Physics of the Crowbar

Surface

He moved by instinct, from cover to cover, working his way through the freight delivery system. Conveyor belts intended to save steps and labor crisscrossed the newest sections of the warehouse, where mass volumes of plastic pipettes, rubber gloves and other plastic disposables were stored. He crouched and scrambled crab-like through the conveyor passages, working against the belts' direction half the time. It was exhausting but let him circumvent the more fortified military installations. The military had a basic blueprint, apparently, but not a good idea of Black Mesa's internal layout. Otherwise they'd have stationed someone at the end of the beltway to pick off living cargo.

They'd entrenched themselves remarkably fast. They had sand bags, heavy weapons, even cement barricades. The sheer volume of drone guns, ammunition and explosives strewn throughout Black Mesa suggested a powerful, organized response. Planned for. Even without the detailed layout, they'd come in prepared.

They'd known a breach was likely. They'd known more than the scientists.

So who had decided every Black Mesa scientist need to die? Who decided the military needed to know more than the people working in the mountain? The resonance experiments were exceedingly costly; who had the money to buy off their destruction?

Freeman didn't like his coworkers, in general. He considered one a mild sort of friend, two more were passing acquaintances, and five had been his superiors. He had no one working directly under him, though a few post-docs and some researchers had passed through his lab in the last few years. He wasn't the most personable man in the mountain, even by physicist standards; his post-docs didn't exactly call him on Christmas. But that didn't mean he wanted the mountain's citizens slaughtered by claws and bullets. Whoever'd designed the experiment had been short-sighted fool, but whoever'd arranged the mop-up was a psychopath.

He dropped from a conveyor belt into a lofted staging area. A catwalk connected the staging area to a platform on the far side of the room, an afterthought of architecture. A sandbag bunker on the platform protected three men in green fatigues. One man shouted and another shot wide and fast over Freeman's head.

He crouched behind the corner of the catwalk and put his hand around. He knew they could see him, because they were shooting at his hand.

Freeman hated signing. He hated signing one-handed, he hated signing in Black Mesa. He reserved it for the very, very rare occasion when a colleague at a conference initiated a conversation in sign language. Then he'd sign, gritted restrained politeness first, until they'd established a point of mutual interest. Then there was an exchange of business cards for formal conversation, and, often, an exchange of sarcastic symbols as commentary on the presenters.

But he signed, letter by letter, don't shoot.

They kept shooting. He signed again. He waved, open-handed. He put both hands around the corner, empty, open, and they still kept shooting. He sighed. And signed again, the simple rude gesture anyone would recognize. It summed up his thoughts on the day as a whole.

A bullet clipped his glove. He felt the tug and sting of broken skin. Blood loss detected, the suit told him. He resisted the childish urge to put the cut in his mouth, an instinct not yet drummed out by years of laboratory safety practices. The gloves were filthy and stained with alien fluids and who knew what else.

He pulled the pin on a grenade, released the handle and paused, then threw it. It exploded in the bunker before it hit the ground. He moved on, methodically working from cover to cover through the freight sorting and staging docks. He watched a marine so intent on picking off a white-coated scientist cowering behind a crate that the marine didn't see a barnacle's deadly fishing line. The marine was hauled up, screaming, his dropped gun on the floor far below.