(Untitled)
Adrian Shephard likes to think of himself as a pretty adaptable man. Throw him into a strange situation in a new environment and he takes to it quickly, under just about any circumstances you could care to name. Mama Shephard saw to it that all her kids grew up like that. It's served her middle child well in all kinds of places and situations,
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--is that singing?
It's so unexpected that it calms him down soon enough, and he lays back in the storage unit to just listen.
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Now they're buried together on the countryside.
Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more!
The bloody Red Baron was rollin' out the score!
Eighty men died tryin' to end that spree
Of the bloody Red Baron of Germany..."
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Shephard breaks off; did he just hear something? He does his best to crane his neck far enough to get a look behind them, but it's kind of hard to see anything in this cockpit other than what's out the front window if he doesn't want them all to die horribly.
"Somebody awake back there?" he finally says.
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By which he means he hasn't eaten period, but Adrian doesn't need to hear all that.
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Not from today, but in general. It's happened a few times.
"Might have t'land eventually 'n let you off, by the way. Me'n Chell here're on our way to somewhere that's got the Combine angrier than a hive full of hornets. I don't think you want to be on board if we start takin' on gunships."
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Barney already knows the answer. But he has to know.
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(In happier times, those coordinates would have pointed at a place called Summitville, New York. And, rather like some worlds have a golf course in northern New Mexico, in other worlds there was a Zen monastery in Summitville.
These things happen.)
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"'S White Forest."
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But that didn't sound like it meant anything good.
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No.
Should he tell the man?
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Shephard glances at one of the few instruments he can decipher. To someone with a Combine helmet on and the authorization to use this aircraft, it would be a point-to-point GPS-like system utilizing dirtside transmitter towers located in Combine Citadels and manufacturing facilities, and have a map overlay with elevation and atmospheric conditions laid out for examination. To Shephard, it's a largely black screen with a number of tiny dots in various sizes that slowly move past the central dot. The one he figured corresponded to the Scab slid off the screen some time ago. The red one for 40°20′14″N, 85°38′35″W is getting bigger with each passing moment.
"Then we'll just have to get there as fast as we fuckin' can, won't we, sir."
Great. Defending eggheads from space aliens again. How does this keep happening?
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