"General Calhoun, we have a problem."
"Did you expect anything else?" The sixth star - the first one ever issued in Earth's history, so new they didn't even have a name for the rank - had done little to quench the General's characteristic dry, sardonic humor. The years had treated him well; he was still sturdily fit, even if the hair in his military crop was now steel gray. His main concession to the uniform was that he shaved more often. Which did little for the shadow, also in steel gray, about his chin and cheeks.
"We're in a war," the General grinned. "We kicked Combine butt once, but you can be sure they'll be back to bite on us faster than a head-humper leaping at a bald man. We're trying to rebuild Earth's economy, clean up the Combine stragglers and Xen lifeforms still infesting five continents, repair our ravaged economy, rebuild our population base, and raise a military capable of defending the planet against an interdimensional empire. How could we not have problems?"
The advisor shuffled papers nervously. He was young, one of the new crop of professional military folk that were coming out of the rebuilt academies these days. "General, we found a survivor. Chell is alive."
"Right." General Calhoun ran a hand through his hair. "Better start at the top."
"Okay, sir. It goes back to the Borealis, you see…"
"You can skip that part."
"Err…yes, sir. Then we tracked down the location of the original Aperture Complex…"
"You can skip that part, too."
"Yes, sir. Well, the long and short of it is we found a splinter lab that had been produced at some point late in the life cycle of the GLaDOS entity. In it were only a few half-constructed test chambers - apparently GLaDOS was building them by instinct at that point - and a single stasis bed."
"You can stop right there. You sure this is the Chell? The original?"
"Yes, sir. Not just the genetic markers, but the dental history and surgical scars; no clone would match this closely."
"How did she survive?"
"She hasn't said. Our belief is that the GLaDOS entity chose to protect and preserve her."
The General came around his desk - which was small, metal, and Army-issue, not the giant mahogany thing some people kept trying to push on him - and sat on one end. "Well, that's just great," he said. "We need to keep this under wraps. Under the deepest cover you can get it. The last thing we need at the moment is to get the Sisters of Mercy all stirred up again."
"The Sisters? I don't understand, sir."
"You weren't cleared for it." He winked. "You are now. The original Black Ops teams used Aperture technology. And more. They were clone sisters, using genetic material from several sources, but mostly…"
"Ah, I see now,"
"Well, the Sisters did some deep soul searching after the Black Mesa incident. They went undercover. And went pacifist. It took the Seven Hour War to shake them out of that, but they mostly worked for the underground railroad and in other non-combat roles for the Resistance. Stateside only."
"Wouldn't they be rather old by now, General?"
"You mean, like me? You forget, they went underground with a whole hassle of Aperture technology. Intelligence estimates there are at least four thousand of them in the States. Of all ages. Kids, too."
"Kid clones."
"Of the woman you just pulled out of a ruined lab in Nebraska. Trust me, you do not want to give a thousand-strong group of multi-generation, genetically-enhanced assassins something that looks like a Messiah figure."
The advisor left General Calhoun in a thoughtful mood. How many had survived since the old days? And he didn't mean just the two decades of Combine Occupation; he meant from his first posting, the high-security Black Mesa facility in the Arizona desert. Although, it was surprising how many leading figures in the Resistance had been at Black Mesa.
Eli was gone now. His daughter - well, Barney didn't like to think about that. Magnusson had gone senile (some said he'd been mad all along, but had just been better at hiding it.) Isaac, though. He seemingly hadn't changed in all the years Barney had known him. His taste in pets was still execrable, certainly. At least the latest was kind of cute in its own one-eyed, faceless way, even if its barks tended to break windows, walls, and priceless computing equipment.
There'd been a nasty little feud for a while between the more, err, blue-collar members of the Resistance, and the surviving group of Black Mesa scientists, over who had best rights to the Lambda symbol. A sizable majority of the scientific teams had deferred to the Resistance over that, perhaps remembering the less than stellar record of the original Lambda Complex. In a rare moment of humor Magnusson had dubbed these dissenters "Black Mesa Gone South," and was surprised when the name was enthusiastically adopted.
Now of course a whole new generation had come up, with the rebuilt universities back at work (and a baffling new realm of portal physics to deal with), who saw everyone who had worked under the Lambda symbol during the dark days of the Occupation as heroes under the same banner. There was a whole generation of 'tweens, now, the biggest baby boom in the history of the human race, and to them anyone who had fought in the Resistance whether in a lab coat or street clothes was a hero.
The General sighed. Three generations of Earth's military had been all but wiped out; first the loss of all senior leadership and most of the combat arms in the Seven Hour War. Then the long decades of Occupation where anyone with the slightest inclination towards military talent was either shuffled into C.P. or turned into some cyborg monstrosity by the Combine. Or joined the Resistance - and with the fatality rates among the Resistance, most of them ended up the same way in the end, if not worse.
The surviving C.P. (and there were very few after the Night of Fire) had been imprisoned en masse, and slowly retrained until small numbers of them could begin trickling back into the general population. Forgiveness took longer. Unfortunately, they had never found a way to reverse the process of making Combine soldiers. After a few horrifying incidents in which people tried to unprogram a friend or loved one, Barney had pushed through, and adamantly held in place, a shoot-first-no-questions policy. Just as he had with the zombies. Both were killed without mercy and shoveled into mass graves without unmasking, carrying the secret of whomever they might have been in their first life to their second graves.
It was a harrowing experience for all involved, and had cost Barney the last of his black hair. More than one former Resistance member had suicided once it was all over, too. But at last the grisly work was done and any active organized Combine presence was cleansed from the planet.
Unfortunately the Xen lifeforms were a harder task. And they thrived in the mess the Combine had made of Earth's environment.
Which reminded the General. He picked up the latest memo on the headcrab problem in the Los Angeles sewers. Which, as hammered as it had been during the Seven Hour War, was still one of the greatest surviving cities in the US.
"Heh." The General laughed aloud at what he read now. "Two birds with one stone, eh?" The first of the official Vortigaunt colonies had set up in the former LA aqueducts. And their voracious appetite for headcrabs - apparently the Vorts considered them a delicacy - had cleaned out every head-humper within two hundred miles.
On the other hand, the Vorts kept sending him petitions about starting up antlion herds. And now some sort of new "indigenous rights" group out of the reborn universities was adding their voice to the argument, exclaiming how important it was that their alien allies be allowed to practice their ancient customs. Antlions, right. Like anyone needed more of those.
The upshot, in any case, is that he had a bottom-heavy military. Lots of eager young volunteers, but very, very few old farts like him and the few Resistance survivors to explain to them that running towards the enemy firing your gun from the hip was not a good way to wage war.
Barney wondered if the scientific establishment was having a similar problem. If all the young graduates were too enthralled by the candy box of Combine technology to realize that Humanity had beaten them at that game, too; closing the Combine super-portal, and defeating their men and machines with human-made weapons.
Some might argue - some still did argue - that there were some toys the human species was not yet mature enough to have, but In the end, it turned out for the best for humanity that Cave Johnson had a very hazy idea of what constituted a shower curtain. They owed Aperture Science their final victory, and Barney for one was willing to accept the downside of that particular Pandora's Box.
"General?" His intercom chimed. "Your 1300 is here."
"Send her in," Barney waved at the phone.
The door opened and he stood to greet the young Major-General as she entered.
"You look more like your father every day, Cubbage," he grinned.
"I'll take that as a compliment," the strong-featured woman grinned back. "Now, about those drone trainers you were promising us..."
"I have one better for you. That bio-lab in Serbia managed to capture a Gunship breeding nest intact, and we passed long ago the point where they were able to breed enough to keep the scientists happy."
"You mean, you are going to provide us lobotomized gunships as living target drones?"
"No, I mean your fighters can be provided with the real thing. It's perfectly safe - the poor things only got as dangerous as they did because they had good ground support. Up against massed fire they don't stand a chance."
"And up against a pair of snub fighters?' The woman's expression was sharp. "I see your hand in this, General. This isn't just target practice - this is a live fire exercise. You mean to 'blood' my troops, as the old saying goes."
"Better to get a few injured here over friendly ground then start losing them on some Combine planet." Barney was still smiling but there was no compromise in his face or voice.
"Well…okay." The young Associated Air Forces General was still troubled, but willing to accept Barney's implied conditions. For now.
"But I've got another bone to pick with you, Cordelia. It's all well and good to have fighters, but I don't want all our training budget and attention to be going towards that Knights of the Air crap. The Combine beasts were tough, all right, but not against a mortar battery. We can beat them one on one, mano-a-monstro, but there's a hell of a lot of them out there in the universe and I want to see us beat them by dropping nukes on them from orbit whenever that option is open."
"General…" The woman started.
"Let me finish! The Combine never understood Combined Arms. Their tech doesn't scale. There's only so big you can make an animal, my tech people tell me. So great for frightening the peasants, but when we take the war to them we're going to show them what scale means. Starting with main battle tanks and working up. And that's what I sent you to Berlin for. Sure, I want fighters. But I want those battlecruisers even more. And I need every bit of ingenuity you have to design training for them!"
WIth the Major General dismissed, Barney Calhoun's thoughts went briefly back to the past once again. Fight them with fists if you have to, or a crowbar if you have one, but throw a grenade and duck when ever possible. Freeman had understood that. He was the holy terror, the one man army, that had torn his way through HECU, Black Ops, and Combine alike. And he hadn't done it with just a crowbar. He'd been smart, and used his weapons, and used his environment.
Barney gave a grim chuckle at one memory. He'd "interviewed" surviving Combine soldiers after the Nova Prospekt Incident. It was the most "human" emotion he'd ever seen out of those poor cyborg creatures. Gordon had come to them holding some of the rarely-shared Vortigaunt secrets of breeding antlions. Those normally uncontrollable fluttering monsters had followed Gordon into the former prison as his personal army of monsters, and they had gone through the defenders like a wave of Furies. Even through the filter of the voders Barney could hear the note of increasing panic and terror among the Combine soldiers stationed there as they recounted how the Xen creatures they had blithely loosed on Humanity had been turned on them with cruelly methodical accuracy.
Freeman had vanished after the March 21st explosion, of course. But Barney was sure that, like the bad penny, the former MIT physicist would show up again just when things were darkest. He had to. After all, Barney still owed him a beer.
With a sigh the six-star general, Commander of all of Earth's ill-assorted militaries, turned back to the paperwork that threatened to suck him up faster than any barnacle.
Cody Cubbage was not having a good day. His troops were greener than a new-hatched Vort, the newly issued M2011 was a bug-ridden piece of slag, and good old dad asked him every leave why he couldn't have a nice safe desk job like his sister. Oh, yes, and his current task was to clean out a nest of Simps.
Every war left behind a small debris of hard-core sympathizers who thought things had been better under the old regime. But not only were these Simps going around in Combine uniforms, acting like they were Combine troops, not only had they taken over an old but extremely defensible Combine facility, Intelligence had strong indications there might be the last functional Portal Communications Array on the planet in there with them.
Which meant do this on the hush-hush, don't tell the local forces you are even there (much less ask for any help to what was looking by the moment like a smaller and smaller team to begin with), and of course don't let the local populace figure it out because they were likely to turn into a bloodthirsty mob (no-one liked Simps), but worse yet, the op orders he had told him not to kill anyone inside because there was no way of knowing which of them might have essential intelligence on the operation of Combine Portal Communicators!
It was the sort of insane operation experienced soldiers could see from five clicks away, and be passed out in a three day pass three counties over when their name came up in the draw. Cody would know, because he'd been too close and too sober at least twice before, and had yet survived to tell the tale. And when you got known for pulling off the impossible, they turned around and sent you back in after something even tougher. Cody had caught a glimpse of a paper-faced man in a black suit talking to one of his superior officers, and it just went to show; when spooks got interested in you, the premium on your life insurance policy just became a non-issue.
Let aside his bright young things had come out of the Academy with more training than anyone else of their equivalent time in service - which meant they had good solid academic knowledge of more ways to kill themselves than Cody could possibly protect them from - but at least one was cute enough to have infected his dreams.
And if that wasn't bad enough, his orders for Command College had come through, and his nice comfortable Major's crown going to be upgraded to the sing-song "Colonel Cody Cubbage."
He heard the thin whine of the forcefield on the soft summer air even before he caught the glimmer of blue-green against the waning light. He tapped the zoom control on his Integrated Combat Arms Suit. The HUD image rippled with the warm air off the grassy slope, but he could still make out the shadow of at least one rapid-firer within the window.
He came to a decision quickly. The hell with "no casualties"; up against full bunker defenses, he'd settle for "minimal." Keeping his hand up (and with luck the Space Cadets would follow procedure and keep their heads down," he whispered, "Barnett!" to call the squaddie with the Dragon up front with him.
"Shots won't go through a field but blast will," he reminded the young soldier. "When I give the signal, pop one right below the window slit, then stay here and cover us in case your first shot didn't completely disable the gun. Metnick, you watch her back. The rest of you, with me. Keep your asses down and your faces in the gully until we're at least as far as that copse there."
RHIP, Major Cody thought as he led the low-crawl into the slight muddy trench he'd pointed out. He had a sick feeling a good many of these bright young soldiers were going to get killed in messy and disgusting ways tonight. But he'd made sure Barnett was safe, at least this time, and he wouldn't have to see his unwanted dreams about her become even less wanted nightmares.
He hit the ground a little hard starting his crawl, hard enough to get a soft complaint from his ICA. Numbers flickered briefly on the HUD. That, and the heat-shimmer, were just enough to keep him from noticing the subtle shudder of earth and air as some intangible something passed through the quiet night and briefly pulled it ever-so-slightly askew. But even if he had noticed, he might not have drawn the right conclusions. He was "Colonel" Cubbage's son, but there were some things he wasn't cleared for.
The portal wailed and howled on its platform, the sound making the guarding soldiers clutch their weapons even closer. The scientists of the Rocket Group didn't seem to mind. "Bernie!" One yelled in a clear soprano voice. "We've got a solid lock!"
"Good, wonderful!" Bernard Quatermass, Director of the Rocket Group, stood up straight from the center console. His massive turn-of-the-century beard stood out from his chin in the posture that more than one reporter had claimed made him the spitting image of Arthur Conan Doyle's less-famous creation, Professor Challenger.
The man has to be pushing ninety, Wendy Forrestal thought. He's got to be at least half Time Lord. Large parts of Earth's cultural ephemera had been destroyed during the brief but thorough Combine Occupation, but for once the BBC had managed to preserve its archives and old entertainments were being aired once again. Besides, after a mere week of it every man woman and child on Earth was ready to see something on the telly other than Doctor Kleiner nattering on and on!
She cleared her throat. "Excursion Team One ready, sir!"
"I know you are, Wendy," the professor said quietly. "You'll do us all proud." In a louder voice, "Transition on my mark! Generators on continuous power, Excursion Team to the blue line, stand by, stand by, on my mark three, two, one…GO!"
The roaring kaleidoscope of a portal transit took Wendy. She'd studied the debriefing of Howard Raft, the leader of the first extra-solar excursion, and spoken to him personally, so she knew something of what to expect. These long-distance portal jumps took a much longer perceptual time, and took a lot more out of you physically as well. Major Raft also talked of hallucinations during the transit.
Wendy was seeing them now. She knew full well the theory - in fact she had an (uncompleted) doctorate in hyper-physics and they'd studied portal theory extensively. So she knew the portal did not pass through Xen. This was the great flaw of Combine portal technology, and a good hint that they had arrived at what tech they had more from accident than from solid theory.
Be that as it may, she was catching glimpses of an alien landscape. If that wasn't Xen, then what was it? How could a clear-space portal intersect another world? The chances of it happening randomly, even with multiple dimensions involved, was too small to calculate. Wendy thought she might have her thesis now - even if Portal science wasn't her chosen speciality.
Then a "pop" and her small team was through. Half of them hard Mark V "Gluon"s out just in case, but the target proved to be just the barren planetoid expected. Glittering at an oddly stark horizon was the the glowing red-orange ball of this system's primary, a star so otherwise undistinguished it was most commonly known by the catalog number "Lalande 21185."
The flickering HUD told her efficiently that the ground temperature was a balmy twenty kelvin, the fraction of a psi atmosphere was mostly helium and argon with a little methane thrown in, and the rocky body beneath her feet was pulling at her with a gentle .3 gravities.
"Lambert and Lewis, take a stroll; check our perimeter out to five hundred meters. Phillips, I'll assist you in fueling up the RTG…" they were using practically Apollo-era technology for a power source here "…while the rest of you get the high-gain and spectrometer set up. Let's get moving, people. I sincerely doubt there is a Combine fleet even as close as an AU away, but our recall is set for four hours GMT and I intend for one not to miss our bus home."
"…so within the next few months we expect to have a DEW ring around this solar system capable of detecting anything moving our way in normal space out to a good ten LY."
"Thanks, Doc," General Calhoun spoke for the general assembly. Doctor Quatermass sat back in the field of his telepresence caller as his presentation finished.
It felt strange to be in this city, so much like the destroyed "City 17." Even the building was another of those monolithic structures the Combine seemed to love taking over for their own headquarters. The stadschloss of Fulda was at least partly excused, though, by the grand gardens outside, now fully restored.
The reason for meeting here was it was convenient to so many of the top people in the sprawling, disorganized structure that was Humanity's make-work approximation of a world-wide organization capable of rebuilding fast enough to beat the Combine's next attack.
The reason was Eastern Europe. The coastlines had been hammered by the war, and economically devastated by the dropping sea levels. But the United States had been hammered a lot worse. Whether the yanks were trigger-happy, over-replete with weapons, or what, they fought back just a little harder in the opening phases of the war, and got pasted worse by the time it was over. Large parts of the continent would not by fit for human habitation for generations to come. There were things in the arid wasteland that was all that remained of the "dustbowl" states that made one long for pleasant, ordinary creatures like bullsquids and antlions. And even worse were rumored to pop up every now and then in the Four Corners. Barney was sure - even though few scientists outside of Isaac Kleiner were willing to agree with him - that there was still a weakness in space in the general vicinity of the large crater that now marked Black Mesa, and things were wandering through from dimensions that even Xen would find strange.
The Combine had been drawn naturally to Eastern Europe, perhaps because their particular style of totalitarianism seemed to have an echo in the history there. And, sure, the infrastructure was a wreck, and the environment heavily contaminated, but for all of that there was more of an industrial infrastructure to be salvaged here than almost anywhere else on the planet.
With the exception of the northern countries, that is. In Norway a combination of high population base and strong technological base with the kind of cold conditions the Combine generally shunned would have made them even more powerful in the new world order had they not been the target of wave after wave of ice gaunts. The things had ravaged the coastal areas worse than any Viking raid, and had seemed to have a particular affinity for geothermal power plants. They were only now rebuilt far enough to start to show signs of delivering on that promise.
A similar situation existed now in the Emirates, which had sold out early when they saw which way the wind was blowing, had survived largely intact in population and infrastructure due to the energy reserves which the Occupation liked as much as any Western power had, but following the Fall of the Tower had become swarmed by antlions. They'd spent a decade walled up in tiny cities behind flamethrowers, with the population dropping to fractions of the pre-war numbers, and most of the wellheads and refineries were pretty thoroughly destroyed.
Barney was just mean enough to hold out political reforms and a whole raft of other improvements before he'd let the Vortigaunt herders get out there and start controlling the antlion problem. If he wasn't careful, though, the Middle East of this brave new world was going to be known less for oil and more for antlion byproducts. At least one person dear to him had been healed by antlion essence, though, so he couldn't turn too cold a shoulder towards the Vort's desire to return to the massive herds of their forefathers.
In an entirely different direction, sub-saharan Africa was remarkably like it had been before they ever heard of the Combine. It was just vaguely possible some remote villages still hadn't. If anyone would turn Simp, though, it would be people who had lived through generations of feuding warlords. The Combine might have seemed like a breath of order and stability after that region's sordid history. In any case, though, as brutal as it was, realistically there was little outside the mines of South Africa and parts of the Gold Coast to interest him. Straightening out the entire Earth was a matter for another day. Barney's only task right now was to make sure there was still an Earth to clean up. And that meant, if they couldn't build weapons, he didn't have time for them.
The world's a big and complicated place, Barney thought. There was no sense in trying to describe it all in one breath. Better to just deal with the issues as they came to a head.
"So we don't really have an economy," the next presenter was continuing. "More a series of IOU's that everyone hopes won't be called any time soon."
"Isn't that how economies always worked?" Barney asked laughingly.
"Don't start that fiat currency nonsense with me, General." The response was better-humored than it sounded. "Besides, I have it on good authority your personal economy is entirely based on beers owed."
All humor aside, there wasn't anything that looked like a proper currency, there were no official lending institutions, and there was no government oversight. Barter economy was all well and good for a subsistence economy, but they needed to build a military. And rebuilt everything that was larger than village level; roads, railways, power distribution, fresh water and sewage.
The latter two were a particular problem. Water had been hard-hit by the great suck of Earth's oceans, and weather systems were going to take hundreds of years to settle down again. The existing water mains and sewers were half-shattered, largely contaminated, and completely infested by tenacious Xen lifeforms.
In the long term, Mossman's group believed they could do away with the entire transport infrastructure and just use point-to-point teleport for everything. All well and good, but Barney was happy that at least the Combine had kept the rails in good order. Still, the cities were enough of a mess he was more than half-tempted to give the orders to raze the old ones to the ground and build new ones from scratch.
"If I may," Felman, the economist, was still speaking. "I request of the chair that the next part of this session be closed."
"I object," Barney said clearly. If there's anything he wanted to see of human government in the new world, it was transparency.
"You shouldn't, General. This concerns you…perhaps most of all."
Barney was intrigued enough to, after a long hesitation, give the nod. The relays were shut down, effectively closing off the conference of the top few dozen people from the rest of the world. "Now out with it," he said.
"The economic problem is a mere subset of a larger problem. And that is we don't really have a government. We have no way of reliably funding the new militaries because we have no authority for taxation."
"There's too many of us here, and too many of us here and outside have memories that go back from before the war," Barney pointed out. "We are never going to be able to agree on a common government, any more than we could agree on a common religion!"
"I think you are wrong there, General. There is something the world agrees with. Oh, perhaps not in five years. Perhaps not even tomorrow. But as of today, they agree that they owe their freedom and their continuing survival to a small number of, well, heroes. And those are the people in this room."
"A hero, doc, is just someone who did the job he had to do."
"A job you did, General. Over and over, you have proven you are willing to put yourself in danger with no thought of personal recompense. Over and over you have given of yourself in order to make the lives of other people better. General, I put to you a page out of your own book; later we can worry about proper elections, representation, a constitution and a supreme court. What we need today is to survive. To survive we need the entire population of Earth to focus on this one task; rebuild and re-arm."
The economist stood taller. "I put it to you, this is the best option we have at this time, and this is the best time to take this option. And if I might be so bold, you are basically doing the job in all but name now anyhow. Heck, you can even keep your military title. Except we need to change it just slightly to be more aptly descriptive."
"No, no." Barney finally saw where the man was going with this. "No no no no no no!"
"Hail Caesar." The man said simply. And sat down.