chastisement of his distraction. The data had drawn him in. How? By what method? What did those organics feed on? Were they manipulated on a material level, like forming wood, or on a genetic level, programmed into shape?They were Enemy, and that’s all he needed to know about them. He shoved the list of questions aside and cleared the mental notebook page. The purple ones fired a bolt of hot plasma energy, and it was capable of cutting through his armor like a bullet through tissue paper. Luckily their rate of fire was very slow. The fruit was dark now, but as he watched its energy built back up from base to tip. Rate of fire. Reload time. Relevant data there.He shot it off with the shotgun, pieces flying over the edge into empty space.Vulnerable. Also relevant data.His arm burned. He saw red oozing skin through the two-inch hole it’d drilled in the plating. The burning, itching sensation grew, until he had to stop himself from tearing at the plate to relieve it. He plunged it into the pool instead, instinct seeking cool water.The liquid was viscous, thicker than water, and it was warm, but it also calmed the burning sensation. It flooded the broken arm plate and oozed into the underlayer, bubbling with displaced oxygen and faintly discolored with his own blood. What was the biological origin? Warm, clear, soothing- saliva. He nearly pulled his arm out as the realization hit, but held still. He couldn’t afford to be squeamish here, now, when this was his only option, but he could feel the stuff seeping along his forearm and pooling at the wrist joint, soaking into the carbon fibers. Disgust warred with practicality, and practicality, along with a reduction in pain, won out.He watched as the raw redness receded from his skin. Not as fast as Black Mesa’s med boxes but it did the job.The pools were med boxes, then. Slow, wet, organic, but effective.And without the neurological effects of Black Mesa’s little synthetic drug operation. He could control the physical revulsion of plunging an extremity into what amounted to the mouth of an engineered organism if it meant a clear head and a patched wound.He circled the platform twice, clearing its nooks and crannies of howlers and drone fruit, before he found a way in. A narrow, belly-crawling way in. It was smaller than the Black Mesa ductwork and the walls, with their slight give, made him think of being swallowed.The collections team came this way too, he reminded himself, and felt foolish for needing the mental comfort of knowing other humans had endured this before him.The tunnel opened into an interior cavity crowded with unfamiliar forms. Tripods, platforms, a shin-deep thick brown liquid stinking of swamp-like rot. Everything looked like an oversized version of what grew on forgotten sandwiches in the back of a Black Mesa breakroom refrigerator. And no way out.They build with organics. Something in here was a door, a lift, a ladder- he just had to find it.Yellow butterflies flittered in a cage at one end of the room. He ignored them as a piece of the general decor, until he realized they were a very familiar shade of yellow. Tiny metamaterial crystals flashed on their bodies. Living batteries or conductors.He opened the cage and followed their flight paths. They settled on waist-high clawed platforms, somehow completing a circuit that energized with their presence.A vibrant yellow-green portal opened between the legs of another organic structure.A door. To where? He didn’t know, and wouldn’t know until he came out the other side.
Forward. Keep moving. Find what you need to kill, and kill it.
He stepped through.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He landed on his feet this time; he was getting better at the portal travel.The smell hit him first.He’d crawled up through Black Mesa’s own sewer system, saturated in its waste both human-origin and chemical, but this was worse. It was an acrid organic scent, half feted compost and half anoxic decay, and the fumes were thick and burning in his nose. He tried to breathe through his mouth, through clenched teeth, as if that would filter out the stench, but it didn’t keep the fumes from filling his sinuses and burning his lungs. He coughed and gagged, trying to find a balance between shallow breathing and oxygen demand.Movement against the spongy ground. Something skittered. Parasites moved in little herds, their claws dangerously silent and their bodies camouflaged in the murk. This was their natural terrain, not cement and steel where he could hear them coming. He killed three of them and the rest drew back, showing the first sign of hesitation he’d seen in the species. Were they watching him? Wary of a new predator, or just waiting for his back to be turned?They drew back again, clearing space, withdrawing to higher ground. Getting out of the way.He felt ripples in the ground before he saw it, and with the sudden increase in stench, he discovered where the smell was coming from. The thing was huge, tank-sized, on spindly clawed legs. Soft body dangled obscenely between them, the folds mottled and wet.He thought it would be slow, until it caught sight of him. Or smell of him. He didn’t see anything like eyes, but as it turned, paused, and charged, he didn’t question if it knew where he was.He ran. The thing was fast. Fast as a bathroom spider, but taller than he was and with a parasite-mouth of teeth and bone knives for feet. It closed on him and he shot into the body with the shotgun as the legs caged him in. It screamed and recoiled, then lunged at him, two clawed forelegs extended. He deflected one with the crowbar and shot into its face. The other claw went high, over his shoulder, and as the body flinched back from his shot the claw slammed down on him.He fell with the claw, letting its momentum shove him into the ground, and rolled back away from the thing. It was howling, clawing at its own face, so he shot it again. It withdrew down the slope, into the tangle of overhangs and snapping vines.Parasites circled him, hanging back from their combat but ready to pounce. As the beast moved away they moved in. He had to follow the beast if he wanted to avoid being swarmed.It was the alpha of the parasites, a brood-mother spawning uncounted hoards of the horrors. Pale juveniles scattered on the swarm’s edge and white slick mounds of what he guessed to be egg sacs were tucked against the walls. The smell grew heavier, the air warmer and wetter, as he pursued the beast. It screeched and thrashed ahead of him, legs plowing through its own offspring, leaving a trail of their innards and its own yellow blood.He stumbled over orange polymer and pale bone. Collections team, their flesh absorbed into the walls and floor, their armor chewed and shattered.He had to kill it. The swarm surged around his heels, staying just clear. The beast turned at bay and roared at him. Its hot gut wind splattered his face with oily burning spit. It crouched over a webbed pit in the ground and struck at him with its claws. He shot both barrels of the shotgun into its face and ducked under the claws. It whirled to follow his movement and he added a note to his mental list. Monodirectional ocular array. A fancy way of saying it had eyes only on one end. It slashed at him with both foreclaws but didn’t move without all four on the ground. Requires four points of structural stability. He dodged back from its slash, measuring his step out of its reach. Five foot attack radius without central movement. The tough hide and flesh body absorbed unbelievable amounts of damage. He shot constantly into it, knowing his ammunition was dwindling but knowing he had no choice. This thing wouldn’t be killed with a crowbar.It screamed and leapt for him -height six feet, forward momentum clearing eight feet- and he slid under its jump, firing up into the swollen belly with the automatic. Every small pinhole enraged it, but it was like trying to kill a rhinoceros with a safety pin.It would be a war of attrition.He rolled away from the webbed pit and switched to the big yellow gun. Its rate of fire was slow but if it could punch a hole through a tank it ought to do some damage. The beast was withdrawing again, screaming its way down a tunnel tangled with vines. The vines struck at him with needle points, clawing at his armor.He released the energy charge into the thing’s body. It howled and whirled on him and he dodged back, into a vine’s strike distance. The thorn caught between his shoulder and back plating and dug in, then hauled him backwards. He lost his footing and his grip on the gun but the vine had dragged him clear of the beast’s attack. He wrenched free of the vine and reached for the gun but the beast was coming too fast. It slid over him, raining acid blood, and pinned him down with one foreclaw. He slashed at it with the crowbar and shot up into its body again and again with the shotgun, until the gun clicked empty.The beast roared again and withdrew.It was an animal, not a sentient opponent, or it would have sliced his head off right then. He picked up the yellow gun and slung its bulk over his shoulder. The gun had done damage, left a gaping hole of seared flesh, but it hadn’t gone deep enough to kill.Just what was the thing made of? What kind of organic process built flesh tough enough to withstand a direct hit from a metamaterial gun? A biologist might have theorized evolutionary pressures or a geneticist isolated the code, but all he wanted was to see the thing dead.He killed parasites that drew too near and followed the beast’s trail. It went deep into the tunnels. He heard it moaning. In pain? Despair? The tunnels were dark but he ran to stay ahead of the parasites, crushing them in ones and twos as they jumped for his shoulders. Then the ground opened under him and he fell, rolling off ledges and crystal outcrops and crashing down onto something big, wet, hot and furious.He’d landed in its lair, on top of it. The beast rose on its web and clawed for him but its own acids thwarted it. He slid clear of the claws and plunged through the web to the floor below.Solid ground, like stone. He’d landed on his side, his shoulder and hip taking the impact. A juvenile parasite latched onto his jaw. He crushed it between his fingers and scrambled into the narrow band of shelter as the beast released a spray of acid from the web above. The droplets burned his skin and made his armor smoke.Biological hazard detected, the suit said.He shot up through the web. At least the thing made a convenient target, but now he was trapped under its feet. If it punched through the web it’d have him cornered much faster but it was an animal and it fought like an animal, preserving its perceived advantage of elevation and familiar turf.It dripped acid and yellow oily blood. Paused, seemed to search for him. He pressed against the wall and reloaded the automatic. Its bullets were numerous but accuracy sub-optimal compared to the handgun. He unloaded the clip into its belly. It screamed and scratched at the walls, alternating between trying to attack him and trying to escape, but it was weakening. Too weak to climb out of its own trap.He was winning. He reloaded and shot again, and again, and again. It fell through the web and lunged for him, and he stepped aside. Its lateral movement was poor, once it had committed to the strike. Its claws swept over his head as he ducked. He shot into its joints and it collapsed to the floor. He dodged its thrashing and shot into the broad pale back.It heaved and wheezed and the skin bubbled fluid. He shot again. And again. And then he buried a grenade into its flesh and crouched behind a mound of stone and eggs. The grenade opened the body from end to end. He winced as acrid aerosolized tissue rained down around him. Perhaps not the brightest idea, but at least he might be reasonably assured it was dead.He shot it once more.And leaned against the stone, panting, waiting for the black in his vision to recede and his hands to cease their shaking. He slid down the stone and sat, staring at the remains. Staring at the gun in his hands, at the scattering of black empty clips across the cavern. The automatic was empty, and his ammunition for it gone. He tossed the useless gun onto the mound of rendered flesh.And he was happy.Elated with the kill. Shaking with adrenaline and pain he hadn’t acknowledged, but furiously pleased with himself.He hadn’t enjoyed any moment of existence from the cascade until now. He didn’t take pleasure in the slaughter, the way the military seemed to. Proud of his own efficiency, yes, cognizant of his skill in surviving the unthinkable, but happy?No. Not until now, as he stared at the oozing corpse. The rational part of his mind knew it was an animal, probably co-opted to the alien war effort to spawn parasites, and probably one of many in some vast war machine, but the wet human part of him remembered the horror of seeing coworkers reduced to mindless flesh-eating monsters by the spawn, and that part was glad.Bloodlust. Joy in the killing. He’d heard coworkers talk about it after going on some big-game hunting excursion. A rare hobby amongst academia, but even Black Mesa had a few Great White Hunter-types who would shell out half a year’s salary to put a bullet in a hand-picked trophy beast.And he’d never imagined finding it himself. But it was there, in how his mind replayed his attack and evasion, reliving the efficiency of his movements, tracking the bullets as they burrowed in. He was proud of it. He’d chased the sow bear to her lair and killed her in front of her cubs. The deep old part of him, the part he kept boxed up and carefully stored away behind a decade of academic training and cold disinterest, was leaching out. Fury. Joy. Pleasure. He was too tired to pack them all away.He stood and leaned on the stone pillar, reloaded the shotgun and hand gun and checked himself for injuries. The thing’s fluids had leached into the suit through myriad cracks and tears. It stung, but at an ignorable level. His bitten jaw was bothering him. His whole self was bothering him, at an ignorable level. The suit told him he’d broken something minor somewhere. Probably in the fall, probably dislodging unhealed bone from a past fracture. He couldn’t feel it yet.He looked back at the body. Scraps of web floated down the pit. Egg cases torn open in the fray leached pearlescent fluid. White-bodied juveniles chittered and scratched at his feet, claws too soft to penetrate, legs too weak to leap for his head.Their battle had punched through the lair’s stone walls and into deeper tunnels. He couldn’t stay in the cavern or climb back out. The parasites were gathering again, and as he watched the swarm buried themselves in the flesh of their mother and started to feed.It was dead. Very dead. And maybe now he wouldn’t hear the sounds his coworkers made when the things took their minds, or see the gaping parasite mouths red with blood in his dreams.He inched into the tunnels, mindful of the swarm, but they were sated and did not follow.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The caverns were dark and rough, stone-hard but dripping with moisture and the brood mother’s blood. He snagged the suit on the edges, tripped and fell, rolled down a slope and caught himself in a narrow spot above a dropoff. His heart pounded in his chest as his heels kicked over empty space. The walls crumbled and he slid and fell-A teleporter flashed yellow around him. His gut lurched and he rolled through it onto a suspended platform, nebula bright overhead, crawling with life. Flyers seared yellow lightning across the platform. Enormous ridged pipes or trees grew from the surface. He fought for comprehension as he watched them surge unevenly up and down through pores in the platform’s skin. Not a growing thing, more like a machine.The raw wail of a gasbag brought him back to immediate reality. Understanding would come after killing. He traced its flight, shot it twice, and sidestepped the energy attack of a pentapod. The pentapod arched its back, arms spread for another bolt. He lunged and caught it through the belly with the crowbar. Its half-formed attack sparked in his face, sending pale green electricity across his suit. He flinched back, almost lost the crowbar as the body tumbled over the edge, and saw the line of plasma from the gasbag come for him.He had time, his brain told him, plenty of time to get out of the way. He could see all six bolts neatly lined up. Had time to count them, calculate trajectory, and time to realize he was thinking much faster than he was moving.The first two smoked out on the platform but the next four caught him broadside, thigh, belly, chest and the arm he’d thrown over his face. He shot at it blindly, aiming by sound, in the precious moments before the pain caught up.Burns hurt. He rolled over, instinct protecting the damaged areas, presenting comparatively solid back plating for the next attack, but the thing was dead. Its deflated body dropped below the platform horizon.Freeman got up on his knees. The chest and belly plating had held better than leg and arm, but the polymer was melted and charred and he coughed on its acrid fumes. The bolt had hit his leg just above and to the left of the bullet. He put experimental weight on it- more surface trauma than the bullet, but unlike the bullet, all that damage was concentrated on the nerve-heavy skin instead of deep tissue. Less mechanical damage, more distraction.His mind was telling him to find shelter, find cover, find a med box and a back corner and heal. His mind was telling him about how good the drugged payload would feel. Anticipating reward for pain.He swore at himself, in red ink. Conditioned response. Like a lab monkey accepting an injection for payment of a grape. He was slow because he was tired, because scar tissue didn’t function like muscle tissue and because everything about the environment was new, unfamiliar and probably threatening. He didn’t want to be slow because his subconscious associated mistakes with pain, and pain with reward.The terrain rose somewhat on one side of the platform. A shadowed alcove on the hillside, if it could be called a hill, held promise of shelter. The alcove lead into a tunnel, and the tunnel to a pool of the same clear viscous liquid. Saliva, he reminded himself, even as he lowered himself into it and knelt so it could flood the burn on his leg. Another reason to not get hurt. Less contact with the alien fluids. Who knew if the flesh it regenerated was wholly his?A pentapod teleported on the pool’s edge. He shot it before it fully materialized. Its body tumbled into the pool, yellow rings of oily blood ebbing out from it. The flesh spread, thinned. Dissolved.He wanted to lurch out of the pool in disgust, but held himself still. It was healing. And it wasn’t taking the same toll on his body that the med boxes did, because it supplied its own building blocks. It just… got those resources from the nearest accessible source.Right now, it wasn’t him.Maybe someday it would be, when he’d accomplished his task. Gotten the job done. He was tired enough that floating in the pool and just accepting sleep was an attractive idea.Saliva didn’t just heal, it also digested.He checked the burns. They were covered with pink fresh skin, still smarting and sore but serviceable.The liquid oozed from the suit. It didn’t slosh like water but he felt it in the carbon fibers against his shins, sticky and disgusting.This is what happens if you get slow, he thought. Maybe the stuff would reverse some of the med boxes’ effects.A side passage near the pool led down into the platform’s innards. He navigated through a network of pools and passageways, some bright with spit and some dark with muddy half-congealed organics, stinking of warm decay. The ceilings were too low, the rooms too wide for comfort. His neck ached from hunching over, his eyes hurt from the low light and strain of trying to spot red barnacles against red ceiling.Then he saw something orange. Familiar, angular, solid orange.Collections team.He thought the body was dead, but it rasped a breath when he moved its arm.Her arm. The face looked up at him. Skin dark and ashen, gaze unfocused. She gasped. “Who. Who are you?”He dismissed the question and crouched in front of her, guiding her head until her eyes met his. She was very weak.“You’re not collections,” she said. Her voice was faint. “Did they take Earth?”He shook his head. Not yet, at least.“They will. Get to the factory. Cloning an army. Kill it. Everything feeds the factory. Take the map.” She gripped a wad of yellow lined paper. “Place changes but factory is always center.”He leaned her forward and gripped her by the armor’s back plates. A spit pool was close; she’d been trying to crawl to it, by the marks on the ground. She cried out at the movement but he ignored her and hauled her into it. “Thanks,” she said, as her body settled into the puddle. “Won’t save me. But feels nice.” Her eyes closed. Her lips were cracked and bleeding but he had no water to offer. Red rings spread in the liquid and large dark clots sank under her body. “They call it Nihilanth. Wants Earth. Rich, fat world. Organic resources. They build with flesh.”He took the damp yellow pages from her glove and flattened them. They showed a hieroglyphic progression of tunnels, teleporters and floating islands, and a scrawl of a building like a maze, like Black Mesa’s own innards. “It changes,” she said. “Rebuilds itself. But some things are always the same. Get to the factory and stop this.”She drew a thin wheezing breath. “Go. Don’t wait for me to die. I want to be alone.” She sighed, floating in the pool, head back and eyes closed. Her face was relaxed, but not at peace.He nodded to her, knowing she didn’t see. She’d die here, flotsam to feed the living organism. Maybe someday an injured creature would come for healing and some of her would pass into it, energy or flesh or other biological building blocks.The marks on her suit matched the brood mother’s claws. It had stabbed her through. He wanted to tell her it was dead, but she was past caring.He walked away. He wouldn’t want an audience for his last moments either. He wasn’t likely to have one, not human, at least.He followed the scrawl of a map. Ride the green pipe up. Find the three-pronged teleporter. Simple.The pipe launched him into a precarious sea of yellow nebula and the platforms below seemed impossibly small. Gravity, he reminded himself, was lower here. The jump was controlled. Mostly controlled.Minor fracture detected, the suit said.Something twinged in his ankle. Something for later. He’d do an experiment, find out if the spit pool could heal broken bones. He saw the teleporter and watched the lilypads of solid ground swirl around it. Movement. Rhythm. And no, it wasn’t going to work.Unless…They build with flesh. Subtly different from Black Mesa’s words. Flesh, not just organics. Living tissue, not slabs of lab-grown meat. So he would build too. The flyers repeated their formation pattern, for reasons he couldn’t fathom. One flew near the gap. Near enough.He calculated his leaps, stepped back, took two quick steps and jumped, ignoring the needlepoint of pain in his ankle. One jump, two- and the third leap put him on the flyer’s broad dark back.It shuddered under him and made an eerie low moan, then it started to roll.He couldn’t threaten it. Couldn’t shoot it, hold a gun to its head and demand to be taken forward. No, he had to work with what it was. Flesh. Flying. He got the hooked end of the crowbar under the wing on the lower side and wrenched up. The thing stabilized, moaning and shivering under his knees. In pain? Was it sentient?He didn’t know. He wrenched on the crowbar, punishing it for losing altitude and veering off course. It flew up, away from the hook’s pressure, near enough. He released it and made the final jump. The crowbar dripped green ichor and the flyer drifted away, listing to one side, still making its strange thin cries.He shoved the thought of its pain behind him and stepped through the teleporter. Enemy, resource, he reminded himself, though the flyers were one of the only things that hadn’t actually shot at him.He liked his enemies properly silent and dead. He didn’t like them alive enough to remind him they hurt too.No time for empathy. or paranoia, or- the green claw waved in his vision. The teleporter crackled behind him and he very nearly went back through it.His back shivered and twitched in memory.But its range was limited to guarding a walkway beside it, unlike the heavy trooper to his left.And the three other troopers on the high ground to his right. Or the four pentapods materializing on the flats between them.He ducked for what shallow cover the teleporter tripod offered as angry living bullets whirled around him. The shotgun was low on ammunition and too slow to reload. He should have reloaded before he stepped through. Stupid of him, stupid tired mistake. He shot with the hand gun, killed three pentapods and the heavy trooper on the left. By the bridge. The black claw was now his clear path.He checked the hand gun. Not enough ammunition to finish the fight. He had two spare clips, and that was it. And he didn’t know what he would need to kill this Nihilanth creature.He ran for the bridge. Living bullets whirled past his head. The claw snapped down in front of him and he rolled under it as it rose to strike again. Yellow electricity crawled up the bridge and six projectiles slammed into his back. The impact sent him past the claw’s reach, over the body of the dead trooper.He grabbed its gun as he would have the gun of a fallen soldier, not thinking beyond shoot back.It shot back. The projectiles were furious and hot, weaker than bullets but more numerous and self-replicating. It closed around his hand, clenching down on his wrist, tendrils working through the fatigued polymer and carbon fibers to wrap around bare skin.He felt it grow up his arm like ivy, pinpricks of pain as it sought blood. Nutrients. Signaling.It was a gun, built on Xen principles. A living thing.He controlled it somehow, through subconscious movements of his hand, through biochemical or neurological impulses, he did not know. The important part was that it worked.The heavy troops seemed surprised at the onslaught from a familiar weapon and hesitated to rush his position. Or maybe the claw didn’t distinguish well between friend and foe. They died, and then the last pentapod died too.In the cervices of the hill they’d shot from, he found the accumulated supplies of at least six collections team members. Bits of armor, ammunition, small health kits, power packs. Things looted and dragged back for further inspection, he guessed, as he plugged in a power pack and let the suit recharge. The carbon fibers’ movement seemed normal. He was surrounded by living terrain, using a living gun. His mind was too ready to forget the suit was a dead thing, manufactured and assembled, not grown. It grew around the Xen gun’s tendrils, accepting their presence as an extension of the flesh.He ran his glove experimentally over the gun’s skin and felt his own touch on his arm, telegraphed through its attachments. He wanted it off. Went rigid controlling his impulse to rip it away. But it was a weapon that did not require ammunition. Too valuable to discard. He’d have to accept the biology, the distraction of its touch.Just a tool, he thought. Just a piece of machinery, designed for a specific function. He considered the dying woman’s words. It wants Earth. This would be the fate of life on that planet, to be reengineered as cogs in the wheel of Xen’s machine. He liked life to be useful to him, liked his interns to follow orders and his security guards to understand liability, and he’d made it very clear he had no time for useless things like affection and pets, but this was too far. Taking the living flesh and milling it down to a singular purpose was fine under conscious control- he knew he was very little more than a solid object careening towards a violent end, Earth’s own ‘Xen gun’ pointed towards Nihilanth- but he’d chosen the necessary path of his own volition. If a superior had coerced him into the battle of the last four days, he’d have flatly refused on principle.Xen wouldn’t give Earth even the honor of choice, not when their technology could simply take from life. Where would that leave humanity? Parasite or suicide.He patched what he could with the scattering of HEV parts, drained the battery packs, scavenged every scrap of ammunition in the cave. The living gun pulsed around his hand. He’d pit flesh against flesh, find out which was the superior, the bioengineering of an alien planet or the biological machine inside the HEV.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He picked his way over wet rotten ground, its spongy surface pitted and slick with moisture. The air was warm and humid and sweat pooled on the HEV collar. He felt it trickle behind his ears, down his forehead.One more teleporter to the factory. The scrap of lined paper was in his utility belt; a mockery of the technological innovation of two civilizations, that the map to save the world would be written with a ball-point pen on dead-tree paper. He wondered what it had cost her to write it, how far her team had gotten before they’d been forced to turn back.Or flee.He dropped a grenade off a bridge to distract a grove of claws.There was red blood splatter, human blood, in his path. He tracked it until it wore off his boots. The narrow road ended in a box canyon of rubble but he could hear the hum and feel the faint static charge of the teleport. He took two steps and saw movement.Reflex took over and he threw himself back and down, making himself small. Projectiles hissed over his shoulder, one clipped his collar bone. He shot back, willing the living gun to fire, and watched the bullets hiss around wreckage. Ambush. Two heavy troopers, by the weapons fire, and by the way the ground shook under their weight.He’d dodged away from the gap he’d come through, away from his retreat path.These ones didn’t hesitate like the others had. They’d been prepared for him. They’d known the living guns were not a quick way to kill him.One laid down cover fire, a steady stream of golden projectiles hissing around his piece of rubble. They seared into it, leaving black charred marks and stinking like burned hair.The other trooper rushed him.He was prepared for the tactic and had the shotgun in his off-hand. He shot as it reached for him, its three-fingered claws closing around his shoulders as both barrels emptied into its gut. It roared in pain and fell, and its weight piled down onto him.Wet alien innards slid over his chest and legs. He scrambled back and hit the wall, no space to maneuver, too much bulk trapping him in. The suit was slick with its blood and he couldn’t get purchase on the ground, on the walls. Couldn’t get his feet under him.The second trooper rounded the debris and fired down into the heap of dead flesh and orange HEV.Freeman threw both arms up to shield his face and neck. He felt the impacts, the burn and sting of contusions as their force transferred through the armor, mentally ticking them off like seconds on a watch—the living guns weren’t unlimited, they needed time to regenerate, time he could use if he was still alive—a huge hand closed around his neck and hauled him upright. He flailed back at it, got the Xen gun up and firing into its eyes, dropped the empty shotgun for the crowbar and stabbed into the meaty forearm.It roared and threw him and he tumbled like a rag doll over the broken ground. The teleporter flashed neon white beside him and he reached for it, but the trooper had him by one ankle, dragging him back. The trooper was wounded, yellow ichor dripping from a dozen places on its face and belly, and it was enraged.Freeman liked his enemies dead, not in pain and furiously angry about it.He grabbed the revolver. It was dragging him towards itself, reeling him in joint by joint, the crushing strength of its grasp bending the HEV plates inward, cutting into flesh. It twisted and something gave way in his knee. His hand didn’t want to stay steady, his off-hand, but he was close enough to almost rest the revolver between its eyes when he pulled the trigger.It crumpled over him, onto the leg it had mangled.His vision went dark as its weight settled on the twisted joint. Movement hurt. Pulling on it hurt. The silver glow of the teleport was a mockery behind him; he was so close, and held back by fallible biology, by his body’s insistence that if he pulled his leg from under the dead alien he’d surely leave the foot behind.Breathe. He made himself measure breath and heartbeat, settle the body’s screaming nerves. He peeled off the Xen gun, a fire of pins running down his forearm as its tentacles were torn out of his skin. He sat up as far as he could, an awkward angle that made his hip contort painfully, and lifted the trooper as much as he could. The leg inched out. The knee joint was mangled, the HEV plates shattered around it. It wouldn’t bear weight.A bad place for a bad injury.He got himself free of the trooper at last and sat back against the support pillar of the teleport to rest.End of the road, the body said. Made a good fight of it.No. He was tired, but he was master of the body and if he said Move it would Move! He reloaded the revolver and looked around for the shotgun. It was by the first dead trooper, twenty feet away.Twenty very long feet away.He levered himself up, hobbling on the crowbar, and limped to it. He reloaded it too, then limped back to the teleport. Beside the pillars, he saw orange.He’d missed the body before, in the fight, but now he saw the dead Collections team member. The HEV was twisted and shattered around the body, broken in a dozen places. These troopers had realized the living bullets were not a fast solution to an HEV-armored opponent, so they had sacrificed range to weaponize their brute strength. The Collections team did not carry the arsenal he’d amassed. Maybe this one had run out of ammunition, or been injured and too slow to reach the teleporter.Why were they all dead alone, he wondered, why not together? Why not some last stand? Had they abandoned their stragglers, their wounded, for the success of the mission?He traded knee plating with the dead man, what of it was salvageable. His knee was swelling inside the carbon underlayer. He found a battery pack on the dead man too, and when he plugged it into his suit he saw stars as the underlayer tightened around his knee. But it would lend support, inhibit swelling, maybe keep him together long enough to reach a spit pool or find a discarded medical pack.The job wasn’t done yet.He got up and stumbled through the teleporter.It hissed silver around him and left him in a dark cavern, walls squared off and flat, meshed with what looked very much like a metallic polymer. A built environment, not grown. The geometry was too solid, too exact.A low-frequency rumble resonated behind his sternum. He froze, trying to interpret if it was a warning of impending attack, but it gradually faded out. Background noise from heavy machinery or an alien version of an intercom system? He didn’t know, and his body was making its own very loud signals. He crept down the hall leading away from the cavern and found the factory.Barrels sat in rows on platforms, catwalks connected conveyor belts that ferried them through gaps in the walls. Lifts shifted rhythmically between levels, and between all of it, in the shadows, pentapods moved through the space. Their red eyes shone against the mottled brown factory walls.He edged out, wary of them. There were too many to risk direct confrontation; he couldn’t shoot all the ones in range before they’d fire their electrical bolts back. But they hadn’t seen him yet.And there was a helpful-looking blue glow coming from an alcove to his left. The same blue as the spit pools. There was a chance it would have a positive effect on his knee. Worth the risk of discovery and confrontation or risk of it being the Xen equivalent of a trash can, for the chance of healing. To be able to walk, run and dodge again.He inched along the wall towards the blue alcove, trying to keep the crowbar from clanking on the floor. Solid ground felt odd to walk on after the outer spongy islands. The blue smelled the same as the spit pools, the vapor swirling inside had the same slightly viscous feel as it collected on his glove.It’d either kill him or heal him.Worth a try.The vapor misted out from pores in the alcove walls. It had healed on skin contact at the pools, but he couldn’t very well get the suit off enough to let it touch his knee. But he was breathing it in, and it was cold and not unpleasant on his throat. Hopefully that would be enough—as long as he didn’t think too hard about the biology.The suit told him his heart rate was steadying and his blood pressure was coming down. Something was working. He bent the knee experimentally and its range of motion had increased slightly. It was a slow process. Ten minutes later he could put weight on it, and another ten minutes he could bend it all the way. He waited until he could trust it to function as designed, trust that it wouldn’t fail him under fire, before he stepped out of the alcove.And almost ran into the pentapod standing just outside.Instinct said dodge but he caught on the alcove edge and went sprawling into the corner between it and a barrel, fighting his own suit to get the crowbar up in the narrow space.The pentapod didn’t move.Its red eye blinked down at him, then it turned and walked away.Freeman sat up, heart pounding loud in his ears. He untangled himself from the corner and rearranged the arsenal on his tool belt. The pentapod hadn’t attacked.He let the Xen gun reattach itself, wincing as its tendrils sought skin. The suit murmured blood loss detected but it was a minor trade for regenerating ammunition.Why hadn’t the pentapod killed him? He’d made a complete fool of himself. The alcove had healed his knee and the bruising left by the trooper’s gun, but it hadn’t repaired more than seventy-two hours without sleep. Reaction times were inconsistent, errors building up in communication between mind and body.It should have killed him. They were always hostile. He knew the bite of their energy, the burning sensation as it danced over the HEV and penetrated the joints to find conductive flesh. He wasn’t alive due to any skill of his own, due to a lucky shot or a well-chosen bit of cover.He was alive because it had chosen to let him live.Why?The red eyes blinked back at him from the factory rim, from three stories of catwalks and alcoves and shadows.
They build with organics. They build with flesh.
Either he was more valuable to them as a living resource than a dead one, or not everything in Xen was his enemy. Or both.He moved through the factory, keeping his distance from them. He had to look away, turn his back to the creatures. Had to keep moving. He didn’t want to leave living enemies behind him. It wasn’t his way- they could still shoot. They could change their mind. It was a trick, a trap--no. No time for paranoia. No margin to let the mind dwell on fear.Data had indicated they were hostile, but the data set was incomplete. These ones were not hostile, according to the data. According to twenty red eyes blinking back at him from the shadows, and the fact that he was still alive.Trust the data. Keep moving forward.Trust the data.This is why they sent a physicist, he thought.The only way out of the room he was in was to join the barrels on a conveyor belt and let it take him wherever they went.The next room was darker, more shadows. A red eye blinked from the level above. He watched it, wary but willing to hold his fire.Then it arched its back and yellow lightning rippled towards him. Ah, now they were shooting at him. Maybe he'd penetrated past the foyer and was now considered a threat instead of merely a lost tourist. Or maybe the first group had been a different tier of pentapod, unable to recognize an enemy or unwilling to risk themselves in battle.His knee twinged but held up to the contortion of a fast step behind a barrel. Energy seared past him, close enough to send small sparks along his arm and shoulder and stand his hair on end. From somewhere overhead came the more guttural sound of a gasbag's plasma bolts.Perfect. The pentapod's energy bolt died out and he rolled into its path and shot it while it recharged. The gas bag was somewhere above, weaving around the factory superstructure, but the Xen gun's bullets followed it in a golden swarm until it died.He was liking the Xen gun. Maybe these alien bio-technologists were on to something there. Give your bullet enough tiny-brain insect intelligence to seek and let it round the corners for you. But there were other implications of its adaptability to his biology and signaling. He ought to have been biolocked out of Xen technology by virtue of his comparatively foreign origin. Why craft a living weapon, and then permit it fall into enemy hands? Clearly, Xen was not the biological monolith that Earth was. An organism from a completely different genetic lineage should not have been able to use his biomass for fuel so readily unless it had been designed to generalize beyond its natural capacity.Earth was not Xen's first battlefield.The pentapods and heavy troops likely came from a shared genetic lineage; both had the unique five-limbed design. But the maggot dogs were quadrupeds, and the acid-spitters a two-legged creature without indication of forelimbs. He didn't know enough evolutionary theory to generalize beyond basic physical structure, but it seemed likely Xen had swallowed other worlds and their native species whole, metabolized them down to a useful blueprint and spat them back out into its war machine.
They build with flesh.
The next battle would be fought with tailless bipeds, smooth-skinned, two-eyed, omnivorous, with clever trigger fingers and a penchant for environmental adaptability.He had a job to do. A job to finish. Or he'd die trying, and deprive them of one more soldier.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He ascended the factory’s core with great care. There were no rails, no warning OSHA yellow on the catwalk edges. The darkness below was absolute. Gravity was greater than on the islands. True planet? Immense space station? No windows, no point of orientation.Pentapods stalked the darkness, their red eyes a dim glow until they reared up and shot at him, while overhead the gasbags camouflaged themselves against mottled brown walls and shot down at his back and head. He wielded the Xen gun, letting its seeker swarms rat out his enemies in their corners. The bullets weren’t fast but they were effective, especially in flushing out gasbags from their overhead nooks. His right arm ached and his hand was numb in the glove; a tradeoff he was willing to accept.Freeman was not the only human in the factory, just the last one left alive. He found them in corners, behind barrels, wedged in crevices. Bodies cased in orange, some so desiccated their flesh was brittle and sunken against bone. And sometimes all he found was the HEV, piles of orange armor like beetle casings.Years of Collections teams. Different generations of HEV, from thin first-generation armor weak to chemical degradation to mid-generation, with a unique woven mesh that flexed with impact but might be pierced by shrapnel, and to the last version, an unpowered, unintegrated version of his own suit, the ones he’d helped develop in the last twelve months.Freeman was not a perfectionist; he knew too much about human fallibility to ever expect perfection from them. But he had standards. High ones. Ones that said there is no bad data, only incomplete data, and so we’ll gather data until the data is complete. Until it is correct. He’d delayed the launch of the integrated suit, not on a whim, but on the very necessary need for more information. More testing. A better, more intuitive onboard computer and medical software. More rugged armor plating. He'd delayed its development by every method at his disposal because he knew it could be better. Knew the underlay could be woven to fit more securely, balance weight more efficiently, clean itself for less chance of skin infection, be interwoven with a silver-based fiber for microbial resistance.Had his delays, his demand for only the best possible product, cost these men and women their lives?They’d died alone, injured, fighting, crawling for shelter. Screaming for help, or in silence, hoping they’d be overlooked to die in peace?This is my data, he thought. Black Mesa bore the responsibility of shoving them through a teleport gate to the far side of reality to steal metamaterials from an alien world. But he’d had the technology to save them and he’d been sitting on it, because no one told him the truth.If Black Mesa had been honest, the Cascade wouldn’t have happened, the Collections team would have been outfitted with true integrated suits designed to protect them from a hostile alien world, and Earth would not now be facing the business end of the Xen invasion force.For want of a very specific kind of nail, he thought, as he stripped power packs from the back of a dead suit. The power packs were two generations old but he had an adapter still integrated into his own suit. The little energy left in them would help.He lost all orientation in the factory and proceeded by whatever path was available. He cleared a warehouse room of pentapods and gas bags, and found the only available exit blocked by a line of barrels. The explosive pouch made short work of them, and when he picked his way through the remnants, he made another discovery.They were not barrels. They were chrysalises.He recognized the heavy brown limbs, the short trunk-like torso, the smell of its yellow ichor. Each one held a developing heavy trooper. Every barrel in the factory was a soldier, all countless thousands of them. The miracle of a butterfly weaponized. Program the developmental sequence, spawn the larva, provide protein and let nature’s own 3D printer do the rest. Like an insect hijacking a plant to produce a gall, Xen had hijacked a metamorphosis to produce a soldier.He took ammunition from a body beside a healing pod. The body was a shrunken dried husk, bones rattling loose inside a first-generation HEV, little more than a basket of plating stitched to a body suit. It predated even Freeman’s tenure at Black Mesa, developed, in theory, for use in disaster rescue and cleanup. It hadn’t tested well against pentapod energy weapons.He let the vapor in the pod sooth the ankle that hurt when he put weight on it and cover the burns on his upper arm, from when he’d dodged a pentapod and been struck by the gasbag he hadn’t seen. The Xen gun on his arm tightened itself, digging deeper into his skin. Recharging from nutrients in the vapor, maybe.The only way forward lead through what passed for the factory’s duct system. He didn’t like the look of it. He backtracked, circling the route he’d come twice before resigning himself. There was no other way through, and by the continuous clamor of machinery and guttural pentapod voices, that’s where he needed to go. He crawled head first on his belly through the floor-level gap, eyes and throat burning from the fumes.The ventilation shaft got him through a five-meter-thick bulwark into the inner factory, where pentapods shuffled materials up and down an enormous ladder of lifts and platforms. The shaft went down, deep down, and it smelled strangely animal, warm and organic. He dropped onto a narrow ledge circling the shaft, barely wide as his boots.And it was crawling with enemies.A pentapod saw him, its red eye flashed and it flung electricity his way. He shot it and ran for an alcove, desperate to get away from the cliff-edged catwalk. Another pentapod was waiting there, dark brown skin against dark brown walls, and its energy surge slammed into his shoulder. He didn’t fight the fall and let his own momentum carry him behind a barrel. The Xen gun’s bullets found it and it died screeching in its own language.More came. Gasbags circled like hawks; the air stank with their sulfur as he pierced their balloons. The pentapods were more cautious, moving from cover to cover, daring him to crack open the chrysalises they hid behind and face their contents.Finally the shadows stayed quiet, stayed dark around him, and he saw no more red eyes. The skirmish had pushed him up two levels and into what looked like an access hall. He followed the hall, hoping for a healing pod, and found one.Occupied.The pentapod in it steadied itself with one claw on the wall, another wrapped around its bleeding middle. Its back was to him but one red eye flashed over its shoulder.It had four eyes. He’d never been close enough to one, without killing it, to notice. One big red eye in the middle, three more around it. It was watching him now from one of those small corner eyes.He’d kill it if it moved. He’d blow its head off if it turned and started spinning energy. But right now, way it was, it wasn’t going anywhere.Not a threat, the human part of his mind said, the part that had killed too many things.He couldn’t turn his back on it. He couldn’t walk away with a living enemy behind him, so he backed away. Gun up and trained on it. The Xen gun twitched around his fingers but he held it still, said no. He wasn’t a soldier purging life, he was just trying to live. He watched, eyes locked on that unblinking point of red, until the hallway hid it from his sight.His path went up. The map didn’t tell him much, but when he saw the hurricane-spiral portal hovering beneath black void he knew where to go. He shot six pentapods and four gasbags and rode the stomach-churning lift to its edge.The ring blazed with green light, portal-light, but through its tendrils he looked down into the factory’s core shaft. He’d have to jump. Jump, and trust it’d take him where he needed to go.Bullets don’t kill you. Gravity kills you. He knelt on the platform’s narrow lip and gauged the jump, but there was no vector path that’d take him through the ring and onto safe ground if, in fact, it was not the portal he wanted.Sooner or later Xen would learn to close doors, he thought.And sooner or later he’d have to try.Only way forward. Only path remaining.His heart pounded wildly in his chest as he stood, half anticipating a long, long fall to the bottom. He stepped back, then took a running leap.Energy surged around him. He felt the dragging sensation of it, resistance, a protest- and he was through the other side, on a grey rocky island in darkness.A low-frequency rumble throbbed through flesh and stone. He thought he heard words in the machine-like echo but couldn’t be sure. Nothing in Xen had spoken a language he recognized thus far, so he filed the thought aside as his own mind’s reach for familiarity.He was alone in a gap between worlds.Behind him the green portal flared, flickered and died out. In front of him, vivid in the darkness, a ring of crystalline structures protected a red portal.This was new.Gravity was near-Earth. He jumped for the next floating rock and it held utterly solid beneath him, as if he were standing on a planet and not an object in space.His footsteps echoed.They should not have echoed. He should not have been breathing. There should not be a down. How deceived where his senses, where had that portal sent him? He looked around, up, everywhere- no visible light source but still there was reflected light. Air pressure, air movement through his hair.Too much data for illusion. Too much data that didn’t fit a known paradigm. Floating living fungus in a nebula he could take, but this place behaved in violation of too many physical principles.He circled the central platform, eyeing its red nexus of a portal. It oscillated in an eight-pointed fractal, shivering with constant motion.The low rumble came again, and this time he heard it.AT LAST, it said. I AM THE LAST. ARRIVED. His head hurt. The Xen gun writhed on his arm, biting sharp into him. The portal shivered in resonance with the words.One way forward.He stepped into the red energy and let it take him.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Air. Falling. Falling. Gravity kills.He flailed, found his eyes, found down and up. And fell past a face staring back at him, enormous, wrinkled, bilaterally symmetric, fetal. Like an embryonic human, but grotesquely old.Then his back hit liquid and he sank and scrambled up, choking out bitter fluids and slime. The life-form above him spoke, and he knew what he’d been hearing.FREEMAN, it said. The mouth did not move but his ears and his core ached with the sound. YOU CANNOT KNOW. And then it shot at him, purple-tinged plasma like ball lightning, each bolt the size of his torso, and he shot back.He’d found the Nihilanth and it knew his name. He didn’t have a context for what that ought to mean but he sensed weight behind the words. This was the creature bent on taking Earth, the thing he’d been sent to kill-If it was killable, if any weapon in his arsenal could make a dent-and it was ready for him.He ducked behind a spike of brown organic growth and peeled the Xen gun off his arm. He discarded it into the murky water and hefted the yellow energy gun instead. Blood dripped from his hands, leaching through a hundred tiny holes the living weapon had eaten in the underlay.The yellow gun made a dent, cut a swath of flesh away, but the Nihilanth undented itself.Healed itself.Of course it would. He wiped char and slime from his face and leaned back against the spire. He could hear it behind him, above him, but its bulk prevented it from getting any closer. It was too large for its own chamber. But he watched it draw in energy from the metamaterial crystals studded around the dome’s apex.Resonant crystalline teleportation, he realized. It was drawing energy through the twinned crystal faces, exactly as he’d been doing. It manipulated them itself, without need of external device or energy source. This thing was holding the gateway from Xen to Earth open, controlling the troops pouring through the sieve it’d made of reality. Manipulating twinned metamaterial crystals wasn’t the peak of its technology. It was a kitchen-drawer bandaid.He hefted the yellow gun again and fired. Again, the creature healed itself.It groaned and roared and seared out a line of purple plasma.Freeman dodged but not fast enough. The margin of a bolt rippled close, melting the HEV from shoulder to knee. His whole left side was on fire, suit compromised, skin burning under the overheated carbon fiber. He stumbled to his knees in his little sliver of cover. The HEV bleated warning after warning before going silent in a system failure.Another glancing blow would probably kill him; a direct hit certainly would.He thought, madly, quickly, in the seconds before his nerves caught up and pain management took over. The crystals were its key- as long as those existed, it’d just keep healing itself. Metamaterial crystals were tough. He’d shattered plenty but only under enormous resonant strain.He’d never tried shooting one before.The suit didn’t need to list off his injuries. His left side was stiff as HEV joints melted together. It rode heavily on his shoulders, its internal structure and weight distribution compromised. His left arm shook and his right hand was swollen and sore from the Xen gun. He didn’t have much time before his mind caught up with the burns and made focus difficult.He traded guns for the revolver. It was a comfortable weight; he’d been saving its scarce ammunition for when something needed a heavy, reliable slug. Bullets tended to go where they got aimed. His hands were steady. He shot the first crystal-two bullets to shatter-and ran for cover, for another angle. Second crystal down.Move! His legs were sluggish in the thick liquid, his left knee joint stiff. He was fighting the suit for mobility when he needed it most. He tripped and landed hard on his knees just behind the next spire. The liquid seeped into the suit, burning on raw flesh.But he had an angle on the last crystal. The Nihilanth was drawing on it, as if it sensed his intent. He aimed, held himself very still, elbows in to minimize the shake in his forearms, and shot it twice.It exploded in a cloud of yellow shards. The Nihilanth roared in fury and a livid green light blossomed between its claws.Teleporter. DECEIVED YOU. HAS DECEIVED YOU. The voice chased him as the teleport sphere descended.Where in the universe could it send him?He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to find out. He didn’t think it would be Earth.Freeman ran but the sphere of green energy followed him in a mockingly graceful arc. He saw his shadow out in front of him as it bore down, felt his hair stand on end with its charge, the tug-And he was falling again.The walls were dirty white and segmented, ribbed above him. He didn’t want to look down. Just let himself fall.Water. Murky oily water, icy cold, closed over him. The impact knocked his breath out and he came up sputtering, gasping for air. He was inside a long, narrow dome, at the bottom. Far above him he heard the signature hum of a teleport. The doorway out.Nihilanth was playing games.He sloshed over to a ledge and sat down on it to catch his breath. The suit was wet inside, heavy on him and the left knee, elbow and shoulder joints were damaged. He had ammunition, had at least a shot or two left in the yellow gun, had a rocket and a handful of grenades. He’d wounded it, made it angry, taken away its healing crystals. He had a chance. Its words bothered him, but then, he didn’t expect reasonable conversation from an entity making outright war on his species. No matter who had started the fight.He’d come to end it, and end it he would, or die trying.But the top of the dome was a long ways up, so he stayed sitting for ten more minutes and relished the moment of comparative peace.The structure was a skeleton, bones of some ancient, and enormous, creature. Gravity’s pull was less than in the Nihilanth’s chamber. He’d been sent here to die climbing, like some myth of purgatory, forever trying to reach an unattainable goal.It had worked before.He found the first body on the dislodged, calcified rib bone, dirty orange against the mineral white. A man, not long dead, HEV a recent work.Freeman knelt beside the body and exchanged what parts he could with it, and used its one remaining power pack. A little energy into the carbon layer was enough to excite it, not enough to fix it, and it dug into the burns under its damage in an all too familiar way. He was going to have to fix that, figure out how to make those fibers align themselves away from the skin instead of against it.Mental notes for later. Because there was going to be a later.He found the second body half-way up, this one much older. A woman, long hair tangled under her. He didn’t want to risk the old meds in the med pack she still carried, but he had no choice. Couldn’t possibly be worse than what he’d already taken. Than alien spit-derived breathable mist.Reaching the third platform was the hardest. He fell three times, all the way back to the bottom. And he wasn’t surprised when he finally made the jump and found a body there too.Recent. Very fresh. Blood still red and wet.Breathing.Unconscious, but breathing. Badly wounded. The man had made it to the top but was unable to continue, to face Nihilanth again. Freeman didn’t blame him. He didn’t want to jump for the teleport and return to that place either, but he wasn’t going to die trapped here. Not when he could still move.He wondered if he’d be back, how many times he’d climb the skeleton before he finally joined one of these colleagues, added his own to the collection of suits littering the Xen countryside.And he jumped.The teleport jerked him up and then he was, again, falling.He was getting used to it, and this time he was ready. He had the shotgun up and firing as he fell, both barrels as fast as he could into the thing’s eyes. It screamed and reached for him but he fell past its grasp and rolled into the muck. It threw its plasma at him and he scrambled for cover, making it in time. Then stepped out and shot and shot and shot, until the shotgun was empty. He discarded it and drew the hand gun. Every bullet he had, every last thing he could throw at it, he would. And if he had to climb the spires and tear at it with his own two hands, he’d do that too.The head blossomed open. A grotesque display, but something clicked. It was drawing energy for its plasma from itself. Some nonsense about life force flickered across his mind but he shoved it aside. This wasn’t the moment for fairy tales; the thing had exposed its last reserve, and that left it vulnerable.He just had to get up there.Platform niches ringed the walls; he’d seen a jump pad across the cavern. Yes, there it was. He made the trajectory calculation from it to the platform and up.And he ran.The knee didn’t like it. Neither knee liked it, but he told them to bend and so they bent. If he lived long enough to be sore later he’d count it as gain. He hefted the yellow gun as he ran.The jump pad was there, and up- and below him green teleport light snuffed out in the water. He scrambled onto the narrow ledge and took two fast steps to the next jump pad, hoping his direction was correct. Hoping this would work.Nihilanth was moving too, trying to keep pace with him. He was on a collision course, but he was high enough to see over the cranial structure and into the meshwork of brain, or whatever it was. It was glowing, energized, a crystalline entity inside flesh, furious with him, and about to die.He shot down into it with everything the metamaterials gun had left.It seared into his hands, threatening overload as he arced over Nihilanth and fell. He dropped it and hoped the explosion wouldn’t kill him before he knew if he’d been successful. He hit the liquid and the shallow floor under it and scrambled for cover. His eyes didn’t want to focus. The final jump had dislodged his glasses. He felt madly around for them and found them almost between his knees, frame bent but whole.And he looked up to a storm of energy.Nihilanth was exploding in a sea of plasma and teleport spheres. Lightning branched out from it in all directions, searing black along the walls. The chamber stank of ozone and burned hair. He ducked behind a nearby spire and hoped. Hoped for anything. To not die slowly, trapped here forever, but to not die before he knew for sure, for sure that it was dead. That Earth was safe.The job done.If a body could be bothered beyond the grave, his would be if he left work unfinished.The green spiderweb of portal energy descended with Nihilanth’s body, danced around his spire, and finally caught him there.He didn’t run from it. Let it take him, wherever it was taking the dying alien.Darkness.Long darkness. The sound of his own breath and heartbeat, then nothing, and then sound again.And the sensation of being jerked rudely to the side, off course, and the sudden heavy weight of Earthlike gravity. More than Earthlike, forcing him down, holding him still.Light. Blue, dim. Movement. Alive, or at least the nerves were. Knees finally overruled him and refused to bend. His right hand was frozen in a claw-grip, fingers empty but searching for a trigger. The arm ached and throbbed as circulation returned. The suit- he kept waiting for the blood loss detected bleat but it was dead now, a cold inanimate thing hanging loose on his body; circuits charred, the carbon fiber compromised beyond self-repair. He steadied himself against the wall at his back, a wall he could feel but not see, and looked up.A man faced him. Grey-skinned, suit-clad. Familiar. The watcher. The Colleague. On the catwalk, back in Black Mesa. Movement from the corner of his eye, time and time again. Sighting down the barrel at that long drawn face, choosing not to shoot. Hair raised on his neck, feeling watched. Feeling like data in someone else's notebook. Assessment. Judgement. Performance review.They were in a tram, hurtling through a surprisingly crowded void. Or that’s how his mind interpreted the visual cue of movement beyond the tiny invisible cage, insisting on applying logic and familiar framework to stave off mania. He'd brought down one monster and been snatched by another, also clearly able to twist time and space. And the man offered no explanation. He just spoke, voice dry and inflection wrong. Alien in a person skin, the hand that had pulled him from under Nihilanth’s dying curse.
”Gordon Freeman, in the flesh…”
What flesh there was left.
He forced one knee up, then the other. The body still lived, and he was still its master.
And he signed No.