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Sidelines
Year Ten by BlindAcquiescence
She had seen it with her own eyes. The fall of humanity, the fall of civilization. She watched the cities burn, and she saw the looks on the faces of hundreds as they ran in terror from the nightmares that they'd wrought. It had been too much to bear, the weight of so many deaths on her shoulders. Colette Green was a broken woman. But she grieved not for the many billions that had perished, those ten long years ago. She grieved most for her colleagues. She grieved most for her friends.
In that dingy cave, which had been her home for the last decade, Colette Green etched on the wall with the small nub of chalk she had salvaged from an abandoned school.
Well, it wasn't truly abandoned, she told herself.
The small nub of chalk slipped out of her hands as she shivered, remembering the scene. Emaciated zombies, none taller than her waist, had crowded her, and she fended them off as best she could. One HEV gloved-covered hand rubbed the oozing wound in her abdomen. She winced at the pain, noting that the infection was getting worse.
Colette brushed the waist-length, dingy unwashed hair from her eyes and continued her calculations.
"If the Xen array could generate the necessary gamma-ray frequencies, the harmonic reflux could cancel out the alpha radiation associated with prolonged portal stabilization," she murmured to herself as the chalk traced an elegant tapestry of mathematical equations across the caves' wall. The small den was covered in the white scribbling, as if a mad composer had seen fit to write his twisted symphony across the earthen walls.
"You'll never get the kind of high-wavelength frequency you need from a contained, self-inducing reflux terminal," a voice came from behind her.
Colette sneered and didn't bother to turn around. "I guess string theory wasn't high on the list of Carnegie Melon Institute Physics degrees." Her biting remark caused a silence to descend on the cave.
Below, Colette could hear the slow, methodical boring of holes into the Earth. Those creatures, those insectoid abominations from beyond were burrowing into the planet's crust, eking out a home in this transformed landscape. Colette couldn't blame them, though, as she too had retreated underground to escape what was above.
The voice of her old mentor, Dr Richard Keller, sounded from behind her. "I think you forgot to add Plancks constant there…"
Growing irritated, Colette bit back, "Not when dealing with the negative ratio!" Their constant corrections and interjections were putting her over the edge.
"He's right, you know,"she heard Gina add, coolly. "Godel proved that even when working with negative ratios, Plancks constant still applies…"
"Shut up!" Colette turned to face her criticizers. "I don't see you adding anything useful to the conversation! You never do." But no one was there to absorb her insults, yet still she hurled them into the darkness, lit dimly by several stolen camping lanterns. "You're meddling is driving me to my wits end! I'm doing…" She began sobbing. "I'm doing all I can to right… to right the wrong that we've committed!" She stared into the darkness, seeing things that only she could see, and staring them into silence. The shadows of the woman she once called her best friend, and the man she once called a father figure receded into the dark, their voices silent.
Content, Dr Colette Green returned to her work.
But still the memories haunted her. As she lay on her bed of desiccated leaves, Colette couldn't keep the nightmares away.
"This is it. This is our last ticket out of here." She could see Gina staring into the portal that sat idly before them. It's bright yellow shell coalescing into a green inner barrier, and finally into a red, angry centre.
Colette stared into it.
"I must stay behind until you two are through, I'm the only one who knows how to operate the machinery." Dr Keller observed passively, as his hands flew across the console next to the teleportation device.
Colette looked to Gina, a meek smile on her face. "Well, we've done all we can, right? Time to go home."
Gina didn't return the smile, but nodded in agreement. "Time to let Freeman do the rest." she said impassively. Since the conversation Keller had with several of the surviving Lambda members about Freeman's exploits, Colette had seen a marked change in Gina's attitude towards leaving, almost as if she were reticent to get out of this god-forsaken mess.
"Quite so." She heard Keller almost whisper. "It's time, ladies. Colette, would you be so kind?"
"Where will we end up?"
She saw Keller's brow furrow as he stared at the console. "Almost every Xen relay source has been neutralized, save one. I don't know who re-established contact with it, but one of our older sites, an expeditionary force, has come back online. If I can pin down the source codes, I can piggyback the signal and send us… well, send us where ever they intended to go themselves." He looked up, obviously nervous. "It's our only choice, we just need to hope that where ever it leads, it's safe."
"Yeah, and the hell away from here." Gina grumbled.
Colette touched her friend's hand. "See you on the other side?"
Gina smiled unconvincingly. They had been through so much terror together, Colette wanted to think there was some hope for them.
"Don't give me any of that sappy shit, just go. Cocktails are on me when all this is over."
That was the last thing Gina ever said to Colette. The portal deposited her in the desert outside Black Mesa. She sat there, staring at the spot in which she had just landed, for what seemed like forever, waiting for further transmissions. But none ever occurred. Gina and Doctor Keller were lost.
Colette awoke sobbing, as she did almost every morning. Stumbling to her feet, she winced at the increased pain in her abdomen. Hobbling out of her cave, she found herself in the forest she called home. The green trees clashed with the almost constantly gray sky above. Colette fumbled her way down to the small nearby creek, and fell to her knees in front of it. Scooping some slightly sour tasting water into her parched mouth, she sighed in pain. The ripples in the water slowly diminished, and Colette had a brief glimpse of the person she had become.
Her once ginger hair had turned gray with the constant stress and fatigue, glowing wildly out, past her waist. Her face saw pockmarks of injuries that hadn't healed once the suit of armour she wore ran out of power. Her eyes, though, hadn't changed. They still shone bright, lively green against the demolished look of the rest of her face. The lambda symbol, scuffed and barely visible, embossed upon her breastplate caught her eye.
The Greek letter stung her eyes like an abomination. She sneered at herself, anguish and self-pity filling her soul. It was no longer a mathematical symbol to her, she thought, it was a representation of the greatest mistake in the history of man.
Gina's smug little smile leered at her over her shoulder. "And you were a part of it. Indeed, you helped to orchestrate it."
Colette grunted and threw a hand through the water, breaking the reflection. When the water finally settled, she was alone.
The infection in Colette's abdomen was getting worse, and she knew it. She tried to reason it away, tried to pretend it didn't exist, but what could she do? She wasn't a medical doctor, she knew little about the inner workings of the human anatomy. Her head was filled with mathematical constants and the inner-workings of the physical universe, not the knowledge of how to quell a highly infected stomach laceration.
Colette's Hazardous Environment Suit, had it the power, would have immediately supplied her with the required antibiotics and morphine- something she desperately wished for all too often- to squelch any infection. But since her flight into the forest, it had been almost a decade since Colette had seen anything remotely resembling a charger station.
In those first few months, those lonely days, that incessant robotic female voice had been Colette's sole companion. She had grown to enjoy its simple updates; its redundant system diagnostics. After enough time alone she even began to feel a strong attraction to the voice, the calm, reassuring entity that it belonged to.
Then one morning Colette awoke. It was like any other morning she had experienced, yet she immediately knew something was missing. She rummaged through her squalid living space, tearing apart her cave like a woman possessed. She stood in the middle of the ruined hideout, and finally realized what was wrong. The Heads Up Display, which had comforted her with its ubiquitous presence, was gone. She thought she could see its faint outlines in the corner of her vision, but she could never quite make it out. Colette called up a diagnostics report frantically, desperate to see if the suit still had enough power to supply her with a most basic human need, interaction.
But only silence followed her request.
Colette remembered screaming, crying out in anguish, as her last and only friend drifted off into oblivion. She took off through the forest, looking for a rock to jump from. She took a seven-foot plunge, landing with a crack as agonizing pain shot up her leg. But there was no voice, no redundant reminder that she had just fallen to a particularly painful landing.
Sobbing, and leaning on a large stick for support, Colette hobbled back to her cave.
So when the lonely scientist sustained her current injury, deep down she knew it was her death sentence. But she refused to allow it to interfere with her work. She resigned herself to moving as little as possible as she continued her work on a way to close the portals that were supplying her own planet with its very own infection.
"How can you be so sure that your permutations can account for the harmonic reflux?"
"What evidence do you have that a sustained assault could possibly cause the portal to collapse?"
"Look at your calculations, shoddy as always!"
"You always were the failure of the two."
Colette worked through the insults, the tireless companions her mind had seen fit to provide her with. Her eyes filled with tears as the chalk traced a web of hope across the wall.
"This was all your fault, you know."
That did it. Colette threw the chalk to the ground, shattering her last writing implement into a thousand tiny pieces that scattered across the floor of the cave.
"Don't you… don't you put this all on me." She screamed. "At least I'm trying to make it right! Where are you?"
Doctor Keller looked up at her from his wheelchair, his eyes full of spite. "I'm back at Black Mesa, where you left us."
There was a long, drawn out silence, and then Colette turned back to the wall. She had no more chalk; she couldn't possibly finish the permutations. She stared at the wall; tears of utter defeat welling up in her eyes, until she finally realized something.
She had finished it, without even knowing it; she had finished the calculations, and had in her possession the weapons to strike back at the Combine. They weren't guns, or cannons, or tanks, but numbers. They were what the universe was constructed out of, and she had finally found the right combination.
In a flash, Colette was throwing boxes aside, in a frantic search for what she had waited a decade to us. Finally she found it, an old Kodak camera, which she nearly dropped in all the excitement. The cave was lit up in a dazzle of light as she snapped off several pictures of the wall-spanning permutations. She waited in baited breath to see if the old film would develop, and sighed long and hard when the ghostly image of humanity's salvation finally appeared on the aged photos.
Holding the sacred relics in her hands, Colette knew that she had to make one final trip.
Her abdomen wretched in pain as the former Black Mesa scientist stumbled through the forest, heading East, for the nearest town. She wasn't sure what she would find there. When she had last seen it, nearly nine years ago, it was home to a group of people who had fled the nearby Combine-controlled city. Colette hoped they had managed to make it out here in the wilderness.
The sun began to set, and Colette wasn't sure how long it would be until she reached the settlement. She clutched her knapsack closer to her as she pondered insecurely whether or not she was even going the right way. She stopped short when she saw a large protrusion in the ground, not ten feet ahead of her. She eyed it queerly. It looked like a cross between a molehill and a small crater. Ever the scientist, even after these long years, she let curiosity take hold, and she inched towards it.
The earth around it seemed soft, recently moved. The edge sloped up, and then fell away, down into a black hole at the centre. Colette thought she could hear rustling below, possibly even footsteps. Tentatively, she crawled over the edge and tried to crane her neck downwards, to hear better. But the traction on her boots had worn off long ago, and Colette quickly felt herself slipping. Colette grasped for the edge of the hole, but her gloves could find no respite, and she felt herself fall.
It was too dark to see anything, but Colette felt the hard, rocky surface rise up to meet her. Pain came at her from all directions; her back, her stomach, her skull. But she didn't scream, she didn't cry out. Colette had only one single-minded reason for existence now, and it overrode all her other senses. Picking herself up, the beaten woman let her eyes adjust to the darkness, until she could make out her surroundings.
She shuddered as she realized where she was. The walls looked as though they had slowly been eaten away over time. It was the work of the Antlions, and their worker drones. They ate away at the planet's crust with their stomach bile, creating a tangled lattice of living space for their young. This passage, though, looked as though it hadn't seen any Antlion traffic for some time. Antlion dung caked the floor, but the majority of it was desiccated. Colette gave thanks for this small revelation, as she looked up into the small ribbon of light, slowly fading into twilight. She knew there was no way to climb back up, not in her condition. Colette looked forward; toward the direction she had been following on the surface, and continued on.
The longer she followed the cave, the more and more deserted it began to look. Normally the tunnels would be filled with Antlion larvae and caked with their fresh waste, but it wasn't so here. It almost looked as if it had been wiped clean, sanitized.
"There you go again. You had the answer, and you had to let your curiosity lead you here." Colette let out a small squeak as she turned and saw Gina instep with her. Her face was filled with contempt. "Why couldn't you have stuck to the topside? Why did you have to stick your filthy nose in places reserved for Allah's lowest forms of crap?"
"I had so much hope for you, Colette." That electric whirl accompanied the voice of Keller as his chair followed her. "But you've disappointed me, once again."
Colette bit back the insults and continued forward. Off in the distance she swore she heard footsteps.
"What were your plans when you even made it to the settlement?" Gina cracked. "If it's even still there. What? Were you going to ride in on a white horse and tell them the answer to all their woes? How the hell did you plan to even implement it?"
Colette could see a dull orange glow at the end of the tunnel, not a colour that accompanied any variant of Antlion she remembered. "Better people than me would know what to do with it," she mumbled.
"That's right," she heard Keller snap behind her. "There were always better people than you. That Judith Mossman should have had your position, she would have made a much better research associate than you ever had the potential of being."
Colette let herself turn to face her old mentor. "How… how could you say that?" She rummaged through the knapsack and retrieved the pictures. "These are going to save…"
Keller waved a dismissive hand, his face scrunched in a look of complete hatred. "Save who? Don't you understand? You're the only one left."
Colette was silent for a moment. Keller sneered knowingly at her. "Everyone else is dead. Just like Gina and me. You left us at Black Mesa, and you left the rest of the world to die. The Combine have killed us all, there's no one left to save."
Colette could feel the footsteps behind her drawing closer, but the revelation was too much to stomach. The woman dropped to her knees, the photographs falling to the ground beside her.
"I…I…"
Gina was next to her suddenly, a surprisingly reassuring hand gripping her shoulder. "It's okay, Colette, we understand you didn't mean it…"
The footsteps were finally behind her now, and they came to a stop.
"Forgiveness, Colette, its here."
Tears flowing down her cheeks, Colette turned and saw the figure standing behind her.
The monstrosity loomed above her; its eyes glowing a toxic green. A drab leather trench coat covered what was presumably an ugly and disfigured body. In its arms it cradled a mean looking device, one end had a small tube, glowing a sickening green, while the barrel of the weapon looked like the business end of a flame-thrower.
Colette, though, felt no fear. This was the angel Gabriel sent to forgive her, sent to take her back to her friends, to the rest of humanity, since there was no one here left to protect, no one here left to save. As the Cremator, the Combine's preferred form of clean-up, raised its immolator to dispatch her, Colette gripped the photos against her scuffed breast plate, smiling as the flame and the toxic chemicals ate away at her flesh.
(A/N: As always, reviews welcome!)