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May. 10th, 2008 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acts_of_gordAs he leapt from conveyor belt to conveyor belt-
As he ducked under the jets of incinerator flame that spat out from both sides-
As he leapt out of the garbage rollers' way and ran like a rabbit for the end of the room-
As he narrowly missed being caught in the teeth of the biggest trash cutting device he'd ever seen, only to have to fling himself through the air and grab at the rungs of the ladder that was the only thing between him and certain death in a vile, oily pool of unmistakably radioactive waste-
Gordon Freeman thought to himself: Why, oh, WHY didn't I take the job at Aperture Science???
At the end of the red-lit hallway there was a vertical shaft with a ladder in it. Gordon approached cautiously, gun drawn- he'd found a security guard's corpse back in the room full of tongue things on the ceiling, poor bastard. It didn't sound as if there were Marines up there, so he holstered the gun and started to climb. About halfway up, though, he heard a faint yip! and froze.
There had been alien dog things in a few of the places he'd passed through. He remembered them pretty well. They were shaped like... well, like blue-and-green large hams: big and round in the front, small and almost conical in the back. The front end was covered in eyes, and the mouth was on the bottom, between the two forelegs. They only had one leg in the back. They certainly acted like Earth dogs, yipping and barking and running in packs, but given a few seconds to build up enough energy, they could let off a hell of a sonic blast. It got worse if they acted in concert. If there was one up top-
No, there were two. Maybe more. He could hear the paws scrabbling around, now that he knew what he was listening for.
He sighed and edged back down the ladder. The room of the toxic waste mashers (he didn't want to know, he didn't want to know) had given way to an access corridor of pipes and, eventually, somebody's stash of general supplies and things that went boom. Why anyone would bother to conceal that many explosive charges in the waste processing units he didn't know, but he hadn't bothered to criticize them for it. He'd just grabbed as much as he could and found a roll of duct tape in the ordinary supply crates, the better to improvise an equipment harness of his own. One satchel full of boom coming right up, puppies, he thought, and pitched the stuff up the shaft in the general direction of the dog things.
When the BRRAABOOM! died away, he started up the ladder again. Carefully, of course. With his luck there'd still be a sonic dog alive, and for all that he could cling to the ladder and fire one-handed, he really didn't want to. But there were no sound dogs forthcoming, only the crackle of indignation from broken electrical cabling, so he pulled himself out of the shaft and shoved one of the corpse chunks aside. It slid to a stop in front of a dog carrier.
It took a moment for Gordon's exhausted brain to parse that properly: a dog carrier. Blinking, he turned to look around the room. There were... There were five of them, in various stages of melt- but definitely five of them. With a growing sensation of I don't want to know this, please don't make me know this crawling upwards along his spine, he turned to count the corpses. It was hard to say for sure- explosives did, after all, tend to leave chunks more than actual corpses- but unless he missed his guess there were five of those, too...
No. Oh, no, he thought. Please, no.
He approached the most intact of the carriers warily, crowbar in hand in case of any unpleasant surprises. But the only surprise waiting for him was the kind that no violence could match: a single white card, neatly typed up, identifying the carrier as belonging to Specimen J-1334 (Houndeye, male, adult, pack 4).
Gordon didn't remember sitting down; his legs might have dropped out from under him for all he knew. He was too busy staring at that label. They...
They knew. They knew. The company had known about these things for long enough to capture at least five of them- more, if this was pack 4. They'd been in contact with wherever these things came from. They'd had them for long enough to study them. They knew.
He'd always wondered why the security chief seemed so insistent that anybody with an HEV certification had to know how to use an automatic rifle. Was this why? In case these things got out? In case- oh, he wished he hadn't thought of it- in case other things got out? What else had they captured, what else did they know? ("Because we study aquatic exotic species as well as the land-based ones," the scientist had said...) What was this company doing with these things?
What kind of people am I working for?
Gordon tore his eyes away from the damning little card and got to his feet. Screw Lambda. He was going to find someone alive here, and he was going to get some damn answers.
There was a grey-skinned thing taller than Gordon floating in a tank full of yellowish fluid. Something clawed and organic-looking had grown over its right hand; the arm growing out of its chest and the left arm looked fairly ordinary. It was armored in places, the metal apparently integrated into its skin.
Gordon stared at it for a while. It didn't move, but there was a weird malevolence to its stillness. He backed out of the room, rather than turn his back on that thing. When he hit the corridor he ran for all he was worth, only to come up short in the next room as much-too-familiar screeching filled the air: the sound of the chicken-things giving vent to all the malevolence their fleshy little bodies could muster. They'd been penned up in an enclosure in the center of the room, its mesh-like walls too slick to climb and too high to jump. Gordon stared at the things as he circled the pen, but there was no indication of what it was for, or indeed, what the chicken things were. There was, however, a nearby control booth. As he stepped into it in search of information, the door locked behind him and a button on the instrumentation console before him lit up. Dreading the reaction it'd get, Gordon pressed the button.
Oh, he thought dazedly a few moments later as the actinic blue faded away and his vision returned. Electricity makes them die, too. Good to know. He edged out of the booth and made for the opening door. It revealed a Marine.
The Marine stared. Gordon stared. Gordon shot first.
The corridors started slanting upwards after that. They were wide and convenient, exactly the sort of thing you'd want if you were moving heavy equipment- or creatures like that thing in the tank!- but they provided no cover at all once the Marines started turning up. Gordon scarcely remembered those fights afterwards. They were smoke and blood and bang, nothing more. The suit was enough to keep him on his feet, even without enough power to dispense painkillers- and he was getting used to doing everything through a haze of jangled nerves and pain by now. He scavenged what supplies and ammunition he could from the dead when it was all done and moved on.
There was a room with a table in it, two cages, and an electrical discharger on the ceiling. A card on the wall indicated that the chicken-things in the cages were called headcrabs and that they were being stored along with something called 'snark sacs'. Gordon stared at them a while, watching them bounce fruitlessly off the cage's gridded front, then went to push the discharge unit's button. It was probably a bad sign that they were getting to be positively familiar by now.
Or that in the next room, when the Marines arrived and the grey-skinned armored things started teleporting in, he just let them fight it out amongst themselves before making a break for it and shooting the last three-armed monster to ensure his own escape.
Or that his only response to the hallway full of headcrab pairs in miniature habitats was to point his pistol at each of the tanks in turn and blow the little monsters away one after another, just in case they managed to get out when his back was turned.
He'd think about it later.
There were voices up ahead; he froze, shotgun at the ready.
"What is this thing? Is it some kinda weapon?"
"Put that down, it's a prototype..."
"Man, that's pretty. Why aren't we usin' it?"
"It's much too unpredictable." A soft whine began to build in the air. "Don't let it overcharge!"
"W-what do you mean overchar-"
Gordon closed his eyes and covered his ears. It wasn't enough.
At least the prototype was still there after his ears stopped ringing. Who knew. He might need it as a bargaining chip if he was going to get any answers.
All of his joints were throbbing and his head was beginning to feel like it might come loose from its moorings as he dropped from the ledge down to the floor of the next room. Leaning heavily on the doorknob, he pushed the door open and found three men in lab coats, cowering in the corners. For a moment it occurred to him that he must surely look like a horseman of the Apocalypse by now, covered in blood, stinking of gunfire, bristling with weapons- but one of them looked up and smiled. "A scientist!" the man said. "Thank God! Get us out of here before those military drones figure out where we're hiding."
Gordon thought of the dog crates, and the armored thing in the tank. The urge to say you don't have a lot of room to talk, mister must've shown on his face, because one of the others hastily said, "We all have retinal scanner access. Escort us to the lobby, and we can get you out of the lab."
The third one nodded. Pointing to the exit door he said, "You'll have to shut down the surgical unit first. Peters switched it on but I'm afraid he never made it back."
Gordon opened the exit door. He stared. He slammed the door shut. "What the HELL is that?" he demanded.
"Ah- that would be the surgical unit-"
"That's not a surgical unit, that's a blender the size of a room! Why do we even have a blender the size of a room?"
"Certain analytical processes require cadavers to be reduced to a homogenate for-"
"You know what? Shut it. I don't want to know what you biology people get up to."
"Xenobiology, actually-"
"I said shut it!" Gordon glared at the man. "Unless you have something useful to tell me I don't want any of you to open your mouths again. I'll switch it off, but then you're going to come with me and let me out of here. I saw the retinal scanners on the exit doors in the lobby. Nice, real nice."
The scientists looked at one another helplessly. Gordon didn't stop to listen; he was too busy evading the whirling blades and making his way to the button near all that remained of Peters. "Okay," he called over his shoulder as the blades whined to a stop, "it's off. Why'd he turn it on in the first place?"
"In case of soldiers," said the third scientist, a Pakistani fellow with grey at his temples. "It's hell out there. It's completely under military control. You'll have to sneak and fight your way from one end to the other."
"What makes you think I'm not just going to make for the nearest way out?"
"Lambda Complex is the nearest way out," was the answer. "It's also where the rest of the science team has taken shelter. I wouldn't venture there myself, but I will let them know that you are coming."
"Thanks," said Gordon dryly. "Come on. Let's go."
As he ducked under the jets of incinerator flame that spat out from both sides-
As he leapt out of the garbage rollers' way and ran like a rabbit for the end of the room-
As he narrowly missed being caught in the teeth of the biggest trash cutting device he'd ever seen, only to have to fling himself through the air and grab at the rungs of the ladder that was the only thing between him and certain death in a vile, oily pool of unmistakably radioactive waste-
Gordon Freeman thought to himself: Why, oh, WHY didn't I take the job at Aperture Science???
At the end of the red-lit hallway there was a vertical shaft with a ladder in it. Gordon approached cautiously, gun drawn- he'd found a security guard's corpse back in the room full of tongue things on the ceiling, poor bastard. It didn't sound as if there were Marines up there, so he holstered the gun and started to climb. About halfway up, though, he heard a faint yip! and froze.
There had been alien dog things in a few of the places he'd passed through. He remembered them pretty well. They were shaped like... well, like blue-and-green large hams: big and round in the front, small and almost conical in the back. The front end was covered in eyes, and the mouth was on the bottom, between the two forelegs. They only had one leg in the back. They certainly acted like Earth dogs, yipping and barking and running in packs, but given a few seconds to build up enough energy, they could let off a hell of a sonic blast. It got worse if they acted in concert. If there was one up top-
No, there were two. Maybe more. He could hear the paws scrabbling around, now that he knew what he was listening for.
He sighed and edged back down the ladder. The room of the toxic waste mashers (he didn't want to know, he didn't want to know) had given way to an access corridor of pipes and, eventually, somebody's stash of general supplies and things that went boom. Why anyone would bother to conceal that many explosive charges in the waste processing units he didn't know, but he hadn't bothered to criticize them for it. He'd just grabbed as much as he could and found a roll of duct tape in the ordinary supply crates, the better to improvise an equipment harness of his own. One satchel full of boom coming right up, puppies, he thought, and pitched the stuff up the shaft in the general direction of the dog things.
When the BRRAABOOM! died away, he started up the ladder again. Carefully, of course. With his luck there'd still be a sonic dog alive, and for all that he could cling to the ladder and fire one-handed, he really didn't want to. But there were no sound dogs forthcoming, only the crackle of indignation from broken electrical cabling, so he pulled himself out of the shaft and shoved one of the corpse chunks aside. It slid to a stop in front of a dog carrier.
It took a moment for Gordon's exhausted brain to parse that properly: a dog carrier. Blinking, he turned to look around the room. There were... There were five of them, in various stages of melt- but definitely five of them. With a growing sensation of I don't want to know this, please don't make me know this crawling upwards along his spine, he turned to count the corpses. It was hard to say for sure- explosives did, after all, tend to leave chunks more than actual corpses- but unless he missed his guess there were five of those, too...
No. Oh, no, he thought. Please, no.
He approached the most intact of the carriers warily, crowbar in hand in case of any unpleasant surprises. But the only surprise waiting for him was the kind that no violence could match: a single white card, neatly typed up, identifying the carrier as belonging to Specimen J-1334 (Houndeye, male, adult, pack 4).
Gordon didn't remember sitting down; his legs might have dropped out from under him for all he knew. He was too busy staring at that label. They...
They knew. They knew. The company had known about these things for long enough to capture at least five of them- more, if this was pack 4. They'd been in contact with wherever these things came from. They'd had them for long enough to study them. They knew.
He'd always wondered why the security chief seemed so insistent that anybody with an HEV certification had to know how to use an automatic rifle. Was this why? In case these things got out? In case- oh, he wished he hadn't thought of it- in case other things got out? What else had they captured, what else did they know? ("Because we study aquatic exotic species as well as the land-based ones," the scientist had said...) What was this company doing with these things?
What kind of people am I working for?
Gordon tore his eyes away from the damning little card and got to his feet. Screw Lambda. He was going to find someone alive here, and he was going to get some damn answers.
There was a grey-skinned thing taller than Gordon floating in a tank full of yellowish fluid. Something clawed and organic-looking had grown over its right hand; the arm growing out of its chest and the left arm looked fairly ordinary. It was armored in places, the metal apparently integrated into its skin.
Gordon stared at it for a while. It didn't move, but there was a weird malevolence to its stillness. He backed out of the room, rather than turn his back on that thing. When he hit the corridor he ran for all he was worth, only to come up short in the next room as much-too-familiar screeching filled the air: the sound of the chicken-things giving vent to all the malevolence their fleshy little bodies could muster. They'd been penned up in an enclosure in the center of the room, its mesh-like walls too slick to climb and too high to jump. Gordon stared at the things as he circled the pen, but there was no indication of what it was for, or indeed, what the chicken things were. There was, however, a nearby control booth. As he stepped into it in search of information, the door locked behind him and a button on the instrumentation console before him lit up. Dreading the reaction it'd get, Gordon pressed the button.
Oh, he thought dazedly a few moments later as the actinic blue faded away and his vision returned. Electricity makes them die, too. Good to know. He edged out of the booth and made for the opening door. It revealed a Marine.
The Marine stared. Gordon stared. Gordon shot first.
The corridors started slanting upwards after that. They were wide and convenient, exactly the sort of thing you'd want if you were moving heavy equipment- or creatures like that thing in the tank!- but they provided no cover at all once the Marines started turning up. Gordon scarcely remembered those fights afterwards. They were smoke and blood and bang, nothing more. The suit was enough to keep him on his feet, even without enough power to dispense painkillers- and he was getting used to doing everything through a haze of jangled nerves and pain by now. He scavenged what supplies and ammunition he could from the dead when it was all done and moved on.
There was a room with a table in it, two cages, and an electrical discharger on the ceiling. A card on the wall indicated that the chicken-things in the cages were called headcrabs and that they were being stored along with something called 'snark sacs'. Gordon stared at them a while, watching them bounce fruitlessly off the cage's gridded front, then went to push the discharge unit's button. It was probably a bad sign that they were getting to be positively familiar by now.
Or that in the next room, when the Marines arrived and the grey-skinned armored things started teleporting in, he just let them fight it out amongst themselves before making a break for it and shooting the last three-armed monster to ensure his own escape.
Or that his only response to the hallway full of headcrab pairs in miniature habitats was to point his pistol at each of the tanks in turn and blow the little monsters away one after another, just in case they managed to get out when his back was turned.
He'd think about it later.
There were voices up ahead; he froze, shotgun at the ready.
"What is this thing? Is it some kinda weapon?"
"Put that down, it's a prototype..."
"Man, that's pretty. Why aren't we usin' it?"
"It's much too unpredictable." A soft whine began to build in the air. "Don't let it overcharge!"
"W-what do you mean overchar-"
Gordon closed his eyes and covered his ears. It wasn't enough.
At least the prototype was still there after his ears stopped ringing. Who knew. He might need it as a bargaining chip if he was going to get any answers.
All of his joints were throbbing and his head was beginning to feel like it might come loose from its moorings as he dropped from the ledge down to the floor of the next room. Leaning heavily on the doorknob, he pushed the door open and found three men in lab coats, cowering in the corners. For a moment it occurred to him that he must surely look like a horseman of the Apocalypse by now, covered in blood, stinking of gunfire, bristling with weapons- but one of them looked up and smiled. "A scientist!" the man said. "Thank God! Get us out of here before those military drones figure out where we're hiding."
Gordon thought of the dog crates, and the armored thing in the tank. The urge to say you don't have a lot of room to talk, mister must've shown on his face, because one of the others hastily said, "We all have retinal scanner access. Escort us to the lobby, and we can get you out of the lab."
The third one nodded. Pointing to the exit door he said, "You'll have to shut down the surgical unit first. Peters switched it on but I'm afraid he never made it back."
Gordon opened the exit door. He stared. He slammed the door shut. "What the HELL is that?" he demanded.
"Ah- that would be the surgical unit-"
"That's not a surgical unit, that's a blender the size of a room! Why do we even have a blender the size of a room?"
"Certain analytical processes require cadavers to be reduced to a homogenate for-"
"You know what? Shut it. I don't want to know what you biology people get up to."
"Xenobiology, actually-"
"I said shut it!" Gordon glared at the man. "Unless you have something useful to tell me I don't want any of you to open your mouths again. I'll switch it off, but then you're going to come with me and let me out of here. I saw the retinal scanners on the exit doors in the lobby. Nice, real nice."
The scientists looked at one another helplessly. Gordon didn't stop to listen; he was too busy evading the whirling blades and making his way to the button near all that remained of Peters. "Okay," he called over his shoulder as the blades whined to a stop, "it's off. Why'd he turn it on in the first place?"
"In case of soldiers," said the third scientist, a Pakistani fellow with grey at his temples. "It's hell out there. It's completely under military control. You'll have to sneak and fight your way from one end to the other."
"What makes you think I'm not just going to make for the nearest way out?"
"Lambda Complex is the nearest way out," was the answer. "It's also where the rest of the science team has taken shelter. I wouldn't venture there myself, but I will let them know that you are coming."
"Thanks," said Gordon dryly. "Come on. Let's go."
