Physics of the Crowbar

Freefall

He saw the device in the center of the room, registered the small console on the observation platform, and looked up; no, the device wasn't in the room, it was the room. The pinnacle of reactor he'd climbed, the gateway to another world.

The room was not clean. Dark blood splattered the floor and remnants of organics had been kicked to the corners. He didn't recognize their shape. Lambda was holding against the soldiers and black-ops assassins but it was vulnerable to alien teleportation technology. He wondered how much ammunition they'd stockpiled and how many of the civilians huddled in the rooms below knew how to use a gun.

The hall bulkhead door came down hard. Enormous piston bolts slid out on either side, locking them in. Steel claws descended from the ceiling, magnetic stabilization arrays at their tips. Plasma shimmered between them. The air crackled with electricity and stank of ozone. Hair stood up on his neck and he suppressed the desire to back away. The skin over his ribs twitched inside the suit, anticipating the white-hot bite of an electrical discharge.

"Get ready," the guard said. "They don't like us knocking on their door."

A hum filled the structure, vibrating through the floor, up the soles of his boots and deep in his chest. Something was out of alignment in the reactor below. Something was resonating with the superstructure. He shoved the observation aside with irritation; designing an interstellar transportation device hadn't been his job. If it had been, there wouldn't be wasted kinetic energy flooding the steel and cement, causing microfractures and speeding decay.

He heard the familiar tearing sound of a portal and his shoulders tensed. He turned towards it, tracking the sound up- up to where it shouldn't be, near the ceiling. Too high. He thought the fall will kill whatever comes out, but the thing that came out didn't fall. It was brown, it could direct its flight path, and it was shooting at them.

All the relevant data he needed, as he leapt aside from its tracing line of yellow energy pulse discharge. Not a solid projectile like the wasp guns, not a bioweapon like the spitters' acid, or the pentapods' single electrical jolt. This weapon spat hot yellow fire-plasma wasn't the scientifically correct term but it fit well enough-and from the way it pooled, splattered and melted into the flooring he guessed it'd play hell on the HEV.

Superheated metal? A compressed liquid with an absurdly high vapor point, ignited on contact with the air?

Data was a distraction. He tracked the brown balloon and shot through its gas bag. Two more materialized across the room. The guard was shouting a steady stream of profanity as he shot, and the scientist was yelling at them that he couldn't be distracted, could they please hurry it up and kill the pests or they'd just have to start all over.

Freeman found that tracking and shooting an enemy moving in three dimensions was unexpectedly difficult. He was used to his adversaries operating on the same horizontal plane and even the helicopters had had a predictable momentum. These things moved at will in independent arcs, difficult to predict and track with a finite number of bullets, and difficult to know what was a safe shot and what would damage the array they were within. The walls were scored with black char marks and bullet divots, testament to past battles, and now that he knew the shape of the aliens, he differentiated two badly-burned human bodies among the piles of deflated gasbags.

Workplace hazards.

They killed six before the portal was ready, and the guard had taken a grazing shot to the thigh that left him limping.

"Hurry!" The scientist shouted.

Freeman looked at the guard, who was shooting at another gas bag. "They'll stop once we close the door!" the guard yelled over the howl of the portal array and gasbag shriek.