PROLOGUE
He opened his eyes, and for a moment the darkness that greeted him convinced the man he had gone blind. But he quickly dismissed his fear and realized that he had simply ended up in some kind of cave. His adjusting eyes confirmed this as he slowly registered vague shapes of rocks in the dark, and the wet walls of the chamber. He imagined the smell of the thick underground air, though the suit he wore prevented him from using his nose. And the sound...
I see you...
A voice seemed to echo from behind him. He spun around as quickly as he could in the heavy suit to search for the source of the sound. With his left hand he flipped a switch on the chest of his suit and immediately the light built into the metal outfit illuminated a small conic section of the chamber in front of him. He turned slowly, using the light to scan the area for any presence besides himself. But as far as he could tell he was the only thing alive in this cave. He stopped and listened. His helmet picked up the noises around him and played them through a set of speakers inside. The sound of dripping water, slightly canned, was the only thing that met his ears.
After a minute had passed with no change he was forced to conclude that the strange voice had merely been in his head, a trick of the mind. He'd never liked caves. Irrational, perhaps, especially considering he was a man of science and reason. But there was something about their dark, echoey passages that had always run a chill up his spine.
No matter. It was time to do what he had come here for. There was a lot riding on this, and he couldn't screw up the project. Not now, when they had done so much, and with so much more that they had yet to do. The discoveries they'd made would go down in history, there was no doubt. The world would soon be a different place.
He shook his head. No time for daydreaming. He needed to get out of this cave and find the area he was supposed to have come out in. It couldn't be too far: refluxes in the system had been known to misalign trajectories before, but never more than a few dozen meters or so. There was likely an exit close by, just around a corner.
He remembered suddenly that he was supposed to be keeping an audio log of his progress. He pressed a button on his chest panel just below the switch that controlled the flashlight. A computerized female voice played through the helmet speakers.
"Audio log system activated. Awaiting voice command." He would skip out his little scare from earlier. Imaginary voices were hardly relevant to the log.
"Record," he said into the microphone built into the helmet. A symbol appeared in the upper-left corner of the display on the inside of the helmet visor, indicating the system was recording.
"This is Dr. Mark Cory with the Black Mesa Research Facility, Lambda Sector. The teleport was successful, though slight interference has dropped me in a cave of some sort, I assume not very far from my intended destination. I am going to try to locate a way out and get my bearings."
Using the light to avoid bumping into any of the rocks adorning all sides of the cave, Cory began making his way forward through the darkness. Rounding several corners he began to notice an upward incline in the ground. A good sign: he was probably nearing the surface now.
Around another corner he spotted a faint light up ahead of him. His pace quickened as he yearned to get out of the strange dark cavern. But he realized as he came closer that the light was not coming from outside, but was created by a large crystal formation jutting out of the wall. He came up to it and examined the glowing stone. It gave off a deep yellow hue, and seemed to hum with energy.
Cory's breath stopped short. It was a crystal like this that he was after in the first place. But this specimen was at least three times the size of any they'd collected so far. He hadn't even imagined such a size could exist in a stable form.
"I...I seem to have found one of the crystals growing here in the cave, but...it's enormous! I'm taking a sample to verify it's the same type of structure we've been studying..."
He pulled a small drill-like tool out of a section of the suit. The thing was small, but here in the cave it could reverb off the walls of the passage fairly loudly. He pressed another switch on his suit, disabling the audio in the helmet, and began cutting out a cylinder from the crystal about the size of his finger with the drill. About a minute later the cylinder was nearly loose.
Human...
He stopped drilling. Was it that odd voice again? He looked around. Nothing moved in the passage. No, it must just be his imagination, as he had turned off the speakers to drown out the noise of the drill.
He resumed drilling, and soon he was holding the sample in his glove. He put the drill back and pulled out another piece of equipment, what looked like a sort of voltage meter, with two wires sticking out. He clamped the wires on to the cylindrical crystal sample and pressed a button on the device. After a moment it beeped. Cory's eyes went wide.
"My god, the sample is entirely beyond the levels of the others. We'll need to get a team here immediately. This is amazing, I..."
He stopped. Something had moved; he'd seen it just out of the corner of his eye. He dropped the device and turned around. The passage still seemed empty, and he could hear nothing but his own quick breath. He remembered that the helmet speakers were still muted, and switched them back on. The sound of dripping water returned, and the buzz of the crystal, but there was something else, a hissing noise reverberating off the passage walls. It grew louder, and louder, until it overpowered every other sound. It was deafening, painful. Cory groped for the mute toggle, but the sound was disorienting him. He tried to walk forward and stumbled over a rock, landing hard on the ground. Something snapped in the suit, and the flashlight went out, and, much to Cory's relief, so did the helmet audio.
He lay there, his head spinning, until at last the effects of the hissing noise faded. He tried to flip on the light, but the suit's power was dead. He ought to be more worried, being stuck on the ground, no power to move, but he was still in a state of relief from the lack of that horrid sound. He didn't think he'd mind just laying here for a while, enjoying the silence...
DIE...Human...
And then he felt it. Something moving across the suit. Several somethings crawling in towards him. His breathing increased, and as it became harder to take a breath, he realized that without power his suit's air intake had closed and the oxygen in his helmet was growing thin. He had no idea what sort of strange creatures were surrounding him, but he had no choice. He ripped the helmet off. The hissing sound returned full force, and he thought his head would explode from the noise. He screamed as the creatures swarmed in on his exposed head, so loud he never realized that the hissing had ceased. And suddenly his screams stopped, and as the echoes faded away into the dark, the cave became as silent as before, broken only by the small hum of the crystal, and the sound of water dripping on the motionless metallic suit.