(no subject)
The metal door sliding down behind them cut off most of the passageway's light, but it also cut off the sounds of antlions screeching. Gordon considered it an acceptable alternative. He followed the glimmer of light from around the corner up ahead, shoved open the chain-link gate at the end, and stepped into a small room that might once have been some kind of mine office. The door at the far left end of the room was barricaded by a pair of tables; straight ahead-
Straight ahead, there was a blue-clad corpse in a mustard-yellow recliner. Gordon's thoughts leapt straight to headcrab zombies lying in wait. As he approached warily, his gun at the ready, he saw he'd been wrong. For one thing, even after the parasites were done with them, headcrab zombies generally had more... well... head. For another, the big dark smear on the metal wall behind it, which he'd taken for rust at first, looked very much like dried blood. And unless he was very much mistaken, that was a fallen shotgun on the floor beside the chair.
"A poignant scene," commented the Vortigaunt. "An eternity's repose. It brings peaceful thoughts, does it not?"
Gordon stared at the alien. No words came; he just shook his head and started heaving the dead man's barricade out of the way. Maybe if they weren't working with a literal deadline (how long had they wasted down here on pointless antlion battles? How much time that Alyx didn't have had those damned spitters cost them?), he'd have done something for the corpse, but...
He was still more than a little stunned by the Vortigaunt's tastelessness as they entered the dirt-floored tunnel on the other side of the door. And then he was a little more stunned as something that screamed like an antlion but charged like a bull elephant rammed into the wooden barricade blocking a nearby tunnel. As he picked himself up off the floor, rubbing at his head in shock, the Vortigaunt said, "Ah, the ancient Guardian. Retrieving the extract may not be... unchallenging."
It screamed again and rammed into the barricade. Gordon caught a glimpse of something glowing and huge through the rain of splintered boards. He crept forward as far as he dared to peer at it more carefully, and saw only galloping luminescence fading into the tunnel distance. It had to have been at least the size of the Nova Prospekt bull.
"The Guardian's presence guarantees the nearness of larval clusters," said the Vortigaunt. "They are commonly posted near the young."
'Not unchallenging' indeed. Gordon's bones ached at the mere thought. The last time he'd fought an antlion that size it'd nearly snapped his spine against the wall.
For a while, it seemed as if they might have been luckier than the Vortigaunt had thought. The only antlions they met as they continued along were the glowing grubs. Eventually, though, they came to an exposed pit housing an elevator shaft and a tunnel opening, red with emergency lighting. The Vortigaunt leaned forward, craning its head this way and that. "A wind from below bears the scent of extract," it noted. "The stuff we seek lies at the bottom of this pit."
There was no power to the controls, Gordon noted as he circled the pit and came back to the elevator. Nothing could move the thing short of cutting vital cables. More unnervingly, there was no bottom anywhere in sight. Without an abseil line or something of that nature the only way to the bottom was at 9.8 meters per second squared.
"This shaft connects to the chamber above, where my kin sustain the Alyx Vance," the Vortigaunt said. "Once we have the extract, we can rejoin them quickly, provided we can restore elevator function..."
Gordon wasn't really listening, though. That tunnel in the side of the pit was a ventilation duct, and he'd used those as a means of getting around obstacles plenty of times before. As long as he didn't think about how ridiculously tiny his landing zone was and how likely a horrible gravity-driven death would be if he missed it, he'd be fine. Without further ado (or, to be more accurate, without further thought), he backed up a few steps and took a running leap for the lip of the duct. There was a moment's heart-stopping scrabble on the edge, but only a moment's; he pulled himself up and clung for a moment to the vent floor, panting.
"Bravely done, Freeman! When you reach the lower chamber, you must find a way to summon me! But do not kill the Guardian, or the extract will be ruined!"
Gordon would have flipped the Vortigaunt off, but to be honest, if their roles were reversed he'd have been only too happy to stay behind and wait too. He brought himself to his hands and knees and started to pick his way forward. A huge, powerless fan blocked most of the tunnel up ahead, but two of its blades were missing. The space afforded was just barely enough for Gordon and his arsenal to scrape through, from dimness into darkness. And then, as the tunnel split at a T-intersection, into light- the light of antlion grubs, clustered around an acid-eaten hole that went down farther than Gordon could see.
( "I always get the shakes before a drop. I've had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can't really be afraid-" )
"Planet P, here I come," Gordon murmured, and jumped into the hole before he could change his mind.
Its walls were brilliant yellow, both where they bore grubs and where they didn't, and webbing tore away as he plummeted. Smudgy spots flashed past him, and then there was nothing around him but whistling air. For an instant he had the impression of a starry night as he fell; then he hit the water below, feet first. When he surfaced (grateful beyond measure once again for the duct-tape strap that held his glasses on), he saw the ceiling of the chamber he'd been dropped into was covered in honeycomb-like structures, many of which bore tiny glowing speckles of light. The larval clusters of which the Vortigaunt spoke? Maybe. It was hard to think what else they could be. But there was no way he could notify the alien now, not this far down and out of the way; he would have to navigate his way back alone.
When Gordon switched his suit's light on he could just barely make out a gap in the stalagmite barrier that separated the pool he'd landed in from the chamber at large. Under the surface, alas. Nothing he could do about that. He took a deep breath and dove- only to find out he was anything but the first person to try doing so. There were Combine corpses jammed in the underwater passage; he kicked frantically, scrabbling past them and breaking the surface as swiftly as he could. Being alone with the dead he didn't mind, but being alone with the dead somewhere that their presence was likely to trap him? That was a problem.
(A few months that added up to a lifetime ago, that thought would have been impossible. He'd have to look at that realization later, though.)
The larger pool took a while to explore; there were barnacles on the ceiling, their tongues dangling down into the water, and he had no desire to get caught by one of those things. He eventually found the way out, though: another yellow-walled grub tunnel. He had to crouch down at first, and then crawl on hands and knees, as the tunnel got smaller. Just as he was wondering if he'd have to start shedding guns to fit through the passage, he rounded a corner. The floor beyond wasn't yellow. It was brown and red, painted all over in oxidized shades Gordon knew entirely too well. He closed his eyes, willing the image of that puddle on the table to go away; then he moved on. Eventually he got up the nerve to open his eyes again.
The walls were still grub-yellow, but the tunnel opened out into somewhere larger up ahead. Larva honeycombs took up most of the ceiling. He crept forward a little further, relieved to see it was only a tunnel, not a chamber.
... a tunnel guarded by acid-lions.
They were there every time he turned a corner, every time he ducked out of the line of fire in search of grubs to squash for their pellets. They loomed up at him when he thought he'd found his way clear to the next tunnel, vestigial wings flaring as they spat their blazing venom at him. The hissing screech they made just before the shotgun shells blew them apart would be with him for the rest of his life, he knew- as short as that might be. Where they were coming from he didn't know. There wasn't enough space for them all in the narrow, cramped quarters he was trying to flee. But they kept coming... and then they didn't, and it dawned on him that he'd worked his way into somewhere open, falling into another comb-studded cavern. A wide, worn-away stone bridge crossed its depths. He stared at it a moment, trying to control the shaking born of adrenaline and who knew what chemicals in his blood.
It was a moment too long. The vast glowing bulk of the Guardian (oh, hell, it really was as big as the Nova Prospekt bull) thundered into sight at the far end of the bridge. The monster bellowed, its cry echoing through the chamber. It lowered its head for the inexorable charge-
There was no time for thought or even for instinct. Only for pure, raw, animal spinal reflex. Gordon ran.
The tunnels on the far side were the stuff of pure nightmare. Grey stone tunnels with huge pulsating cocoons on the walls. Yellow grub-tunnels, splashed with blood. One whose floor was slippery with icy, ankle-deep water. And always, always, no matter how desperately he ran or how hard he pushed the suit's sprint function, that THING was just behind him. He tripped, once, over a skeleton that still bore a few tatters of clothing. The time it took him to get up cost him dearly; the very next thing he felt was the phenomenal force of the Guardian's impact flinging him down the tunnel and into the stone wall.
"Warning," the suit suddenly said. "Blood toxin levels detected..."
Was it his imagination, or was the voice slurred? It was still working, he could tell, by now he knew the feeling of whatever chemicals the suit used being pumped into his bloodstream to compensate for the latest foulness, but... The Guardian bellowed. Gordon clenched his jaw against the searing pain and dragged himself into a grub tunnel before the thing could reach him.
As he smashed the nearest grub with his fist and caught its pellet, the thought completed itself: the suit's voice sounded like a tape player did just before its batteries ran out. When was the last time he'd been able to charge it? He hadn't seen a battery in... he didn't know. And the Vortigaunt hadn't been able to do much with it, either. He'd been draining the sprint capability all the way down every time, forcing it to recharge from the suit's main power supply. It'd been torn and chewed up and burned away by acid, and forced to regenerate, more times than he could count. If it ran out of power down here...
If it ran out of power down here, now, there was absolutely no way he'd be able to make it back to the surface. The suit was too heavy, and he was too badly damaged himself, even with the grub pellets. If the suit ran out of power he'd be trapped some unspeakable distance below the surface, paralyzed in the damn thing until the antlions came for him.
If, he told himself. That's all it is. Just if.
The other possibility wasn't one he could afford to consider.
As the latest round of chemicals from the suit finally took hold, he tentatively started forward. A sound of galloping footsteps reached him. Breath hissing, he jerked back into the grub-tunnel just in time for the Guardian to thunder past. Not much liking the idea of sprinting again, he opted to head back the way the monstrous thing had come, leaning against the tunnel walls and moving with great care. It was enough; ahead there was a doorway, an actual doorway, nailed shut from the other side but still somewhere that human hands had been-
The whuffling roar of the Guardian sounded again. Gordon ripped the gravity gun free from its moorings and frantically started blasting away at the barricade. The instant he had enough space to do so, he wedged himself through the hole into the narrow shaft beyond. None too soon, either. The Guardian lunged after him. For one heart-stopping instant he thought the beast would reach him- but its body was too big to push any further into the shaft, and its back-spines kept it from retreating. Gordon nearly collapsed in relief.
The floor beneath him did collapse, but since it was only about an eight-foot drop into a human-made tunnel, he was willing to forgive its failure. He made it back to his feet and started following the minecart tracks he'd landed on. They had to go somewhere that led to the upper levels eventually, after all.
'Somewhere' turned out to be a sizable cavern with more of the honeycombs than he'd seen anywhere yet studding the ceiling far above. As he continued along into the cavern, he caught sight of familiar machinery- and heard a distant, familiar voice. "I sense the Freeman down below!" it called. "Restore the elevator's function, that we may reconvene!"
He'd never been so glad to hear that damned voice in his life.
"I descend," the Vortigaunt announced as Gordon found the obstructive metal jammed in the elevator's gears and worked it loose. "Abide a moment longer, that we may proceed together."
Moments later- they seemed like hours- the elevator car slid into sight and the Vortigaunt stepped off. "The scent of ripe perfection beckons," it said. "Follow, Freeman, while I track it to the source. You have done the hardest work, gaining entrance to this chamber. Truly, the life of Alyx Vance is in able hands."
He offered the Vortigaunt a weak smile; it was all he was capable of. But he was pretty sure it understood.
Straight ahead, there was a blue-clad corpse in a mustard-yellow recliner. Gordon's thoughts leapt straight to headcrab zombies lying in wait. As he approached warily, his gun at the ready, he saw he'd been wrong. For one thing, even after the parasites were done with them, headcrab zombies generally had more... well... head. For another, the big dark smear on the metal wall behind it, which he'd taken for rust at first, looked very much like dried blood. And unless he was very much mistaken, that was a fallen shotgun on the floor beside the chair.
"A poignant scene," commented the Vortigaunt. "An eternity's repose. It brings peaceful thoughts, does it not?"
Gordon stared at the alien. No words came; he just shook his head and started heaving the dead man's barricade out of the way. Maybe if they weren't working with a literal deadline (how long had they wasted down here on pointless antlion battles? How much time that Alyx didn't have had those damned spitters cost them?), he'd have done something for the corpse, but...
He was still more than a little stunned by the Vortigaunt's tastelessness as they entered the dirt-floored tunnel on the other side of the door. And then he was a little more stunned as something that screamed like an antlion but charged like a bull elephant rammed into the wooden barricade blocking a nearby tunnel. As he picked himself up off the floor, rubbing at his head in shock, the Vortigaunt said, "Ah, the ancient Guardian. Retrieving the extract may not be... unchallenging."
It screamed again and rammed into the barricade. Gordon caught a glimpse of something glowing and huge through the rain of splintered boards. He crept forward as far as he dared to peer at it more carefully, and saw only galloping luminescence fading into the tunnel distance. It had to have been at least the size of the Nova Prospekt bull.
"The Guardian's presence guarantees the nearness of larval clusters," said the Vortigaunt. "They are commonly posted near the young."
'Not unchallenging' indeed. Gordon's bones ached at the mere thought. The last time he'd fought an antlion that size it'd nearly snapped his spine against the wall.
For a while, it seemed as if they might have been luckier than the Vortigaunt had thought. The only antlions they met as they continued along were the glowing grubs. Eventually, though, they came to an exposed pit housing an elevator shaft and a tunnel opening, red with emergency lighting. The Vortigaunt leaned forward, craning its head this way and that. "A wind from below bears the scent of extract," it noted. "The stuff we seek lies at the bottom of this pit."
There was no power to the controls, Gordon noted as he circled the pit and came back to the elevator. Nothing could move the thing short of cutting vital cables. More unnervingly, there was no bottom anywhere in sight. Without an abseil line or something of that nature the only way to the bottom was at 9.8 meters per second squared.
"This shaft connects to the chamber above, where my kin sustain the Alyx Vance," the Vortigaunt said. "Once we have the extract, we can rejoin them quickly, provided we can restore elevator function..."
Gordon wasn't really listening, though. That tunnel in the side of the pit was a ventilation duct, and he'd used those as a means of getting around obstacles plenty of times before. As long as he didn't think about how ridiculously tiny his landing zone was and how likely a horrible gravity-driven death would be if he missed it, he'd be fine. Without further ado (or, to be more accurate, without further thought), he backed up a few steps and took a running leap for the lip of the duct. There was a moment's heart-stopping scrabble on the edge, but only a moment's; he pulled himself up and clung for a moment to the vent floor, panting.
"Bravely done, Freeman! When you reach the lower chamber, you must find a way to summon me! But do not kill the Guardian, or the extract will be ruined!"
Gordon would have flipped the Vortigaunt off, but to be honest, if their roles were reversed he'd have been only too happy to stay behind and wait too. He brought himself to his hands and knees and started to pick his way forward. A huge, powerless fan blocked most of the tunnel up ahead, but two of its blades were missing. The space afforded was just barely enough for Gordon and his arsenal to scrape through, from dimness into darkness. And then, as the tunnel split at a T-intersection, into light- the light of antlion grubs, clustered around an acid-eaten hole that went down farther than Gordon could see.
( "I always get the shakes before a drop. I've had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can't really be afraid-" )
"Planet P, here I come," Gordon murmured, and jumped into the hole before he could change his mind.
Its walls were brilliant yellow, both where they bore grubs and where they didn't, and webbing tore away as he plummeted. Smudgy spots flashed past him, and then there was nothing around him but whistling air. For an instant he had the impression of a starry night as he fell; then he hit the water below, feet first. When he surfaced (grateful beyond measure once again for the duct-tape strap that held his glasses on), he saw the ceiling of the chamber he'd been dropped into was covered in honeycomb-like structures, many of which bore tiny glowing speckles of light. The larval clusters of which the Vortigaunt spoke? Maybe. It was hard to think what else they could be. But there was no way he could notify the alien now, not this far down and out of the way; he would have to navigate his way back alone.
When Gordon switched his suit's light on he could just barely make out a gap in the stalagmite barrier that separated the pool he'd landed in from the chamber at large. Under the surface, alas. Nothing he could do about that. He took a deep breath and dove- only to find out he was anything but the first person to try doing so. There were Combine corpses jammed in the underwater passage; he kicked frantically, scrabbling past them and breaking the surface as swiftly as he could. Being alone with the dead he didn't mind, but being alone with the dead somewhere that their presence was likely to trap him? That was a problem.
(A few months that added up to a lifetime ago, that thought would have been impossible. He'd have to look at that realization later, though.)
The larger pool took a while to explore; there were barnacles on the ceiling, their tongues dangling down into the water, and he had no desire to get caught by one of those things. He eventually found the way out, though: another yellow-walled grub tunnel. He had to crouch down at first, and then crawl on hands and knees, as the tunnel got smaller. Just as he was wondering if he'd have to start shedding guns to fit through the passage, he rounded a corner. The floor beyond wasn't yellow. It was brown and red, painted all over in oxidized shades Gordon knew entirely too well. He closed his eyes, willing the image of that puddle on the table to go away; then he moved on. Eventually he got up the nerve to open his eyes again.
The walls were still grub-yellow, but the tunnel opened out into somewhere larger up ahead. Larva honeycombs took up most of the ceiling. He crept forward a little further, relieved to see it was only a tunnel, not a chamber.
... a tunnel guarded by acid-lions.
They were there every time he turned a corner, every time he ducked out of the line of fire in search of grubs to squash for their pellets. They loomed up at him when he thought he'd found his way clear to the next tunnel, vestigial wings flaring as they spat their blazing venom at him. The hissing screech they made just before the shotgun shells blew them apart would be with him for the rest of his life, he knew- as short as that might be. Where they were coming from he didn't know. There wasn't enough space for them all in the narrow, cramped quarters he was trying to flee. But they kept coming... and then they didn't, and it dawned on him that he'd worked his way into somewhere open, falling into another comb-studded cavern. A wide, worn-away stone bridge crossed its depths. He stared at it a moment, trying to control the shaking born of adrenaline and who knew what chemicals in his blood.
It was a moment too long. The vast glowing bulk of the Guardian (oh, hell, it really was as big as the Nova Prospekt bull) thundered into sight at the far end of the bridge. The monster bellowed, its cry echoing through the chamber. It lowered its head for the inexorable charge-
There was no time for thought or even for instinct. Only for pure, raw, animal spinal reflex. Gordon ran.
The tunnels on the far side were the stuff of pure nightmare. Grey stone tunnels with huge pulsating cocoons on the walls. Yellow grub-tunnels, splashed with blood. One whose floor was slippery with icy, ankle-deep water. And always, always, no matter how desperately he ran or how hard he pushed the suit's sprint function, that THING was just behind him. He tripped, once, over a skeleton that still bore a few tatters of clothing. The time it took him to get up cost him dearly; the very next thing he felt was the phenomenal force of the Guardian's impact flinging him down the tunnel and into the stone wall.
"Warning," the suit suddenly said. "Blood toxin levels detected..."
Was it his imagination, or was the voice slurred? It was still working, he could tell, by now he knew the feeling of whatever chemicals the suit used being pumped into his bloodstream to compensate for the latest foulness, but... The Guardian bellowed. Gordon clenched his jaw against the searing pain and dragged himself into a grub tunnel before the thing could reach him.
As he smashed the nearest grub with his fist and caught its pellet, the thought completed itself: the suit's voice sounded like a tape player did just before its batteries ran out. When was the last time he'd been able to charge it? He hadn't seen a battery in... he didn't know. And the Vortigaunt hadn't been able to do much with it, either. He'd been draining the sprint capability all the way down every time, forcing it to recharge from the suit's main power supply. It'd been torn and chewed up and burned away by acid, and forced to regenerate, more times than he could count. If it ran out of power down here...
If it ran out of power down here, now, there was absolutely no way he'd be able to make it back to the surface. The suit was too heavy, and he was too badly damaged himself, even with the grub pellets. If the suit ran out of power he'd be trapped some unspeakable distance below the surface, paralyzed in the damn thing until the antlions came for him.
If, he told himself. That's all it is. Just if.
The other possibility wasn't one he could afford to consider.
As the latest round of chemicals from the suit finally took hold, he tentatively started forward. A sound of galloping footsteps reached him. Breath hissing, he jerked back into the grub-tunnel just in time for the Guardian to thunder past. Not much liking the idea of sprinting again, he opted to head back the way the monstrous thing had come, leaning against the tunnel walls and moving with great care. It was enough; ahead there was a doorway, an actual doorway, nailed shut from the other side but still somewhere that human hands had been-
The whuffling roar of the Guardian sounded again. Gordon ripped the gravity gun free from its moorings and frantically started blasting away at the barricade. The instant he had enough space to do so, he wedged himself through the hole into the narrow shaft beyond. None too soon, either. The Guardian lunged after him. For one heart-stopping instant he thought the beast would reach him- but its body was too big to push any further into the shaft, and its back-spines kept it from retreating. Gordon nearly collapsed in relief.
The floor beneath him did collapse, but since it was only about an eight-foot drop into a human-made tunnel, he was willing to forgive its failure. He made it back to his feet and started following the minecart tracks he'd landed on. They had to go somewhere that led to the upper levels eventually, after all.
'Somewhere' turned out to be a sizable cavern with more of the honeycombs than he'd seen anywhere yet studding the ceiling far above. As he continued along into the cavern, he caught sight of familiar machinery- and heard a distant, familiar voice. "I sense the Freeman down below!" it called. "Restore the elevator's function, that we may reconvene!"
He'd never been so glad to hear that damned voice in his life.
"I descend," the Vortigaunt announced as Gordon found the obstructive metal jammed in the elevator's gears and worked it loose. "Abide a moment longer, that we may proceed together."
Moments later- they seemed like hours- the elevator car slid into sight and the Vortigaunt stepped off. "The scent of ripe perfection beckons," it said. "Follow, Freeman, while I track it to the source. You have done the hardest work, gaining entrance to this chamber. Truly, the life of Alyx Vance is in able hands."
He offered the Vortigaunt a weak smile; it was all he was capable of. But he was pretty sure it understood.