Physics of the Crowbar

Interlude

He'd known Black Mesa was vast, but he hadn't known exactly how vast until now. Until the tram car had dragged him through decades of research infrastructure and he'd breathed the backstage dust of more than half a century of forward thinking.

Progress.

Loose wires, forgotten tunnels, enclaves of hostiles, and his name scrawled like a slur on the walls, written in black alien blood.
He'd waded through a drawn-out firefight between bipeds and military. Both sides left their dead where they fell to continue a running battle down the tram lines. He'd come through on the heels of their conflict, somehow always just behind the front lines, to mop up the survivors as both turned their weapons on him.

The machine guns were impressively penetrative but cumbersome and ineffective against a moving target. The rocket launchers on the other hand... he wondered if he should be flattered. He knew they weren't just for him; tunnels like this had ways of being left off updated maps and the military was, for once, showing an immense leap of wisdom to fill them with soldiers supplied for a siege. A siege that had started a long time ago; he added it to his mental tally of evidence against the shadowy superior who'd ordered the purge.

But then there was the graffiti.

Freeman didn't make waves intentionally. His arrogance had set colleagues off in fits of rage, invited nasty reviews on his journal papers, and once had lead to a disgruntled former employee trying to sabotage his work, but he knew he was the better man and so he'd set the opposition aside and continued about his business.

The sheer vitriol necessary to make a man go from highly trained and disciplined soldier to writing personal insults on what amounted to Black Mesa's bathroom stall was something he couldn't empathize with. He knew he was hated, but it was becoming clear they were reserving a special kind of hatred for him, a hatred that went beyond the simple battlefield nature of their interactions with the aliens.

No one was writing parasites go to hell! or surrender biped scum! or equivalents to the harsher threats of what they'd do to him when they caught him or the hangman cartoons with the little man in the orange suit.

He chewed on an energy bar and washed it down with an artificially-colored orange drink that may have had something in common with the nuclear waste. The vending machines had resisted the crowbar but succumbed to the grenade. He was so desperately hungry and thirsty he hadn't cared how ridiculous the overkill; he had food now, he had liquid, and his head hurt a lot less as his blood sugar and hydration levels stabilized.

First rule of grad school: Your brain can't think on empty.

The night air smelled cool and clean after the sulfur stink of gun smoke and rocket exhaust. He heard crickets. He liked crickets. A normal, harmless sound after hours of straining to hear the scratch of parasite claws. He sat on the sand bags and looked up at the sky, at the distant glowing trail that was the satellite. Would it help? Who knew? He found his brain didn't want to hypothesize. Too many variables. Too many unknowns.

The resonance experiments had proved twinned metamaterial crystals could transmit frequency, and thus information, instantaneously and without regard for distance. This alone would have revolutionized the communications industry with instant, cheap transmission anywhere in the world or, theoretically, the solar system. But they couldn't stop there. No, they had to keep pushing. Vibration transmission was just information. World's most advanced text message. Energy transmission was next, then matter. Who didn't want a microwave that could teleport you to Mars?

Freeman had been assisting with an experiment half-way through the energy phase, merging the idea that if light was both wave and particle, enough light of the right wavelength transmitted from one twinned crystal face to the other would open both doors at once. He hadn't designed the experiment or set the parameters, but he'd been roped into it from the start on account of the HEV. His own experiments involved studying the two-dimensional plane of the twinned crystal face to determine if they could replicate its properties with the right elements and a Hadron collider. Even short-lived artificial elements would be cheaper than the crystalline metamaterial.

Second rule of grad school: Don't take shortcuts unless they work.

The satellite was indistinguishable from the background stars. The clear night looked so peaceful, so deceptively calm. He'd never smoked before -the single coughing attempt to take a drag of a friend's schoolyard cigarette in seventh grade didn't count- but he abruptly understood the impulse.

It'd been fourteen hours since the resonance cascade.

Fourteen hours of running, killing and pain. Of fear, no matter how thoroughly he mastered himself, that the next bullet would strike his unprotected skull or finally punch through worn, torn polymer and dead carbon.

And it wasn't over yet. Launching a satellite was only step 11.6 of the Lambda plan. The next step was him getting power back to the satellite control room and finding the rest of Lambda.

He'd seen only dead hostiles for hours, so the massacre of the satellite control room had hit him hard. He hadn't known that team, and he was sure they had their bad eggs and arrogant bastards just like the rest of Black Mesa, but they'd been human, physically defenseless, and bent on solving the cascade breach if it killed them.

And it had. They'd died shot in the back, cowering under desks, on their knees, died of slow stomach wounds and fast bullets between the eyes. They were all men, for which Freeman found himself suddenly grateful. He didn't want to think about what would have happened to any female scientist in the room. This kind of enjoyment of brutality leaned towards the basest denominator.

What next? I choose to live, and that meant moving forward. He was breathing free air but he was a long way from getting out. He needed to get to Lambda and connect up with the team initiating the satellite patch. If nothing else, he betted they could use the firepower.

Fourteen hours. Countless more to go. He'd pulled all-nighters many times but never with this much physical activity involved and it was taking its toll. His vision was blurred with fatigue and he wasn't processing quite as quickly and it would cost him.
Third rule of grad school: Think about the test you haven't taken, not the one you've already turned in.

Time to move.

He levered himself off the sand bag wall and crushed the empty plastic bottle. He dropped it unceremoniously between the bodies of the soldiers who'd built the wall. Maybe someday the world would have time to worry about recycling again.