Physics of the Crowbar

Cold War Ghost

Under the silo, in the place the thing had grown from, a tunnel led down through an incongruously organic layer of dark red bedrock. Freeman tried to ignore the esophagus-like curve of it. Under here somewhere the oldest Black Mesa installations built for nuclear testing joined up with the first generation of true laboratories, but clearly there'd been some extracurricular architecture along the way.

And casualties, he thought, as he passed a security guard. Dead of toxic exposure; no aliens necessary. Someone had been careless with their nuclear waste.

Below the landing and its bodies, the cavern was flooded.

He was not looking forward to this.

Water compressed the suit in strange ways. It fit differently, altered his buoyancy, and though the neck seal was reasonably watertight he couldn't banish the trickling feeling entirely. And it was wet, cold and unpleasant on his back. And he had to submerge himself entirely. He clamped his glasses with one hand and swamp with the other, and then realized he'd probably ruined half his arsenal. The damaged back plates filled with water and weighed him down, and pulling himself up on the ledge on the far side wasn't easy.

The lurid green glow of the toxic waste swamp was an enemy he couldn't shoot. Par for the course for first-generation (and second and third generation) Black Mesa; bury your demons and hope you die before the lawsuits find you.

The suit's Geiger counter was very displeased.

Aimsworth had said to follow the conduits through the silo's underbelly through to the other side. He'd said nothing of the ghosts of arms races past.

But he got through, finally, into the dry old pipes themselves, shielded from radiation by inches of steel. These would put him out somewhere near-

-the pipe shuddered and with a screech of overtaxed struts it fell. He braced himself but jarred loose and slid out the jagged end. He fell through open space, blinded by white fluorescents, and reached frantically for a handhold. His left arm caught the fall and something snapped behind rigid polymer, something that made his stomach drop.

Major fracture detected the suit bleated. Morphine depleted. Emergency medical systems depleted. It had spent the last hour trying to fix his back. It had nothing left to give.

He rolled up, cradling his arm. The pain was a limited dull throb, but it would grow. And he'd lose use of the arm and wrist.

Frantically he scanned the room's contents. No med box, but the crates looked promising. Redundant supplies, shoved aside and forgotten. Everything was a little dusty and dated back to an era when things were shipped in wooden packing containers.

He levered the crowbar under lids and started searching. Beakers, glassware, replacement fume hood parts... wet-lab supplies. And then, the second-to-last crate, three dozen OSHA-mandated drawer-sized first-aid kits. They were just little plastic boxes with the Black Mesa logo on one side and a helpful red cross on the other, but something in them would help. Some magic of Black Mesa's, surely; they would never trust their employee well-being to an outside contractor. That would be buying from the competition.

He cracked open a plastic box with his right hand and emptied it onto the floor. The fast-healing cocktail of hormones and steroids was present, in small injector form with a startlingly large-bore needle. A white protein block was also present, and he tore its wrapper off and ate it in three gulps. It was dry, hard to swallow, but it went down. He scavenged every protein block he could find from the rest of the med boxes, then he set to work with the needles. The little instruction diagram was made for people not wearing HEV suits. It told him to find a vein and inject carefully nearest the site of the wound, and also told him, at length, about the risks of adverse side-effects not limited to several different kinds of cancer and/or reproductive harm.