AN: Thanks again for the reviews, guys, they really keep me going. I've thankfully managed to devise the next 'arc' in the story that will occupy the next few chapters, so I should be able to chug-along for a bit before any writer's block sets in... :P

--

As I floated through the nothingness, spinning weightlessly, every second felt like a year. That was entirely possible of course. In the space of a few seconds a few decades could fly by in the real world, and I wouldn't even know about it until I got there.

Then, just like everything else in this state of non-death, I heard something happened suddenly. I heard humming far away. More of a murmur, but I could pick out that it had a tone to it. It got louder, closer, and, as I expected, the man in the suit was soon obstructing my field of vision. His face held an expression that betrayed his anguished thoughts; 'I thought this was taken care of'.

The Vortigaunts, glowing a deep purple and pink had surrounded him again, but now there were more than I'd ever seen- practically hundreds, their arms outstretched, swirling pools of energy held at their hands.

The blue-suit man's face was etched into my retinas as I awoke in a flash of light. An incredible shiver ran up my spine, causing me to convulse as if in a standing seizure. The air around me was cold, and my HEV suit started to boil me alive to make up for the cold. It soon settled back to a comfortable temperature as I took in my surroundings.

I was on the deck of the Borealis again. The snow was sticking to my hair in clumps, and the deck had iced-over again. I was at the back of the ship, behind the remains of the bridge. I could see a makeshift fortification had been built around it, with a few stationary guns, but no one was manning them. The deck was lifeless, and a lot of the cargo containers were gone.

For a second I thought that the Vortigaunts had come too late. Decades had passed and now I was stuck in the middle of nowhere. My heart jumped as a siren went off next to my head. A little speaker held aloft on a metal beam haphazardly welded to the deck.

Nearby there was a hole in the deck, apparently from an explosion of some sort. The metal was thick, and it looked to be intentional.

Suddenly a rebel sprung out of the hole like a rabbit- a rebel from City 17. He had an AR2 and a couple of grenades were clipped on his chest. He was about to kill me when he realized who I was. His eyes went wide, and his jaw-dropped. I was used to this kind of thing by now, though.

"Doctor Freeman?" he asked. I began to wonder just how long I'd been gone.

The siren went off again, and he looked to the skies worriedly.

"Come on down. We can't talk here." He said, and gestured toward the hole. I walked over and peered down, and could make out the shape of a make-shift ladder. I scrambled down quickly, eager to find out what had happened since my disappearance.

"Doctor Kleiner's office is just down this corrider. Take a right at the end, and then his office should be on your left a few feet down. I have to stay here, but you shouldn't have any trouble finding it." he said, and pressed a button on a panel on the wall, but I didn't stay to find out what it might do.

The halls were hot and murky. Every few feet was a huge vent, with a giant fan, all of which were inactive. I found the door to Doctor Kleiner's office and opened it with a sigh, expecting another ramshackle Rebel camp in a place with little or no comfort. For some reason the fact that the Rebel hadn't mentioned Alyx made me nervous too. Maybe the Vortigauts had failed to keep the Blue-suited man occupied? I didn't want to think about it. The last thing we needed now was to lose Alyx to some trans-dimensional being.

My sigh turned into a gasp as I laid eyes on Doctor Kleiner's office, causing me to cough and sputter just a bit. Much like the bridge, the room had white tiled floors, walls, and ceilings, as well as the computer and monitor from the bridge. The circle was zooming about the screen, a bright orange. Irritated I guessed.

When he heard the door open, Doctor Kleiner turned and he looked shocked, as shocked as he had through the view-screen the first time I had every come to City 17.

"Gordon! This- this is amazing! The Vortigaunts predicted you'd be in stasis for 20 years at least! Yet, here you are, a week later! I have to- Oh, I should tell Alyx! She'll be positively ecstatic!" he said, stopping and stuttering the whole way through, before turning to the hastily-built viewscreen above the desk, whose grungy gray exterior stood in stark contrast to the bright white room around it.

He reached around the side and messed around with the buttons and dials on the side until the screen turned on. It came to life for a moment, but soon it went out, shooting a spark out with it.

He let out a rather lifeless breath, and I understood how he must have felt. He wasn't exactly young anymore, and he constantly had to move around, hauling his valuable information around behind him. He grumbled a bit and hit the viewscreen's side with his palm, and started messing with the buttons on the side again. The screen turned on and this time stayed on, though it appeared that at any moment it might give out again.

"Hey. I recognize you." Came a voice from the monitor, as Doctor Kleiner tuned the viewscreen to Alyx's frequency. "You took my cake. You'll get yours."

Doctor Kleiner, finished with tuning the viewscreen, pressed a button on the monitor. The circle turned red, angry, but made no noise- it was muted.

On the screen I saw a room similar to the one I was in, but altered slightly. A bed had been moved in, and the sheets and blankets were rustled and unmade. Slept in recently. Then Alyx's head swung in from the left side of the screen, her eyes held open with a great amount of effort. She had been sleeping.

"Alyx! You'll never guess who's just arrived!" Doctor Kleiner said, his voice back to normal. She didn't seem to keen to make an attempt at first, but I saw her eyes glance towards me, then hang over me as they opened to their full extent. The corners of her mouth grew apart, and then she was gone.

Doctor Kleiner looked at the screen for a few minutes, confused. He turned back to me and was about to ask if he'd just imagined her or if she had, in fact, disappeared, when the door slammed open. I was instantly beset upon by whatever had broken in, and was knocked onto my back.

Alyx had tackled me in a hug, and though her cheek was digging painfully deep into mine, I didn't say anything. She made a sort of 'mmmm' sound, like a cat's purr, and when she finally brought her face away from my cheek her head seemed to catch on something, and her face hovered a few inches from mine. I could feel her breath on my nose, and I thought for a second that she might kiss me.

Then she awkwardly stumbled to her feet, and was about to give me a hand when Doctor Kleiner chuckled a bit. Alyx gave him a puzzled look, then her eyes shot to directly behind my head. I was startled when a headcrab grasped my face firmly, and I flopped around in a panic. I could hear Alyx and Doctor Kleiner laughing and I realized it was Lamarr. I pulled her off my head and threw her at Doctor Kleiner, who caught her mid jump, as I'm sure he was accustomed to doing. Having a headcrab would train a person quite well against the real thing, I'd assume.

"Oh, I've forgotten to feed her. I'm sorry Gordon." He said, still chuckling. I slowly pulled myself up and wiped my face off with my hands.

"Come on, let me show you around the ship." Alyx said, grabbing my hand and leading me out of the room. Doctor Kleiner said something just as the door closed, but I couldn't here it.

Just as before the hallway was warm, and I could see Alyx wipe the rapidly-accumulating beads of sweat from her forehead, using the makeshift cast she wore on her right wrist, before gesturing towards a door as we passed.

"That's Doctor Mossman's office." She said, without stopping. I wondered if she was actually busy, or if Alyx was simply avoiding her. I couldn't blame her, though, as the only real emotional tie they held was dead. I'm sure they only reminded each other of Eli.

We kept walking for a few minutes, before we turned and came to a staircase. We went down more flights of stairs than I cared to count, and by the time we came to the bottom we were both panting like dogs. We didn't stop, however, as she assured me were close.

We finally reached the room, and I had trouble grasping what I was seeing. The room we were in, by itself, wasn't much. It was more of an L-shaped hallway, that first jutted to the left then went straightforward again. It had windows however, which would seem strange on any surface other than the hull in a ship. Here, though, they allowed the viewing of the chamber through which the hallway sat. I could barely make out the top, and the hazy mist in the room made seeing the far wall impossible. It looked as if it stretched into infinity and further.

In the center stood a giant chamber that stretched all the way to the top of the room, and connected at the base with the room we were in. Alyx gave a smug little laugh as if finding an enormous room in the middle of a lost tanker in the Arctic Ocean was a normal experience for her.

"C'mon." She said, and led the way around the corner toward the room. The door was round, and decorated to make it look even more high-tech than it was, and after a moment it slid open slowly.

The massive room appeared even bigger from the inside. There were a few men here in lab coats. At the center of the room hung a big jumble of wires and cables and pieces of protective plastic, but it hung a good 20 feet above the ground. While it appeared rectangular from the outside, the interior was actually cylindrical, as if it were made to fit around whatever had been built there. It appeared that the bottom portion of the jumble of wires had been sort of torn or burned off.

One of the scientists was on a large ladder, extended to its full length, leaning on the hanging equipment. It wasn't a flat surface, and even the slightest movement made it look like it might topple. Another was in a small booth, whose black exterior was chipping away, like rust without the color. There was a pedestal with a large red button, but pressing it had no visible effect on anything nearby. At the far end of the room there was a hole in the ground that led to another room, though there didn't appear to be a simple way to move into and out of said room.

"Neat, huh?" she said, putting her hands on her hips and looking up. "Doctor Kleiner thinks it's for a missile or a bomb. If you look on the floors above the room, though, it looks like the floor was repaired. Like something tore a hole through the whole ship. I think it was for research- maybe experimenting with an unstable chemical, and the explosion was somehow concentrated upwards."

I looked up, but was knocked over as the ship shook- it felt like an explosion had occurred on the deck. I looked at Alyx, who didn't seem worried.

"The Combine have been pounding the ship for days. They want whatever is here so badly that they aren't willing to hurt the ship itself, so we just have to shut off the few entrances to the deck. That's where most of the power is going, so we can't cool the halls. They'll cool down themselves eventually, but it's strange that they were kept warm this whole time in the first place."

She kept going, talking about all the oddities on the ship, and her own hypotheses behind them, her eyes pointed up as if she had scribbled them all on the ceiling and couldn't remember. My mind wandered back to the near-kiss in Doctor Kleiner's office. As much as I would have liked for it to move past a 'near-kiss', I knew that I wouldn't have let it. The blue-suited man could break free from the Vortigaunts' hold at any moment, and if he did then Alyx could be in as much danger as me, even more-so had she gone through with it.

A little radio clipped to the back of Alyx's belt began making some noises, before Barney's voice started to emanate from it.

"Alyx, you there? Over." He said. She quickly pulled it, the clip making a snap as it closed on itself.

"Yep." She replied simply. There was a slight pause, and I saw her grin a little as Barney started to talk.

"How many times do I have to tell you, Alyx, you gotta' say 'over' so I know you're done talkin'!" he said, and even through the radio I could tell he was cranky. He had probably been up for too long, ensuring the ship was safe. He continued with a sigh.

"Anyways, we need you up here in the security office. Doc's got a job for you two, over."

Alyx muttered an affirmation, followed by a mumbled 'over', and set off in the direction from which we had come.