Surface Tension
Grif and Calhoun had finally finished climbing up the cliff face. Grif had done a great deal of grumbling, and he eventually switched off his transmitter so he wouldn't annoy Barney with it too badly. (He'd also been responding to posts in the Nexus, which helped, too.) There was one headcrab in the pipe that jutted out from the top of the cliff face, which wasn't all that hard to get rid of. After that, they crawled in. Daylight became darkness, and then the pipes started having red emergency lights along the ceiling. Grif's motion tracker showed activity above, which was verified from a burst over the Marines' radio band.
"Recon in position. All quiet."
Barney and Grif looked at each other and, lacking facial cues, shrugged at each other wearily. The red-lit piping formed a T-intersection with the section they'd come in from. They tuned to the frequency they'd designated for their use -- within the Marine gear's functional range, but above where their scanners tended to go -- and discussed.
"Okay. They're out there. What's your map say?"
Grif consulted his map. "Hm. Occasional waterways on this level, open to the ground above, with no railings around either them or the manholes that lead up from these pipes. Yet another wonderfully safe design. Plenty of space for who knows what they might have set up. Wait here; no sense in both of us risking our necks prairie-dogging."
He crept along the pipe, adjusting the shielding level up, just a little bit, under his feet for quieter steps. There was a ladder up, but it was short, requiring that he stand up to reach the bottom rung rather than being able to continue in a crouch. That was enough that, when he popped his head up out of the hole, a nearby soldier spotted the movement and called out to his fellows.
"Hostiles! We got hostiles!"
And then there were two grenades in the air, and Grif dropped back down into the hole, running for the T-intersection before they landed and went off.
"Shit! Okay. There's a bunch of guys, they're spamming the manhole with grenades now, and I barely caught a glimpse of a tank."
"So what's the plan?"
"Hm. Sounds like they're still lobbing grenades from a distance, rather than just dropping them in. I should be able to get out of the hole while a batch are in the air, at which point I'll run around, taking out guys and distracting the tank. Meanwhile..." Grif pulled the rocket launcher off his back and handed it over. "You'll need this. Take the pipes and waterways to the far end, see if you can pop up somewhere that you can get the tank safely."
"Okay. Let's go."
The plan went pretty well, on the whole. Grif's timing wasn't quite as good as he'd hoped for, though, so his shields took a pretty good hit from the grenades going off before he was all the way out of the hole. By the time he was done killing all of the soldiers, he was dangerously close to losing his shields entirely. Barney had done his job, though, taking out the tank, which meant that there was finally a moment with no one shooting at him again, and the shields recharged. They picked up ammo from the dead, as well as a cache off to one side of the tank. After a quick check of the motion tracker, they hit the button that opened the door to the next area.
It was a good thing that that cache had included a full load of replacement rockets: The next area, around the curving trail, held another tank, entrenched in a manner that made Grif wonder if they'd had to air-drop the thing into place. There were a few tense moments of running around, trying not to get tagged by the tank's rockets while still being able to shoot back, before it finally blew up as well.
Grif and Calhoun dropped through the hole in the roof of the building marked "Ordnance Storage Facility." They arrived in a small room with a number of crates and a scientist.
"You're heading for the Lambda complex," he said, "aren't you?"
"Yup."
"I was heading there myself until I wound up here, and, well, simply lost my nerve. Take one look through that door and you'll see what I mean. I'm going to wait out the catastrophe in here. If you intend to go on, then I beg of you: proceed with extreme caution."
The two of them looked at each other and shrugged. Grif, taking point as he usually did, opened the door and looked out into the corridor beyond.
"Shit."
"What?"
"Tripmines. Several of them."
The scientist chuckled nervously. "Those're nothing. Just wail 'til you see the ones in the main facility. Whatever you do, don't set any of them off. Any of them."
Grif and Calhoun looked at each other, each knowing that despite not being able to see it, they shared the same look of trepidation. Hopping over the mines' lasers got them to the vast cavernous main space of the facility, and suddenly Grif knew why the scientist had gotten so jittery.
"Nukes?! You guys actually keep nukes in the facility?!"
"Black Mesa does disarmament work. I expect they're probably here waiting to get processed."
"Great. And these assholes tripmined the shit out of the place, so setting any of them off blows the place to Kingdom Come." Grif looked around, figuring what went where and was safe to walk, picking off a couple of headcrabs in the process.
"Hm," Calhoun said, thoughtfully. "At the far side, over there, it looks like there's a lift that, if we're careful, we can get to, activate, and then hop onto to jump over the tripmines blocking the entrance to the fence around the lift down."
"Orrrrr, we can just climb over the fence. Even my fat ass can get over that. Come on, let's go get that scientist. I expect it'll be trickier to get him to come with us, but we can at least leave him somewhere a little more hospitable."
"What the hell is this thing?!"
They were looking at a mound of some sort of organic material, with a depression in the center, its edges melted and melded into the concrete of the floor. They'd fought through several groups of both aliens and soldiers, and had to do a certain amount of running, jumping, and hiding while the two forms of their enemy fought amongst themselves. This, though, caught them up short.
"I dunno." Calhoun looked behind him, at the gun emplacement that they'd just used to wipe out several Vortigaunts that had teleported into the area. "We got those empty ammo containers. We could grab one of them, throw it onto it, see what happens."
"Yeah, sure." Ten seconds later, a container was tossed while they stood back, just in case. It make a whooshing sound, and the container was launched into the clear blue sky. "Whoa! Sweet!"
Half an hour later...
"What the hell is that thing?!"
"It's a thing we run away from, Barney, before it roasts or stomps us flat! Come on!"
Grif remembered the last time he encountered one of these giant blue crab-handed alien monsters. He wasn't terribly sanguine about finding another convenient pair of electrical towers to lure it into. Instead, he and Calhoun ran and ran and ran, though what seemed to be a parking garage, back out to the outdoors, only to be met with a massive wall. The wall's gate had a sign declaring that it led to "Black Mesa Waste Processing Area 3," and was securely shut.
"Crap!"
"There, look!" Calhoun pointed at a jump pad, positioned so that one could, theoretically, use it to get over the wall. "Come on!" He ran over, and jumped onto it. Grif heard a splash, and then the security guard's head popped back up into sight.
"Well, here goes," Grif said, and then he bounced on the pad. Neither technique nor luck were with him, however; his trajectory overshot the semi-cylindrical reservoir of water mounted just on the other side of the wall, which Barney had landed in.
"Aw, crap."
There was, however, a pipe leading from the reservoir to another taller fully cylindrical silo, which had some sort of table-based console on it. Grif reached for it, and, to his own surprise, managed to grab hold of it in both hands.
"Yes!" Unfortunately, his grip wasn't that good, and his respite from falling was merely temporary. His armor's shields took the brunt of landing on the ground, but all the same, it wasn't very pleasant. "Fuck. Ow."
"You okay down there, Grif?"
"Yeah," he groaned. "Just peachy."
The Marines' radio frequency lit up, a no-nonsense voice coming in over the airwaves. "Come in! Cooper, do you copy? Forget about Grif. We're abandoning the base. If you have any last bomb targets, mark them on the tactical map. Otherwise, get the hell out of there. Repeat: we are pulling out and commencing air strikes. Give us targets or get below."
"Hey, Grif! Think an air strike can take out that thing?"
Grif stood up and started making his way up the spiral walkway leading up the silo where Barney stood. "I think so. We can hope, anyway."
Working together on the joysticks, they were able to target the gate of the wall behind them, which the monster had just broken through. The jet pilots apparently didn't care whether the person pushing the button calling for an air strike was the Marine that'd been lying dead next to the map, or anyone else. This was fortunate, as the force of their bombs was just what was needed to kill the giant alien. It also proved sufficient to open up the barricaded door leading back inside, as well as knocking down walls and antennae to provide a route in. (Grif thought that a bit silly, but it seemed the only useful way across the chasms through which waste water flowed for processing.)
"You know, the air strikes become a lot less fun and helpful when you're underground."
"Yeah, well, I could've done without the rampant exploding bugs, or the swimming through the waste water."
"You didn't have to tangle with the fuckin' alien dino-shark. Again. Nearly felt like that one was gonna chomp my crossbow, and half my arm with it. If I'm stuck in this universe after all this shit's done, remind me to go into business producing guns that work in non-atmo conditions. I should be able to make a fuckin' mint."
"heh. Roger that. Anyway, the lambda symbols show we're at least going in the right direction."
"That's something, anyway."
Twenty minutes later...
They'd briefly surfaced again, long enough to have to play tag with a tank, before descending back underground. They hopped over some spilled radioactive waste, picked off survivors of a fight between aliens and soldiers in the Mechanized Infantry bay (neat things: firing off a tank's guns; not so neat: not being able to get the tank to move to help them take out that weird energy weapon emplacement that was lurking around the corner), and taken another lift to the next level down.
Soon after, they passed through a door into a vast open room with stacks of shipping containers. The sign on one wall said, "Hazardous Materials Bay A." Grif felt a sense of déjà vu swept over him; whether it was normal subconscious instinct, or some artifact of the SPARTAN enhancement process, was anyone's guess. Whichever it was, he heeded it, stopping and waving Calhoun back through the door.
"Look, Barney, I got a hunch. Last time I saw a room set up like this -- quite like this -- it had a bunch of Black Ops chicks running around. They're fast, they're quiet, and they're a total pain in the ass. So hang back, and if you see a shot, go ahead and take it, but don't let them catch sight of you. I'll try to be the shiny orange distraction. Okay?"
"All right."
Grif had been fairly sparing in his use of his .357 Magnum, as ammo for it was relatively rare. This time, though, he had it out and ready, his 9mm in his left hand as a backup. He re-adjusted his armor's shields, thickening them to reduce their friction with the floor. This was nearly a very bad idea, but he managed to get his balance, rather than falling on his ass. Finally ready, Grif took one last look over at Calhoun, and after an exchance of nods, he dashed out into the open.
Whatever sense had warned Grif of the potential danger in his room had served him well, as shots rang out, followed by footsteps, quick and light. Once before, he'd faced a team of what he referred to as the "Black Ops chicks." He'd won, but he had to admit that it wasn't really all that easy, even once he more or less neutralized their speed advantage. This group had apparently gotten the benefit of intel gathered from the last fight, and possibly also his activities in the intervening time. There were more of them -- some on an upper level that he wasn't sure he'd be able to safely traverse without ramping his underfoot shielding back down for traction -- and they'd apparently planned for setting up crossfires.
Barney, however, was sticking to his part of the plan, keeping himself hidden and picking his shots. With Grif keeping the ones down on the ground busy, he aimed for the upper level, picking them off. That opened things enough for Grif to be able to start taking down the ones downstairs, until finally none remained.
"So, what now?"
"Well, last time, the next room was an obvious trap."
"Oh, right. Where you--" Grif leaned forward a little, giving the impression of a glare despite the reflective facebowl. "Never mind. Think they're gonna try that again?"
"Dunno. Guess we'll have to find out, once we've finished looking to see what's around here for ammo and first aid."
As it happened, there was no further ambush waiting for them. Instead, after riding a lift down to Hazardous Materials Bay B, there were a few of the lumbering alien grunts to contend with. When the last of them fell, Grif and Calhoun could hear the sounds of someone operating a keypad. On the far wall, at the top of a ladder, there was a platform leading into a room that appeared to be an observation area for the storage bay below. A man in a labcoat beckoned them to come inside.
Hey, everyone.
Dunno what kind of time's been passing out there, but Barney and I are still alive. We seem to have made it to Lambda Complex, finally. More news as it happens.
--Grif
"Recon in position. All quiet."
Barney and Grif looked at each other and, lacking facial cues, shrugged at each other wearily. The red-lit piping formed a T-intersection with the section they'd come in from. They tuned to the frequency they'd designated for their use -- within the Marine gear's functional range, but above where their scanners tended to go -- and discussed.
"Okay. They're out there. What's your map say?"
Grif consulted his map. "Hm. Occasional waterways on this level, open to the ground above, with no railings around either them or the manholes that lead up from these pipes. Yet another wonderfully safe design. Plenty of space for who knows what they might have set up. Wait here; no sense in both of us risking our necks prairie-dogging."
He crept along the pipe, adjusting the shielding level up, just a little bit, under his feet for quieter steps. There was a ladder up, but it was short, requiring that he stand up to reach the bottom rung rather than being able to continue in a crouch. That was enough that, when he popped his head up out of the hole, a nearby soldier spotted the movement and called out to his fellows.
"Hostiles! We got hostiles!"
And then there were two grenades in the air, and Grif dropped back down into the hole, running for the T-intersection before they landed and went off.
"Shit! Okay. There's a bunch of guys, they're spamming the manhole with grenades now, and I barely caught a glimpse of a tank."
"So what's the plan?"
"Hm. Sounds like they're still lobbing grenades from a distance, rather than just dropping them in. I should be able to get out of the hole while a batch are in the air, at which point I'll run around, taking out guys and distracting the tank. Meanwhile..." Grif pulled the rocket launcher off his back and handed it over. "You'll need this. Take the pipes and waterways to the far end, see if you can pop up somewhere that you can get the tank safely."
"Okay. Let's go."
The plan went pretty well, on the whole. Grif's timing wasn't quite as good as he'd hoped for, though, so his shields took a pretty good hit from the grenades going off before he was all the way out of the hole. By the time he was done killing all of the soldiers, he was dangerously close to losing his shields entirely. Barney had done his job, though, taking out the tank, which meant that there was finally a moment with no one shooting at him again, and the shields recharged. They picked up ammo from the dead, as well as a cache off to one side of the tank. After a quick check of the motion tracker, they hit the button that opened the door to the next area.
It was a good thing that that cache had included a full load of replacement rockets: The next area, around the curving trail, held another tank, entrenched in a manner that made Grif wonder if they'd had to air-drop the thing into place. There were a few tense moments of running around, trying not to get tagged by the tank's rockets while still being able to shoot back, before it finally blew up as well.
Grif and Calhoun dropped through the hole in the roof of the building marked "Ordnance Storage Facility." They arrived in a small room with a number of crates and a scientist.
"You're heading for the Lambda complex," he said, "aren't you?"
"Yup."
"I was heading there myself until I wound up here, and, well, simply lost my nerve. Take one look through that door and you'll see what I mean. I'm going to wait out the catastrophe in here. If you intend to go on, then I beg of you: proceed with extreme caution."
The two of them looked at each other and shrugged. Grif, taking point as he usually did, opened the door and looked out into the corridor beyond.
"Shit."
"What?"
"Tripmines. Several of them."
The scientist chuckled nervously. "Those're nothing. Just wail 'til you see the ones in the main facility. Whatever you do, don't set any of them off. Any of them."
Grif and Calhoun looked at each other, each knowing that despite not being able to see it, they shared the same look of trepidation. Hopping over the mines' lasers got them to the vast cavernous main space of the facility, and suddenly Grif knew why the scientist had gotten so jittery.
"Nukes?! You guys actually keep nukes in the facility?!"
"Black Mesa does disarmament work. I expect they're probably here waiting to get processed."
"Great. And these assholes tripmined the shit out of the place, so setting any of them off blows the place to Kingdom Come." Grif looked around, figuring what went where and was safe to walk, picking off a couple of headcrabs in the process.
"Hm," Calhoun said, thoughtfully. "At the far side, over there, it looks like there's a lift that, if we're careful, we can get to, activate, and then hop onto to jump over the tripmines blocking the entrance to the fence around the lift down."
"Orrrrr, we can just climb over the fence. Even my fat ass can get over that. Come on, let's go get that scientist. I expect it'll be trickier to get him to come with us, but we can at least leave him somewhere a little more hospitable."
"What the hell is this thing?!"
They were looking at a mound of some sort of organic material, with a depression in the center, its edges melted and melded into the concrete of the floor. They'd fought through several groups of both aliens and soldiers, and had to do a certain amount of running, jumping, and hiding while the two forms of their enemy fought amongst themselves. This, though, caught them up short.
"I dunno." Calhoun looked behind him, at the gun emplacement that they'd just used to wipe out several Vortigaunts that had teleported into the area. "We got those empty ammo containers. We could grab one of them, throw it onto it, see what happens."
"Yeah, sure." Ten seconds later, a container was tossed while they stood back, just in case. It make a whooshing sound, and the container was launched into the clear blue sky. "Whoa! Sweet!"
Half an hour later...
"What the hell is that thing?!"
"It's a thing we run away from, Barney, before it roasts or stomps us flat! Come on!"
Grif remembered the last time he encountered one of these giant blue crab-handed alien monsters. He wasn't terribly sanguine about finding another convenient pair of electrical towers to lure it into. Instead, he and Calhoun ran and ran and ran, though what seemed to be a parking garage, back out to the outdoors, only to be met with a massive wall. The wall's gate had a sign declaring that it led to "Black Mesa Waste Processing Area 3," and was securely shut.
"Crap!"
"There, look!" Calhoun pointed at a jump pad, positioned so that one could, theoretically, use it to get over the wall. "Come on!" He ran over, and jumped onto it. Grif heard a splash, and then the security guard's head popped back up into sight.
"Well, here goes," Grif said, and then he bounced on the pad. Neither technique nor luck were with him, however; his trajectory overshot the semi-cylindrical reservoir of water mounted just on the other side of the wall, which Barney had landed in.
"Aw, crap."
There was, however, a pipe leading from the reservoir to another taller fully cylindrical silo, which had some sort of table-based console on it. Grif reached for it, and, to his own surprise, managed to grab hold of it in both hands.
"Yes!" Unfortunately, his grip wasn't that good, and his respite from falling was merely temporary. His armor's shields took the brunt of landing on the ground, but all the same, it wasn't very pleasant. "Fuck. Ow."
"You okay down there, Grif?"
"Yeah," he groaned. "Just peachy."
The Marines' radio frequency lit up, a no-nonsense voice coming in over the airwaves. "Come in! Cooper, do you copy? Forget about Grif. We're abandoning the base. If you have any last bomb targets, mark them on the tactical map. Otherwise, get the hell out of there. Repeat: we are pulling out and commencing air strikes. Give us targets or get below."
"Hey, Grif! Think an air strike can take out that thing?"
Grif stood up and started making his way up the spiral walkway leading up the silo where Barney stood. "I think so. We can hope, anyway."
Working together on the joysticks, they were able to target the gate of the wall behind them, which the monster had just broken through. The jet pilots apparently didn't care whether the person pushing the button calling for an air strike was the Marine that'd been lying dead next to the map, or anyone else. This was fortunate, as the force of their bombs was just what was needed to kill the giant alien. It also proved sufficient to open up the barricaded door leading back inside, as well as knocking down walls and antennae to provide a route in. (Grif thought that a bit silly, but it seemed the only useful way across the chasms through which waste water flowed for processing.)
"You know, the air strikes become a lot less fun and helpful when you're underground."
"Yeah, well, I could've done without the rampant exploding bugs, or the swimming through the waste water."
"You didn't have to tangle with the fuckin' alien dino-shark. Again. Nearly felt like that one was gonna chomp my crossbow, and half my arm with it. If I'm stuck in this universe after all this shit's done, remind me to go into business producing guns that work in non-atmo conditions. I should be able to make a fuckin' mint."
"heh. Roger that. Anyway, the lambda symbols show we're at least going in the right direction."
"That's something, anyway."
Twenty minutes later...
They'd briefly surfaced again, long enough to have to play tag with a tank, before descending back underground. They hopped over some spilled radioactive waste, picked off survivors of a fight between aliens and soldiers in the Mechanized Infantry bay (neat things: firing off a tank's guns; not so neat: not being able to get the tank to move to help them take out that weird energy weapon emplacement that was lurking around the corner), and taken another lift to the next level down.
Soon after, they passed through a door into a vast open room with stacks of shipping containers. The sign on one wall said, "Hazardous Materials Bay A." Grif felt a sense of déjà vu swept over him; whether it was normal subconscious instinct, or some artifact of the SPARTAN enhancement process, was anyone's guess. Whichever it was, he heeded it, stopping and waving Calhoun back through the door.
"Look, Barney, I got a hunch. Last time I saw a room set up like this -- quite like this -- it had a bunch of Black Ops chicks running around. They're fast, they're quiet, and they're a total pain in the ass. So hang back, and if you see a shot, go ahead and take it, but don't let them catch sight of you. I'll try to be the shiny orange distraction. Okay?"
"All right."
Grif had been fairly sparing in his use of his .357 Magnum, as ammo for it was relatively rare. This time, though, he had it out and ready, his 9mm in his left hand as a backup. He re-adjusted his armor's shields, thickening them to reduce their friction with the floor. This was nearly a very bad idea, but he managed to get his balance, rather than falling on his ass. Finally ready, Grif took one last look over at Calhoun, and after an exchance of nods, he dashed out into the open.
Whatever sense had warned Grif of the potential danger in his room had served him well, as shots rang out, followed by footsteps, quick and light. Once before, he'd faced a team of what he referred to as the "Black Ops chicks." He'd won, but he had to admit that it wasn't really all that easy, even once he more or less neutralized their speed advantage. This group had apparently gotten the benefit of intel gathered from the last fight, and possibly also his activities in the intervening time. There were more of them -- some on an upper level that he wasn't sure he'd be able to safely traverse without ramping his underfoot shielding back down for traction -- and they'd apparently planned for setting up crossfires.
Barney, however, was sticking to his part of the plan, keeping himself hidden and picking his shots. With Grif keeping the ones down on the ground busy, he aimed for the upper level, picking them off. That opened things enough for Grif to be able to start taking down the ones downstairs, until finally none remained.
"So, what now?"
"Well, last time, the next room was an obvious trap."
"Oh, right. Where you--" Grif leaned forward a little, giving the impression of a glare despite the reflective facebowl. "Never mind. Think they're gonna try that again?"
"Dunno. Guess we'll have to find out, once we've finished looking to see what's around here for ammo and first aid."
As it happened, there was no further ambush waiting for them. Instead, after riding a lift down to Hazardous Materials Bay B, there were a few of the lumbering alien grunts to contend with. When the last of them fell, Grif and Calhoun could hear the sounds of someone operating a keypad. On the far wall, at the top of a ladder, there was a platform leading into a room that appeared to be an observation area for the storage bay below. A man in a labcoat beckoned them to come inside.
Hey, everyone.
Dunno what kind of time's been passing out there, but Barney and I are still alive. We seem to have made it to Lambda Complex, finally. More news as it happens.
--Grif