Physics of the Crowbar

Jump

He ascended the factory's core with great care. There were no rails, no warning OSHA yellow on the catwalk edges. The darkness below was absolute. Gravity was greater than on the islands. True planet? Immense space station? No windows, no point of orientation.

Pentapods stalked the darkness, their red eyes a dim glow until they reared up and shot at him, while overhead the gasbags camouflaged themselves against mottled brown walls and shot down at his back and head. He wielded the Xen gun, letting its seeker swarms rat out his enemies in their corners. The bullets weren't fast but they were effective, especially in flushing out gasbags from their overhead nooks. His right arm ached and his hand was numb in the glove; a tradeoff he was willing to accept.

Freeman was not the only human in the factory, just the last one left alive. He found them in corners, behind barrels, wedged in crevices. Bodies cased in orange, some so desiccated their flesh was brittle and sunken against bone. And sometimes all he found was the HEV, piles of orange armor like beetle casings.

Years of Collections teams. Different generations of HEV, from thin first-generation armor weak to chemical degradation to mid-generation, with a unique woven mesh that flexed with impact but might be pierced by shrapnel, and to the last version, an unpowered, unintegrated version of his own suit, the ones he'd helped develop in the last twelve months.

Freeman was not a perfectionist; he knew too much about human fallibility to ever expect perfection from them. But he had standards. High ones. Ones that said there is no bad data, only incomplete data, and so we'll gather data until the data is complete. Until it is correct. He'd delayed the launch of the integrated suit, not on a whim, but on the very necessary need for more information. More testing. A better, more intuitive onboard computer and medical software. More rugged armor plating. He'd delayed its development by every method at his disposal because he knew it could be better. Knew the underlay could be woven to fit more securely, balance weight more efficiently, clean itself for less chance of skin infection, be interwoven with a silver-based fiber for microbial resistance.

Had his delays, his demand for only the best possible product, cost these men and women their lives?

They'd died alone, injured, fighting, crawling for shelter. Screaming for help, or in silence, hoping they'd be overlooked to die in peace?

This is my data, he thought. Black Mesa bore the responsibility of shoving them through a teleport gate to the far side of reality to steal metamaterials from an alien world. But he'd had the technology to save them and he'd been sitting on it, because no one told him the truth.

If Black Mesa had been honest, the Cascade wouldn't have happened, the Collections team would have been outfitted with true integrated suits designed to protect them from a hostile alien world, and Earth would not now be facing the business end of the Xen invasion force.

For want of a very specific kind of nail, he thought, as he stripped power packs from the back of a dead suit. The power packs were two generations old but he had an adapter still integrated into his own suit. The little energy left in them would help.

He lost all orientation in the factory and proceeded by whatever path was available. He cleared a warehouse room of pentapods and gas bags, and found the only available exit blocked by a line of barrels. The explosive pouch made short work of them, and when he picked his way through the remnants, he made another discovery.

They were not barrels. They were chrysalises.

He recognized the heavy brown limbs, the short trunk-like torso, the smell of its yellow ichor. Each one held a developing heavy trooper. Every barrel in the factory was a soldier, all countless thousands of them. The miracle of a butterfly weaponized. Program the developmental sequence, spawn the larva, provide protein and let nature's own 3D printer do the rest. Like an insect hijacking a plant to produce a gall, Xen had hijacked a metamorphosis to produce a soldier.