Chapter 25: Grassy Knoll Revisited
When he opened his eyes, Quarir was elsewhere. Somewhere dim, somewhere indoors.
He stood up, staggering a little, and sent a shelf of paint tins crashing to the floor. Something clanged underfoot, and he wondered why part of the floor seemed to be metal.
Quarir felt woozy, but not nauseous, and matter transference was well known to shake up your insides. So that meant he hadn't been beamed here.
"True" teleportation, as the Domarians knew it, involved breaking any given body up into subatomic particles and flinging them down a digital transmission wave: unsurprisingly, a living creature could not survive the reduplication process once they reached their destination.
Although those that weren't technically minded tend to refer to directed energy transit as "teleportation", the Legion generally resorted to matter transference beams. This basically involved shoving any given entity, organic or otherwise, into a bubble of energy and throwing them through a series of carefully angled magnetic fields. Quarir had undergone this process a few times: once because he was rich enough to afford it and was in a hurry, and once because he'd been arrested and Security was eager to get him behind bars.
Phaseshifting, however, was the Uclasion propulsion method. The Domarians had unashamedly stolen the technology to improve their own ships. Phaseshifting involved getting from A to B by tearing through several billion dimensions and, somehow, using a perfectly-calculated shortcut to pass through C, D, and E and eventually hit B.
But the Domarians had never phaseshifted a lone body: they'd always had gigantic ships, covered in flux suppressors and all manner of safety device. They weren't prepared to risk lives when they still didn't fully understand the process.
But the suited man, with his briefcase and strange mannerisms, could apparently phaseshift individuals at will.
Quarir didn't know what that meant but he didn't think it boded well.
Wooden crates, planks, rusty machine parts... his new location was certainly familiar. There was a humming of machinery, but he couldn't quite place it. Big, drafty shack full of junk... it rang several bells in his slowly reforming memory.
"Quarir Nalore, it is good to see you after all this time."
He looked up to see a Vortigaunt. Was that Pyotr?
"We detected both your flux and your noisome movements, Quarir Nalore. We have long suspected you were in dimensional limbo. It has been three days since you left Nova Prospekt."
Quarir brushed past a cog-covered table, upending it.
The Vort chirped disapprovingly. "Kindly cease your motions until you get your bearings."
It's definitely Pyotr, Quarir realised, he's the only Vort that could manage to sound so chastising.
He shook his head to clear it. "What do you mean, three days?"
"As we said," Pyotr repeated, "it has been three days since you were teleported from the Nova Prospekt nexus." The Vortigaunt pointed to the metal circle on the floor. "That is Grassy Knoll's telepad. It has long been dormant but something activated it. Something allowed you through."
"How odd," Quarir said dully.
"Nuri instructed us to 'drag' the Worborne back with us and he told us your story. It appears the Uclasion Artefact disrupted the teleportation field, rerouting its primitive thread to a different place. Nuri also made that deduction."
"Nuri? You guys came for me?"
"Yes Quarir Nalore, we did," Pyotr bowed his head solemnly. "Regrettably Yuza was injured during our flight from Nova Prospekt."
Quarir blinked. "Who the hell is Yuza?"
"Yuza is the true name of the being you knew as Annie. Yuza is a Domarian Enforcer."
"What?"
"She chose to behave so covertly because she predicted that reaction."
"Pyotr," Quarir breathed in deeply, "tell me what the hell is happening!"
"Slow teleportation, Quarir Nalore. That is what this world's greatest minds have dubbed it. The Freeman and the Alyx Vance are trapped between planes as you were. The Worborne calls this a convergence anomaly, resulting in time dilation."
"And is he right?"
"Something secret shapes all our destinies, Quarir Nalore. We will never name it."
"Computers and suited bastards," Quarir groaned quietly, scrolling his hand down his face. "Why the hell did Nuri rescue that Worborne guy anyway?"
"He is a scientist who survived the chaotic breach of Black Mesa. Like Eli Vance he was the leader of his field."
"He's a quantum physicist too?"
"He is known as a 'biochemist' but Nuri had told him that we would feed him to the Antlions if he did not aid with the reactivation of the telepad."
"He managed it?"
"No, Quarir Nalore. As we said, the teleportation frame had long been dormant and the Worborne played no part in its reactivation." Pyotr indicated the pad, which had long-since stopped humming. "He currently believes that the Knoll's survivors will soon dispose of him."
"Quarir?"
It was Nuri. She ran to him, and he'd secretly wondered at the possibility of a hug, but instead she drew to a halt, peered at him, and prodded him in the shoulder, as if checking whether you were corporeal.
"It's you!" she exclaimed. "It worked!"
"Yes and no," Quarir muttered, but he couldn't keep the smile off his face.
The pad sparked gold, and, atop the tall green hill that gave the base its name, a suited man walked away.
The reunion didn't maintain its cheery feeling for long. Quarir sat with Nuri, Pyotr and Zosia and listened intently. Nuri explained everything that had happened, and there was very little to feel happy about.
"When we finally got to the teleporter, you were gone," she began, "Worborne was there, gibbering about malfunctions and how he'd lose his job. We dragged him back with us, but we'd already guessed about…" she lowered her voice, "Maintonon."
Quarir nodded. "First time the damn machine has done anything to help for ages."
"Well, we ran like hell. Elites were crawling over the place, since they'd been called in to get Freeman. We took the tunnel back to Delta, and we nearly made it—"
"I knew that was coming."
"—and then we ran into our old friend. The really tall Elite with all the armour."
"He's still around?"
"And worse than ever. Yuza thought she could take him, but… he…"
"The Fortieth defeated Yuza with ease," Pyotr finished for her. "She was gravely injured."
"Anyway, we run, slam a door in Forty's face, and Pyotr somehow manages to carry Yuza back to where we'd left the APC—"
Pyotr bowed. "We work out routinely."
"—but it was gone. Dropships were converging on the Fort, but Zosia appears—"
"Thanks to Pyotr's directions," Zosia said modestly.
"—in Maggie the van, and we all get onboard and back here as soon as we can."
"You fixed Maggie?" Quarir raised an eyebrow. "Zyke wasn't too happy about stealing her and leaving her as a wreck and all that."
"Ah, I've got over it."
Quarir gaped.
"Why so surprised?" Zyke grinned. "That big bucket of circuits told you I'd survived right? How else do you think Pyotr could communicate with Zosia?"
Nalore stood up so fast that his chair toppled over. He grabbed Zyke's hand and shook it warmly, oblivious to the big man's bone-crunching grip.
"Aren't you afraid you'll catch something?" Zyke said slyly.
"Hey, it'd do me a world of good! I can't believe you lived through that!" Quarir's smile faded slightly as he recalled Zyke's state immediately after his run-in with the Elite's firepower.
"It wasn't pleasant but I'm very, very hard to kill. And believe me, a lot of people have tried." He pulled up a chair and sat in it. It creaked under his weight. "Zosia saw what had happened here and ran all the way to the Dead Pass. Of course, I'd had time to fix Maggie by then, and the soldiers were long gone, chasing after Freeman."
"She 'saw what happened here'?" Quarir repeated back, not understanding.
"We discovered that the Reginald was the betrayer," Pyotr clicked darkly. "But the traitor was himself ambushed. Soon after severing Archibald's tie and murdering Kim, he came across the Arcadimaarian."
Zyke nodded. "I can confirm that. The place reeked of psionic discharge. The Zealot stabbed Reg with his own arm, but god knows the scumbag deserved it, and stole one of our buggies and went after you. We don't know where he is now."
"We fed Reginald to the Antlions but we found space for some graves." Nuri sighed. "I didn't know about Xen customs, but we buried Archibald too."
"We have little interest in the fate of our empty shells," Pyotr explained, "but your sentiment was much welcomed."
"There were more bodies to come," Zyke growled. "Reginald had given our coordinates to the Combine. Gunships and Dropships burnt us to the ground. These two shacks," he gestured sadly, "are all we have left. We made them from the remains and filled them up with what survived."
Quarir swallowed. "What about the Aegis vehicles?"
"All of their vehicles got hit. Maggie's all we've got."
Quarir held his head in his hands. "So who made it?"
"Zosia, as you know— and, incidentally, she knows all about us now—"
"It was hard not to notice how weird you were, certainly," Zosia admitted.
"—and Charlie and three of the Aegis members. They still didn't know so I haven't let them anywhere near Yuza. She's in a regeneration coma, although I don't know if her bionics will cope… not after what Forty did to her."
Quarir shuddered. A regeneration coma was a well-documented recovery process for those with higher-grade augmentations, where the body shut down all non-essential activities in a desperate attempt to undo the damage it had suffered. If Yuza really was an Enforcer, she had five times more nanodrones swirling around her components than Quarir did. Forty must be practically unstoppable now, to best her so easily.
"But now we know what to do," Zyke said firmly.
Quarir goggled. "Uh, we do?"
"Maintonon's contingency. He told me about it all those years ago. We're to aid in the uprising."
"You what?"
"Zyke's been talking about this a lot," Nuri grinned nervously, as if she agreed in principle, but not action. "Mr. Calhoun has been on the radios, trying to start up the revolution Dr. Vance talked about for so long…"
"He had the right idea! I say we go to the Citadel. Freeman's not coming back, at least not soon." Zyke clenched his fists. "There's a lot of work for men like us, Quarir."
"What do you mean, 'men like us'?"
"Men who don't fall apart after one pulse round. Men who know there are other worlds out there, other worlds the Combine has its avaricious eyes on. We have to stop them somehow. You've seen what they're like!"
"Yeah, well…"
"Whether you go or not, I will. Barney Calhoun is the first sensible Resistance leader I've heard from. You've been saying the same thing all along, and you were both right: we've got to take the battle to the Combine.
"I remade myself from the ground up. Molecular self-manipulation makes Rots freaks but it makes us powerful freaks. I'm not much of a telepath anymore but I'm a damn good psychokinetic. And with the gauntlet Nuri brought back, I'm even better."
All eyes were on him. Zichekoam was back and in full form, effortlessly falling back into his leader's role.
Zyke pulled the amplifier gauntlet on, and sparks crackled from his fingertips. "I say we put our own contingency plan into action."