acts_of_gord | Freeman Gita

Freeman Gita

"Barney?"

"Yeah, Gordon?"

"What're you going to do if I die out there?"

"You're not gonna die, Gordon."

"I'm serious, Barney. What are you going to do?"

"Gordon... the sun will fall out of the sky, the Earth break into a million pieces, and fire's gonna lose its heat before anything out there's going to kill you, okay? If you get killed, that's pretty much the end of the world."

"...."

"But if it helps at all, I'm gonna go find Breen and kill him with my bare hands, Advisor or not."

"... actually, yes. That does help. Thank you, Barney."

( Do your duty, Arjun, as your nature dictates. )
There are other Gordons today. So many other Gordons. There's Floyd with the good fake HEV suit and there's two guys with moderately acceptable fakes and there's about five or six more with fakes that only fool the eye as long as they're intact. They're all going to be targets, more than anybody else. The Combine knows
( All work fetters, as all fire gives smoke. Only selfless duty saves. )
( "The Combine's reckoning has come." )
( Pride will lead only to your moral ruin. )
what's coming for them. They know it's in Gordon's hands. It doesn't make sense for it to be in anyone else's.
( If, filled with pride, you say, 'I will not fight,' it is all in vain. )
( "How could one man have slipped through your force's fingers time and time again?" )
( You are foolish. Fight you will, your nature will make you fight. )
Maybe he should've given it to Barney. Maybe Shephard. For security's sake. Give it to someone else, let the Combine target him, give it more of a chance-
( Your karma will make you fight. )
No. Target or not, he is the best chance the vermifuge has. The best chance all the Resistance's plans has. It gets to the Worm with him or it doesn't get there at all.
( You will fight in spite of yourself. )

In North Dakota, the Gene Worm complex was pipes and wires and plastic- lots of plastic, everywhere. In Chapada dos Guimarães and Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa it wasn't much better, all metal fencing and hastily erected structures on their way to becoming permanent ones. The pipes that fed the monster in Poland were still visible under the open sky, surrounded by prefab mazework.

This is not like that. This place is different. The Combine have been here from the beginning and they meant to make this place permanent from day one. The buildings here are reinforced to kingdom come, the wires doubly and triply redundant. There are pipes, there's got to be, but they're buried too far down to reach. There's a few walls here and there to herd foot traffic away from the feeder railroads that come in from all over Asia but there's no maze. There's just the little buildings full of Overwatch and Synths and manhacks, there's the generators, there's the charnel-houses (can't mistake those for anything else, not ever, ever).

The ground here is desert, and barren. And soaked, with each passing moment, with more colors of blood- gray from the Hunters, spattery thick pinkish-gray from the Striders, unknowable unnamed colors from the crab things with their back-cannons, and red and red and so damned much red everywhere-

( you don't look as if you have any trouble killing things )

The skies overhead are screaming. Kreyu the dragon's tearing the mega-gunships apart, and what she's not getting, Ben's Veritech is destroying, and everything else up there, everything, is dying in a hail of lasers and energy bolts and lightning. There's flying Synths the likes of which Gordon hasn't ever even imagined being flung to the ground in smoking, shriveled bits because they crossed the Black Lion's path.

Soon. He's going to release the drone and it's going to take off. Soon. It's going to thread through the falling chunks of helicopter and Synth and gunship and shrapnel and it's going to slide right on past all the Combine defenses and snake its way around the charnel houses and the defense grids and soon it's going to dump everything it has where the Worm can breathe it in, and the Worm will scream the way nothing else in human history has screamed, and there won't be an explosion because there's nothing to explode but it's going to flail and spasm and vomit and die, and the stink it leaves will drift away until there's nothing left but Earth air.

Soon.

So very soon.

But a lot of other things have to die first and they're all between Gordon and the limit of the region where they can chance releasing the drone and so he's got Work to do. There's blood on the ground. There needs to be more.
( I am the beginning and ending of all things )
He can make that happen.
( I am the tip of God's arrow fallen to Earth )
The Resistance is behind him one hundred per cent in this. Because everything that's in front of him is dying in waves.

"Hello, you've never met me before. I'm really very sorry about that, it would've made things happening today so much easier..."
Gordon isn't listening. There's a cloud of manhacks coming his way, and a squad of Elites behind them, and not even enough cover to shelter a mouse. Fight and win, or die.
The weirdo in the moon-marked outfit, Janny had to admit, knew his stuff. She'd been extremely suspicious of the idea of being copilot on a giant robot thing out of some kind of weird pre-Combine Japanese entertainment expo, but damn her if the the robowhatsis wasn't working, and working better than any actual military tech she'd ever seen.
One day he's going to ask Alyx what powers the Gravity Gun, exactly.
That calm, clear rasping voice, not a hint of anger or rage...yet. It was there, oh yes, and carefully leashed up, and waiting patiently.
It uses zero point energy, yes, but he'd like to know the mechanism that allows it to siphon that energy off and snatch the beastly little viscerators out of the air.
"Someone here told me about...someone you've taken in. Used really. I do so hope you're hearing this Breen...because right now someone's found the bad news."
The Elites don't die right away, of course. Their armor's thick enough to protect them from the manhack blades to some degree.
They weren't attacking Synths, so much. The Synths were throwing themselves at the ... robot thing, really, she should've gotten its name out of that Moon Shadow guy... and splattering to pieces on the drills that popped out of its surface. Drills. Seriously. All over the place. Not that she objected, since it meant she got to smash drill-covered fists and sunglass-shaped blades into things that oh so very desperately deserved it, but Lord Almighty, it was weird.
But they stagger, and that's all the time Gordon needs to snatch up the remains of a hunterchopper rotor with the Gravity Gun and fling it at them, edge first.
"That's right. Lesson one: Humans can gain immunity to psychic attacks." Then there was a growling laughter, long and low and nasty."Lesson two: we can fight back..."
He jumps over the corpses before they've even stopped moving. There's no time for raiding the bodies.
Janny didn't like the sound of that. And she was the co-pilot, for Pete's sake.
They're closing on the border of the drone release zone. He's not sure he has time to waste on killing, at this point.
"And Lesson Three....I AM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE MASCOT."
He has to get closer and let the vermifuge drone go before any more of his people die.
The whole damn robot thing erupted in drills and thrust one hand skyward. Janny just shook her head and wondered, Who the hell does he think he is?, and concentrated on plotting a path to tear the Combine buildings a couple of new ones.
Somebody else can do the shooting now. Somebody else is going to have to. He has to run like hell.

The Hunter splattered across five yards of landscape behind him didn't kill him. Came close. Didn't. Won't kill anyone ever again.

Standing hurts. Moving's better. Keep moving, forward, forward, fast as you can barrel, head down, gunbarrel glowing orange. Throw what you can. Shoot what you can't. And move, move, move, move.

Until you can't. Until you stumble, look around. Until you see they've lost track of you. Things, in the sky, there's things flying, small little things. Too big for manhacks. Too small for choppers. Must be drones, but they're not over you, they're not seeing you. The suit's gray and orange but it's mottled in alien bloods. All the colors scattered all over the landscape. That's your camo, your salvation- their blood.

You'd laugh if you could. Maybe later. You have a thing to do now. A load to take off. A drone of your own to let go. Looks like Combine make. Was. Isn't any more. Human work inside there now, and alien- salarian. The Gene Worm's death, the vermifuge. You're close enough now. The trip's short from here. The drone can make it to the tower. The Worm will breathe its death in, sure as that little drone rises, sure as it flies-

It's raining, you realize distantly. Not water. Metal.

Not scrap metal. Drones. Whole ones. Not yours. Theirs. Not destroyed. Intact. Just- shut down, switched off-

They saw you this whole time. Saw you coming. Knew what you carried. Waited for you to let it go and shut off all of theirs so the only thing left in the sky was yours, so every last one of their fliers can concentrate its fire on that blessed little bundle of death-

( now we are all sons of bitches )

It's a foul and awesome display of firepower and you can't be bothered to watch it. No time left to start again, just to switch gears and move to the alternative-

Of course there's an alternative. There was always an alternative. You're just gonna need a little help getting it to the target now.

Cue up the headset. Find the signal, make the call. They saw where the drone went down. They know where you are.

"Drone is down, I'm going in. I'm going to need cover."

And if you know them at all, so do your own people.

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All of a sudden, there's a new voice in your headset, one you haven't heard (or seen) the whole time you've been out here, one that's strangely calm despite how fucked-up the entire battlespace is.

"Not alone you're fucking not."

He's been busy.

"There's entire fucking divisions of Overwatch in there. You go in there, you ain't coming back out."

What comes next is a little more uplifting.

"I'm two-zero mikes to your two. I'll cover your cross and tag along. One's none, two's one."

Gordon's not a religious man, never has been, but the thought Oh thank God does cross his mind just about now.

"Roger that, I hear you-"

And then his stomach knots, because a much-too-familiar spliced-together parody of a human voice just started overriding every audio feed and output within hearing. Not, admittedly, directed at him- but it's close enough...

"HeLlo, mISs vANce. I knOW YOU caN Hear mE. iT's BEen a loNG tIme, hAsN'T iT, SinCE wE LASt spOKe?"

His breath hisses between his teeth. "That's Breen," he mutters over the link to Voodoo. "Their old stooge. He's in an Advisor body now."

"Whoop-de-fuckin'-doo."

The BUPBUPBUP of the M60 suppressing Overwatch puts that discussion to rest.

Better start running, Gordon. That belt won't last forever.

"YOUr liTTLe rUSE wAs QUIte cLEVeR, bUT YOU shoulD kNOw By NOw thAT dECOyS woN'T deCEIvE us," he continues. "wE HaVE eYES AND eaRS eVERywhERE, aS weLL aS a HOST Of seNSEs thAT a mERE HUmAN CoULdN'T pOSSiblY coMPREheNd, LeT aLoNE uSe. YOUr pLAn wAs DOOMeD fRoM tHe stARt."

Gordon started running somewhere around 'liTTLe', not that Breen's around to see or know or care. Later, he might admit that for once it's kind of a relief not to be the focus of the (former) man's taunts. That's later. Right now he's running for everything he's got.

(Fortunately he's had a lot of practice at exactly this kind of situation, and very sure footing to boot.)

After a while, the M60 runs dry - even the 200-rounders are only good for about 25 seconds of cyclic and a minute or two of sustained fire.

That's okay.

There's more than enough Resistance fighters to make up the difference. They're just armed with some MP7s and military surplus Mausers where he's at, but it's better than nothing. After shouting a few quick orders, Voodoo takes off like a rocket after Freeman, sprinting from cover to cover, leaping over it where he can, ducking under it where he has to.

He's over there soon enough.

Gordon glances over his shoulder only once, just to make sure the shape he sees is Voodoo and not an enterprising Overwatch or something. Once he sees the SEAL there he doesn't have to look again. It's all good.

(Or it would be, if Breen would just shut up. "YOU THinK he'S gONe, doN'T YOU? gONe to heaVEN OR Hell OR-" damn it, would the man just stop yammering for once in his miserable existence?)

"Voodoo," he says tersely, jerking his head at the target.

"-DEatH sEEM liKe AnyTHing buT obLIVioN?"

"I've got four mini-nukes to plant in there as close as I can to the Worm-"

"weLL, YOU're alMOST riGHT, AlyX. wE HaVE hiM."

That part was probably meant to distress everyone in hearing. Gordon has... gone past the point of distress by now. Now, he's just mad.

And Voodoo sees it.

"Fuckin' focus up, Freeman. We know the layout of this fuckin' place? Blueprints, plans, any of that shit?"

"We got image feeds from the drones we used in South America and Poland," Gordon says, shaking himself off. "It's the same internal layout as the one in North Dakota. Form follows function."

"His PERsonAliTY. His MEMOry. eVERyTHing-"

Gordon grits his teeth and raises his voice. "No hard copy, but I've been in these often enough- I have the layout memorized."

"Okay. I'll take point. Follow me, but stay ten meters back."

( it's just been so lonely ever since he's been gone )

"Can't risk losing those nukes."

( even with the kids, it's like there's this hole that won't ever be fixed )

There are other reasons. But he won't admit it until later.

The door leading in crashes inward with a forceful kick to the lock, and Voodoo moves in, the M60 sweeping the plant interior.

Gordon would object, but-

"- preVEnt HUmANiTY frOm aCHieving thAT dREAM-"

-it would waste time. He nods grimly and follows at a distance, the gravity gun in hand.

The halls beyond are designed for things of a maximum height somewhat larger than human norm, just in case. There's a buzz on the air that Gordon recognizes all too well- manhacks. No hiding from the damned things, they're too maneuverable... happily, that won't be an issue.

hrmmmmTHORP, goes the Gravity Gun, and POIT! goes the first manhack. And THOOM! go the second and third, since Gordon hit them both with the first.

If they didn't have somewhere to be and a Worm to kill he could do this all day.

And BUPBUPBUP goes the M60, and THOOM go the fourth, fifth, and sixth. And seventh.

Turns out they're a lot less intimidating once you're stepping over the wreckage.

"First time I met those things I was swatting them down with the crowbar," Gordon notes. "Nice work. Second left up ahead, then a sharp right. Keep an eye out for Elites, they'll be here."

Oh yes they will.

One's right around the right turn, as a matter of fact. And is dumb enough to try to knock Voodoo's M60 out of his hands.

Voodoo's response is so simple and quick even the Elite's stunned - he drops the '60, letting it hang by his side from the sling, then bumrushes the Elite, slamming him into a nearby wall. The AR2 goes flying, and so does the Elite once Voodoo sweeps his feet out from under him.

They say Overwatch soldiers can't feel pain. They say the augmentations took care of that nagging little problem years ago. They say a lot of things.

But goddamn does it feel good to beat the everloving shit out of one.

Voodoo's straddling the Elite right now, delivering a rapidfire combination of hooks and jabs that are keeping the Elite's head spinning and disorienting him enough that he doesn't have a hope of fighting back.

It doesn't last long (one wishes it would) - when Voodoo brings his fist back for one particularly crushing blow, it comes back out with the tomahawk instead.

In the split-second before the tomahawk hits home, there's a glint of something in the Elite's optic opening.

The uninitiated might call it fear.

THWACK.

Voodoo gets up, sheathes the tomahawk, and brings the machine gun back up. "Where next?"

That was a fine and lovely sight to see, and one day Shephard will regret that he wasn't here to see it happen. For now, though, Gordon just offers a thumbs up and jerks his head towards the right. "About a hundred meters," he says, "and then left again. We're going for a vent shaft. Easiest way to get to the central chamber- they can't put guards in there other than manhacks."

Vent shaft. That means they're going to be breathing in whatever shit that worm's pumping out.

Voodoo's gas mask is out and secured to his face in seconds. He's had practice.

It also has the minor side effect of making him sound vaguely like the adults from Charlie Brown.

"Follow me, keep your dispersion."

And with that, he sets off, machine gun up and sweeping the halls.

Gordon's been wearing his helmet since the start of all this. It's not the one that saved his life at Black Mesa; that one was left in the ruins long ago. This one was the work of Hephaistos, in the Bar, when handed a downhill biking helmet meant to protect him against fifty-mile-an-hour impacts. It's fixed to his suit seals, airtight and safe as anything can ever be.

And it's got great audio sensors built in, because as they turn one corner he catches the croak of a low-pitched voice synthesizer; there's Elites coming around behind them, though still at a distance. "We've got company," he murmurs, and readies the gravity gun. There's not much loose here to work with, other than the light fixtures- but he can rip those down and punch the lead Elite with them in a heartbeat.

Voodoo turns his head at Gordon's warning, then plucks a frag grenade off his vest, pulls the pin, lets the lever fly, and chucks it in the direction of the voices. "Frag out."

Overwatch soldiers, meet Mr. M67. It's been too long.

WOOMCH.

The Elites still moving after the explosion don't last long against chunks of their own building flung at top speed.

"That worked, but it won't hold them long," Gordon mutters. "Let's get to that shaft and get crawling. I'll pry it open myself."

He has, after all, got a tool for that sort of thing.

Turns out?

When you're sprinting, a hundred meters goes by fast.

And if a handful of Elites get on the wrong end of your M60, and one in particular gets on the wrong end of your boot...

...well, that's their own goddamn fault, isn't it.

Voodoo steps over the corpses and takes the left. "Talk to me, Freeman. Where's the fuckin' shaft?"

"Ceiling. Center of the hall. Should be a set of chevron shaped slats, can't miss it," says Gordon. "Vents might be infested with headcrabs if there's not manhacks in there. They do that sometimes."

"Fuckin' wonderful."

Indeed, he can't miss it, and he doesn't. He peers into it, machine gun raised.

"Looks clear," he says, taking a knee to cover the hallway they just left. "Do your thing."

Normally Gordon would use the gravity gun here, but he's got a bad feeling about what might be lurking in there and he'd prefer to be able to smash it on sight if it turned out to be organic. The dark energy reactor that once supercharged the gravgun to the point where he could use it on living matter was destroyed long ago, so there's really only one choice. Fortunately, he's tall enough to hook the crowbar's end around one of the slats and anchor it decently- and fortunately, carrying all the guns and all the weight of the HEV suit that Gordon routinely does is a fantastic way to build upper body strength.

There's a horrifying screech of metal as the vent cover starts ripping apart. There's also a horrifying screech of another kind entirely, but it gets cut short by a sick wet splud as Gordon leaves off ripping the shaft open to swat the alien parasite into the nearest wall, where it leaves a vile yellow-grey smear as it falls to the floor.

Were he somewhere else and in an entirely different mindset, Voodoo might react a bit more vocally to that. He might even glance at it instead of looking over the sights of his machine gun like the entire Combine army's about to storm around the corner.

Which might just be the case.

There's footfalls coming, and the hum of manhacks. Definitely getting closer. Gordon mutters something that might be a swear word- hard to say. "I have to get in there and scramble," he says. "I've done this before."

More times than he can count any more.

"Can you hold the position?"

Voodoo quickly takes a mental stock - he's down to three belts (including the one in his '60, but he's lucky if that's half-full), four pistol mags, two frags, and two smoke grenades. It sounds like a platoon or two incoming, maybe more, but who the hell knows, the acoustics in this place give everything a demented echo.

"Yeah."

The footfalls are closer, now. So are the manhacks. Voodoo looks at Gordon, then nods to the shaft.

"I'd get in there if I were you."

Someone else might speak, since this is a perfect opportunity to say something memorable or important. Someone else, however, would not be Gordon. He nods, offers something not unlike a salute, and gravguns a suitably sized chunk of debris into place to let him climb up into there and start on his way.

Ah, there- the first wave of the little bladebots just swept around the corner and into line-of-sight...

Voodoo sights in and squeezes off four three-round bursts.

Down the hall, four manhacks explode.

And then Overwatch rounds the corner - Elites, the place is lousy with them, but Voodoo doesn't even blink as he squeezes off burst after burst after burst, his mind almost a complete blank, engulfed in a weird sort of Zen as he shifts fire from target to target to target.

The BUPBUPBUP of the M60 echoes across the complex, mixing with the crackle of vocoders, the whine of manhacks, the DAKKADAKKADAKKA and WHOCK of AR2 and shotgun fire, and the guttural electronic cries of Hunters as they converge and work to purge the troublesome outsider, this pesky human who just doesn't know when he's beat, doesn't know when to quit, doesn't know when to just lay down and die.

It'll echo for a long, long time. Longer than seems humanly possible. Longer than is humanly possible.

And while it's still echoing, as the smoke is still freshly stinking in the air-

something too huge for words, something that ought never to have been, something that, Fortune willing, will very soon never be again... something screams.

A little while after, the ceiling above Voodoo's head clatters, and a man in an orange-and-grey hazard suit covered in things very, very much fouler than mere blood drops out.

The M60 is smoking.

The hallway is still.

And there's about two metric shittons of dead Elites, Hunters, and manhacks cluttering it up.

"What's our exit?"

Blink. Blink.

Gordon points silently with the crowbar towards a side corridor. It's the fastest route he can think of, given this building's layout- and speed is of the essence now.

When it occurs to him that language is a good thing he adds, "Signaled Redondo. There'll be a hunter-chopper to get us once we reach outdoors."

"Out-fucking-standing. I'm on point."

And with that, Voodoo sprints for all he's worth down the side corridor, keeping his breaths steady against the resistance of the gas mask, his eyes scanning vacant halls out of reflex.

Keep up, Gordon.

There are still Combine in the building. They're running the other way, though- all of them, all at once, for the Gene Worm's central chamber. They heard that scream, broadcast on a thousand frequencies. They know what's coming. They're trying to stop it.
( carry on my wayward son )
They won't be able to. It's too late now.
( there'll be peace when you are done )
Gordon hasn't run this fast since Black Mesa, since the day and the hour and the moment he knew he was going to die.
( lay your weary head to rest )
He's shouting directions, he knows the way, even if it's flickering past them faster than anyone ought to be able to follow- you don't forget a thing like the North Dakota gene worm and how you escaped its premises, not ever. If the Combine see them, they don't care any more.
( don't you cry no more... )
Which is fine, because up ahead of them the corridor is coming to an abrupt end, but it's an end with a door in it...

A door that's going down hard.

Okay, Voodoo hadn't really meant to make it fall off the hinges like that, just break the lock, but fuck it, it works.

He can't rip that mask off fast enough as he sprints, taking long, deep breaths of fresh air as his legs propel him forward, away from the complex, toward the sun.

It's the best feeling in the world.

There really isn't another one like it, is there? Being under the sky again at last, after a hell-pit like that?

Except, possibly, for the feeling of seeing the oddly streamlined form of one particularly customized hunter-chopper touching down, and hearing Manny Redondo call out, "Vamanos, you two! The EMP shielding on this thing's only so good!"

Don't need to tell him twice, Manny. Voodoo practically jumps to grab at the carry handle on the side, just behind the cockpit.

After he gets a solid grip, he hooks a carabiner and a length of rope to it, hooks the rope into another carabiner on his vest, then turns and takes one long look at the complex. He wipes his brow and lets out a breath he didn't even know he was holding.

Not bad, for improvisation.

Gordon beams; he'll thank Redondo later. Right now he's going to grab at the other handle and hang on for all he's got, because he's counting down the timer on those things in his head. EMP shielding or no, if they're not well and truly clear by the time it reaches zero, there will be Problems.

He needn't have worried. Redondo knows what he's doing. They're on the ground, they're well away, and more importantly, they've got some nice thick solid concrete between them and the Worm spire when-

FA-THOOOOOOOOOOM.

Edited 2012-04-02 03:23 (UTC)

After that, the cabin's quiet.

Well, quieter than where they were a couple of minutes ago. The docs have taken to setting up a makeshift waiting room in there, to check for injuries and decontamination needs before they send them belowdecks.

And Voodoo's thirsty.

He pushed it to the back of his mind back there, but now that he's out of danger, he notices for the first time that his mouth is really, really dry.

He takes a canteen off his belt, shaking it to check if it's full. It is. He unscrews the top, lifts it -

- and then stops.

After a while, he turns to Gordon, in the seat next to him.

"Not bad, Freeman."

He offers up the canteen.

"Not bad at all."

Gordon accepts the canteen with an expression that isn't quite a smile- but that comes very close.

"Thanks," he murmurs. "Not bad at all."

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Freeman Gita

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