Rocky Terrain
"So... you want to talk about it?"
There was a long pause, gas-masked face staring into mirrored helmet visor, before the radio frequency finally opened up again. "You broke their arms and legs?!"
"Only the ones that didn't get broken in the fight."
"Yeah, that makes it so much better. Look, can we have this conversation without the headgear? Feels a bit weird to be talking over the radio, even if you did change the frequencies so the Marines won't hear us."
"I already told you, Barney. I'm not taking off my helmet. You can if you want to, and I'll still be able to hear and talk to you fine, but don't bitch at me when shrapnel smacks you in the head. I don't even see the need for a conversation, other than that you're getting all cranky."
"Well... it's just... How are you supposed to be the Good Guy here, if you're doing shit like that?"
"How about the fact that I'm trying to save your asses, while these guys came in specifically to punch all your tickets? You've dealt with these guys already, haven't you?"
"Yeah, I know. But--"
"Look! I know! I could give you a whole song and dance about some fucked-up shit that's been done to my brain before, but fuck that. The main thing is that they set up an ambush, and wanted to either torture and dissect me for science, or throw me in a trash compactor and crush me to death. In any case, I'm not proud of what I did, but as long as these assholes keep showing up and pulling this shit, they're going to keep pissing me off. Can we please accept that and move on?"
Green lenses stared back blankly for a few moments before a sigh crackled over the airwaves. "Yeah, okay. I suppose I can't blame you too much. I mean, I've been getting annoyed at these guys too. Come on. Let's go."
The Black Mesa definition of "open ground," Grif considered to himself as he and Calhoun jogged along it as best they could, was very strange indeed. Apparently, it mainly meant that there weren't any buildings, and that there was a road down which -- if they broke into one of the vehicles in the motor pool -- they could have theoretically driven down and made their way out of the complex entirely. If Alyx and Gordon had told him that there was someone in a nearby town he should see about getting some help, this would've been the best time to do that.
Those weren't his instructions, though, and so instead they moved as best they could across ground that could, at best, be termed "rocky." At worst, which was more often the case, it consisted of mountainous terrain with the occasional small cliff that needed to be climbed up or down. Grif thanked the fact that he'd at least gotten some of his internal organs re-replaced, by an expert surgeon, with pristine ones cloned from his own DNA; otherwise, his poor care of the ones from Simmons that Sarge had badly stitched into him probably wouldn't have been up to his current challenge. Instead, he and Barney were making reasonably good time, headed towards Lambda Complex, and with hardly any contact with anyone else, alien or human. It certainly beat the alternate route, which would have involved crawling through the waste processing systems.
It couldn't last, though, and sure enough, they reached a wall, both literally and figuratively. The building behind which they stood had been built into another part of the mountains, such that what they faced appeared to be an amalgamation of rock and man-made construction. Air gently wafted out of the vent mounted in a part of the wall that was clear of the mountain. Grif and Calhoun looked at each other, then up the rock face for a minute or two, then back at each other.
"We... could maybe cli--"
"No. Oh, hell no, dude. I'd rather crawl that fucking airduct than try that kind of climb."
"Okay, then, since you called it... Crowbars."
Grif sighed, then nodded and got his crowbar out. The vent cover was actually fairly solid, as opposed to some of the others each of them had run across in the last day or so. With each of them prying with their crowbars, though, they were able to pop it off rather easily. The duct's path was mostly downward, with a few direct vertical drops. The last drop was directly onto a vent, which popped out, depositing them into a hallway.
The clattering of metal on the floor was a bit noisy, and Grif could see one blip on his motion tracker, just around the corner and headed their way. He just had time to get his guns up to see that the blip was a guard, at which point he had to not only hold his fire, but also convince the guard not to shoot at them.
"Whoa! Hey, hang on. We're all friends here, 'kay?" He holstered his guns, then pointed at the unit patch on his armor. "I'm Grif, and, well, I suppose you probably already know Calhoun here."
The guard eyed them a bit warily, his expression shifting to puzzlement as Calhoun unhooked his gas mask so the guard could see his face. "Barney? What the hell are doin', wearing that Army shit?"
Calhoun grinned. "Actually, Tanenbaum, it's Marine shit. Our orange pal here, uh, 'liberated' some of it from some soldiers, shortly before we ran into one another. I'm wearing it because we got shit to do and it's better than swapping out security armor all the time. We're trying to get to Lambda Complex. What's the word on getting through here?"
Tanenbaum shook his head. "Nah, it's no good up there; it's all sealed off. The only way out would be to find someone with scanner access who can open the front door. I'm pretty sure there's a few scientists hiding somewhere in the labs. Maybe with all of looking, we can track them down, and get 'em to let you out."
Grif nodded. "Yeah, okay, sounds like a plan."
The corridor the guard had been standing in led to an office reception area, that had several soldiers stationed around it and on the open upper level. After clearing all of them out, it was pretty much a simple sweep, with the occasional detour to alternate routes to get around doors that would only open from one side. There didn't seem to be any scientists around, though, until Grif noticed one area where his motion tracker showed where there should be three people. From his readings, they were somewhere on the other side of a room whose door would not open. Through the door's window, they could see some sort of strange machinery whirling every which way from its moorings in the middle of the ceiling, blood splattered all over.
"Okay," Grif said as they looked through a grated metal wall that looked out onto a small enclosed courtyard, which contained a door leading back toward the room with the machinery. "It looks like if we can get in there, we can see who's in there."
Barney asked, "Well, you've got the super-strength. Can't you just rip out this grating?"
"Ngh. The mountings into the rest of the wall are reinforced. Who does that kind of thing?" He looked up to the courtyard's ceiling. "For that matter, who builds what seems like it should be an open area in so small an enclosed space? God, whoever designed this place was a moron. Anyway, if I felt the need to work at it, I could probably pull it out eventually, but we're probably better off going upstairs and trying something from that window I see."
Tanenbaum shook his head. "Nah, that window's reinforced." He thought a moment. "But there is a big experimental laser in there, and I've always wondered what would happen if the blast shield weren't allowed to come down and absorb the shot. That might do it."
"Sure. It's an odd plan, but what the hell. Let's go."
Upstairs, a pitched battle was taking place between soldiers and bullsquids. They hung back until the soldiers won, then mopped up the rest, allowing them to get to the first auxiliary laser that Tanenbaum told them needed to be activated to power the main laser. In the distance, as they approached the second, Grif's enhanced hearing could hear a conversation between what sounded like a guard and a scientist.
"What is this thing?" the guard asked. "Is it some kinda weapon?" A whirring sound began to build.
"Put that down... It's a prototype." Grif heard something like the sound of lightning if it were the voice of someone shrunken in a cartoon, and he could see some crates at that end of the corridor explode.
The guard was obviously impressed. "Man! Why aren't we usin' it?" The whirring began again.
"It's much too unpredictable. Don't let it overcharge!"
"W-what do you mean overchar---"
Again, there was that lightning-like noise, but attenuated, and instead of a bolt being fired, something within the room exploded instead. When they got to the room a second later, there was blood, gore, and bones enough for two adults. On the floor sat a strange item that looked like someone tried to make a laser rifle out of bits and pieces from an auto shop.
Tanenbaum looked around, saw a few shreds of guard uniform, and said, "That must've been Torvalds. He never could keep his hands off of shiny new shit long enough to be told how it actually worked."
"Well, waste not, want not," Grif said as he picked up the weapon and examined where he could attach a strap for carrying. "Just gotta remember not to overcharge it."
The other auxiliary lasers weren't difficult to get to, and Tanenbaum was right that by blocking the metal blast shield from coming down (by means of a conveniently handy metal crate put in the path), the primary laser's fire was enough to take out the wall overlooking the courtyard. Grif told the guards to go back downstairs and wait for him, and leapt down, then through the door, where there were, in fact, three scientists waiting.
The first one exclaimed, "It's you! Thank God! Get us out of here before those military drones figure out where we're hiding."
The second thought he needed an incentive. "We all have retinal scanner access. Escort us to the lobby, and we can get out of the lab."
The third briefed him on the mission like he'd already accepted. "You'll have to shut down the surgical unit first. Peters switched it on but I'm afraid he never made it back."
Grif paused, looked through the window in the door to the room that he'd seen with the crazy machinery, then looked back. "Surgical unit?! That thing's not a surgery machine; it's a butcher! ARGH!"
Grif stowed his weapons and strode into the "surgery" room. His arms reached out to put one hand around each of the whirling blade-tipped arms as they swung towards him. Fueled by the force of his annoyance, enhanced muscles and powered servos ripped the arms from their moorings. He threw them off to the side, then looked back at the scientists. "There! Nuts to your fucking surgery machine! Get the fuck moving, now!"
They fell in, following him out, where he met back up with the guards. "All set here?"
Calhoun nodded. "Yep. One other soldier showed up -- must've been going to the bathroom or something earlier, I dunno -- but Tanenbaum and I took care of him."
Satisfied, Grif laid out the eventual evacuation plan for Tanenbaum and the scientists, marking the lobby's location in his list of coordinates. One of the scientists then used the retinal scanner to get Grif and Calhoun out of the labs. The motion tracker alerted them to nearby soldiers, and they did a pretty good job of fighting through them... And then they exited a short tunnel to find a canal, on the other end of which they could see a bunker with a very large cannon. A helicopter could be heard flying patrol somewhere near the area. They quickly backed into the tunnel and conferred.
"Okay, now what? Fuckin' rush the bunker?" The tone of Grif's voice made it clear just how dubious he found that idea.
"Wouldn't do much good. The door next to it requires a higher security clearance than I usually have. That building branches off in entirely the wrong direction, anyway." Barney pointed to a tower rising up out of the water on one side. "The flow control for the canal's in there. Best shot for progress would probably be to switch that on to get water flowing to the other side, then hop in and swim through the sluiceways."
A growl resounded from the water, and a finned shape surfaced for a few moments, swam along, and resubmerged.
"Shit. Fuckin' alien dino-shark. You got a Plan B, Barn, or should we be getting our crossbows out?"
"Well, we could go back a little bit, climb up that bit of rock wall, and run along the wall of the canyon that the canal river runs through. Be a bit of a challenge climbing back down once we got to the other end--" Barney's grinning look made it plain that he was putting the challenge to Grif directly, so confident was he in his own mountain-climbing experience. "--but we'd avoid the whole canal business itself."
Grif considered it a moment, then nodded. "Yeah, what the fuck, let's go with that."
Dear Black Mesa designers:
In the future, when you build a lab complex into a mountain range, would it kill you to level the mountains first? I mean, I know it's only the 21st century and you don't have full terraforming technologies yet, but Goddamn, knock down the mountains and fill the valleys with them. It's bad enough to have to do wacky shit to get around while underground, but outside on the surface, I should not have to deal with any of the following:
--Grif
PS: I do, however, like the zappy lightning-ray gun from one of the labs, and I thank the military for coughing up a rocket launcher. I prefer the SPNKr's ability to load two rockets into the launcher at once, but this thing's laser guidance is almost worth the price of not getting a 2x scope.
There was a long pause, gas-masked face staring into mirrored helmet visor, before the radio frequency finally opened up again. "You broke their arms and legs?!"
"Only the ones that didn't get broken in the fight."
"Yeah, that makes it so much better. Look, can we have this conversation without the headgear? Feels a bit weird to be talking over the radio, even if you did change the frequencies so the Marines won't hear us."
"I already told you, Barney. I'm not taking off my helmet. You can if you want to, and I'll still be able to hear and talk to you fine, but don't bitch at me when shrapnel smacks you in the head. I don't even see the need for a conversation, other than that you're getting all cranky."
"Well... it's just... How are you supposed to be the Good Guy here, if you're doing shit like that?"
"How about the fact that I'm trying to save your asses, while these guys came in specifically to punch all your tickets? You've dealt with these guys already, haven't you?"
"Yeah, I know. But--"
"Look! I know! I could give you a whole song and dance about some fucked-up shit that's been done to my brain before, but fuck that. The main thing is that they set up an ambush, and wanted to either torture and dissect me for science, or throw me in a trash compactor and crush me to death. In any case, I'm not proud of what I did, but as long as these assholes keep showing up and pulling this shit, they're going to keep pissing me off. Can we please accept that and move on?"
Green lenses stared back blankly for a few moments before a sigh crackled over the airwaves. "Yeah, okay. I suppose I can't blame you too much. I mean, I've been getting annoyed at these guys too. Come on. Let's go."
The Black Mesa definition of "open ground," Grif considered to himself as he and Calhoun jogged along it as best they could, was very strange indeed. Apparently, it mainly meant that there weren't any buildings, and that there was a road down which -- if they broke into one of the vehicles in the motor pool -- they could have theoretically driven down and made their way out of the complex entirely. If Alyx and Gordon had told him that there was someone in a nearby town he should see about getting some help, this would've been the best time to do that.
Those weren't his instructions, though, and so instead they moved as best they could across ground that could, at best, be termed "rocky." At worst, which was more often the case, it consisted of mountainous terrain with the occasional small cliff that needed to be climbed up or down. Grif thanked the fact that he'd at least gotten some of his internal organs re-replaced, by an expert surgeon, with pristine ones cloned from his own DNA; otherwise, his poor care of the ones from Simmons that Sarge had badly stitched into him probably wouldn't have been up to his current challenge. Instead, he and Barney were making reasonably good time, headed towards Lambda Complex, and with hardly any contact with anyone else, alien or human. It certainly beat the alternate route, which would have involved crawling through the waste processing systems.
It couldn't last, though, and sure enough, they reached a wall, both literally and figuratively. The building behind which they stood had been built into another part of the mountains, such that what they faced appeared to be an amalgamation of rock and man-made construction. Air gently wafted out of the vent mounted in a part of the wall that was clear of the mountain. Grif and Calhoun looked at each other, then up the rock face for a minute or two, then back at each other.
"We... could maybe cli--"
"No. Oh, hell no, dude. I'd rather crawl that fucking airduct than try that kind of climb."
"Okay, then, since you called it... Crowbars."
Grif sighed, then nodded and got his crowbar out. The vent cover was actually fairly solid, as opposed to some of the others each of them had run across in the last day or so. With each of them prying with their crowbars, though, they were able to pop it off rather easily. The duct's path was mostly downward, with a few direct vertical drops. The last drop was directly onto a vent, which popped out, depositing them into a hallway.
The clattering of metal on the floor was a bit noisy, and Grif could see one blip on his motion tracker, just around the corner and headed their way. He just had time to get his guns up to see that the blip was a guard, at which point he had to not only hold his fire, but also convince the guard not to shoot at them.
"Whoa! Hey, hang on. We're all friends here, 'kay?" He holstered his guns, then pointed at the unit patch on his armor. "I'm Grif, and, well, I suppose you probably already know Calhoun here."
The guard eyed them a bit warily, his expression shifting to puzzlement as Calhoun unhooked his gas mask so the guard could see his face. "Barney? What the hell are doin', wearing that Army shit?"
Calhoun grinned. "Actually, Tanenbaum, it's Marine shit. Our orange pal here, uh, 'liberated' some of it from some soldiers, shortly before we ran into one another. I'm wearing it because we got shit to do and it's better than swapping out security armor all the time. We're trying to get to Lambda Complex. What's the word on getting through here?"
Tanenbaum shook his head. "Nah, it's no good up there; it's all sealed off. The only way out would be to find someone with scanner access who can open the front door. I'm pretty sure there's a few scientists hiding somewhere in the labs. Maybe with all of looking, we can track them down, and get 'em to let you out."
Grif nodded. "Yeah, okay, sounds like a plan."
The corridor the guard had been standing in led to an office reception area, that had several soldiers stationed around it and on the open upper level. After clearing all of them out, it was pretty much a simple sweep, with the occasional detour to alternate routes to get around doors that would only open from one side. There didn't seem to be any scientists around, though, until Grif noticed one area where his motion tracker showed where there should be three people. From his readings, they were somewhere on the other side of a room whose door would not open. Through the door's window, they could see some sort of strange machinery whirling every which way from its moorings in the middle of the ceiling, blood splattered all over.
"Okay," Grif said as they looked through a grated metal wall that looked out onto a small enclosed courtyard, which contained a door leading back toward the room with the machinery. "It looks like if we can get in there, we can see who's in there."
Barney asked, "Well, you've got the super-strength. Can't you just rip out this grating?"
"Ngh. The mountings into the rest of the wall are reinforced. Who does that kind of thing?" He looked up to the courtyard's ceiling. "For that matter, who builds what seems like it should be an open area in so small an enclosed space? God, whoever designed this place was a moron. Anyway, if I felt the need to work at it, I could probably pull it out eventually, but we're probably better off going upstairs and trying something from that window I see."
Tanenbaum shook his head. "Nah, that window's reinforced." He thought a moment. "But there is a big experimental laser in there, and I've always wondered what would happen if the blast shield weren't allowed to come down and absorb the shot. That might do it."
"Sure. It's an odd plan, but what the hell. Let's go."
Upstairs, a pitched battle was taking place between soldiers and bullsquids. They hung back until the soldiers won, then mopped up the rest, allowing them to get to the first auxiliary laser that Tanenbaum told them needed to be activated to power the main laser. In the distance, as they approached the second, Grif's enhanced hearing could hear a conversation between what sounded like a guard and a scientist.
"What is this thing?" the guard asked. "Is it some kinda weapon?" A whirring sound began to build.
"Put that down... It's a prototype." Grif heard something like the sound of lightning if it were the voice of someone shrunken in a cartoon, and he could see some crates at that end of the corridor explode.
The guard was obviously impressed. "Man! Why aren't we usin' it?" The whirring began again.
"It's much too unpredictable. Don't let it overcharge!"
"W-what do you mean overchar---"
Again, there was that lightning-like noise, but attenuated, and instead of a bolt being fired, something within the room exploded instead. When they got to the room a second later, there was blood, gore, and bones enough for two adults. On the floor sat a strange item that looked like someone tried to make a laser rifle out of bits and pieces from an auto shop.
Tanenbaum looked around, saw a few shreds of guard uniform, and said, "That must've been Torvalds. He never could keep his hands off of shiny new shit long enough to be told how it actually worked."
"Well, waste not, want not," Grif said as he picked up the weapon and examined where he could attach a strap for carrying. "Just gotta remember not to overcharge it."
The other auxiliary lasers weren't difficult to get to, and Tanenbaum was right that by blocking the metal blast shield from coming down (by means of a conveniently handy metal crate put in the path), the primary laser's fire was enough to take out the wall overlooking the courtyard. Grif told the guards to go back downstairs and wait for him, and leapt down, then through the door, where there were, in fact, three scientists waiting.
The first one exclaimed, "It's you! Thank God! Get us out of here before those military drones figure out where we're hiding."
The second thought he needed an incentive. "We all have retinal scanner access. Escort us to the lobby, and we can get out of the lab."
The third briefed him on the mission like he'd already accepted. "You'll have to shut down the surgical unit first. Peters switched it on but I'm afraid he never made it back."
Grif paused, looked through the window in the door to the room that he'd seen with the crazy machinery, then looked back. "Surgical unit?! That thing's not a surgery machine; it's a butcher! ARGH!"
Grif stowed his weapons and strode into the "surgery" room. His arms reached out to put one hand around each of the whirling blade-tipped arms as they swung towards him. Fueled by the force of his annoyance, enhanced muscles and powered servos ripped the arms from their moorings. He threw them off to the side, then looked back at the scientists. "There! Nuts to your fucking surgery machine! Get the fuck moving, now!"
They fell in, following him out, where he met back up with the guards. "All set here?"
Calhoun nodded. "Yep. One other soldier showed up -- must've been going to the bathroom or something earlier, I dunno -- but Tanenbaum and I took care of him."
Satisfied, Grif laid out the eventual evacuation plan for Tanenbaum and the scientists, marking the lobby's location in his list of coordinates. One of the scientists then used the retinal scanner to get Grif and Calhoun out of the labs. The motion tracker alerted them to nearby soldiers, and they did a pretty good job of fighting through them... And then they exited a short tunnel to find a canal, on the other end of which they could see a bunker with a very large cannon. A helicopter could be heard flying patrol somewhere near the area. They quickly backed into the tunnel and conferred.
"Okay, now what? Fuckin' rush the bunker?" The tone of Grif's voice made it clear just how dubious he found that idea.
"Wouldn't do much good. The door next to it requires a higher security clearance than I usually have. That building branches off in entirely the wrong direction, anyway." Barney pointed to a tower rising up out of the water on one side. "The flow control for the canal's in there. Best shot for progress would probably be to switch that on to get water flowing to the other side, then hop in and swim through the sluiceways."
A growl resounded from the water, and a finned shape surfaced for a few moments, swam along, and resubmerged.
"Shit. Fuckin' alien dino-shark. You got a Plan B, Barn, or should we be getting our crossbows out?"
"Well, we could go back a little bit, climb up that bit of rock wall, and run along the wall of the canyon that the canal river runs through. Be a bit of a challenge climbing back down once we got to the other end--" Barney's grinning look made it plain that he was putting the challenge to Grif directly, so confident was he in his own mountain-climbing experience. "--but we'd avoid the whole canal business itself."
Grif considered it a moment, then nodded. "Yeah, what the fuck, let's go with that."
Dear Black Mesa designers:
In the future, when you build a lab complex into a mountain range, would it kill you to level the mountains first? I mean, I know it's only the 21st century and you don't have full terraforming technologies yet, but Goddamn, knock down the mountains and fill the valleys with them. It's bad enough to have to do wacky shit to get around while underground, but outside on the surface, I should not have to deal with any of the following:
- Canals.
- Swimming through canals.
- Climbing up/down rock walls to avoid the canals.
- Helicopter patrols -- though okay, I'll blame the military for that one instead.
- Climbing up the sides of buildings to skulk around on the... terrain on their rooftops?!
- Climbing/sidling along cliff walls.
--Grif
PS: I do, however, like the zappy lightning-ray gun from one of the labs, and I thank the military for coughing up a rocket launcher. I prefer the SPNKr's ability to load two rockets into the launcher at once, but this thing's laser guidance is almost worth the price of not getting a 2x scope.