"Is it true, about Gordon Freeman?" Eric asked.

Their two hours were up. Splice had been right: he'd fallen asleep almost immediately after they'd finished up, coming awake suddenly to a hand on his shoulder in the darkness some time later. Now they were all getting ready for the next part in the pale glow of Lara's flashlight, checking their weapons and making sure their gear was secured.

"I don't know for sure, you know how rumors are, but I think so," Splice replied. "For sure, something has happened. I've never seen them this active before, not even during our most savage attacks. They're mobilizing their entire army, it looks like. There's been more helicopters in the sky than I've ever seen. There were even Striders around."

"Jesus," he muttered.

"What does it mean, if he's really back? I mean...he's not really that powerful, is he?"

"Can't rightly say," Splice replied.

"No, he's not," Eric said.

"You seem awful confident in that answer," Lara replied.

"Well, when I was-" He caught himself, shook his head. "Let's just say, I've talked with a lot of the old hands who were actually there at Black Mesa, some of whom had personal interactions with him. He's a scientist. A scientist in great shape who is an excellent shot and sounds extremely brave and skilled at survival, but he's not superhuman. Black Mesa was a living nightmare, a lot of things happened and a lot of people did a lot of things. There were a lot of heroes those few days between when the Cascade hit, but before the nuke went off. It's just that almost everyone there died, and he happened to be the one most people remember, and people like Eli Vance and Isaac Kleiner and Barney Calhoun talked about him a lot. People need heroes, and he became the most recognizable one. He went missing under mysterious circumstances, so he's unique in that he's neither dead nor alive. That's why he's mythical."

"You seem to know a lot about this," Lara murmured.

"I like history, I studied Black Mesa extensively," Eric replied as he finished relacing his boots up. It was his automatic go-to response anytime people started to get suspicious or curious about his Black Mesa knowledge.

The average person, even now, wasn't ready to hear: I was abducted by a man in a blue suit and put into stasis for eighteen years and I have no idea how or why but here I am.

"It's true," Splice said. "Eric has a lot of knowledge about the incident. Sometimes it almost seemed like he was actually there...although that'd be impossible." She frowned suddenly. "Well, maybe. I mean twenty years feels like forever, but I guess you could've been a security guard or something, working there under unique circumstances in your mid-twenties, and you just aged pretty well…"

"I wasn't there," he lied, finishing up. He checked over his MP7 once more, then turned fully towards the two of them. "I'm thirty two years old, I would've been freaking twelve. Now, you ready? We should go."

"I'm ready," Lara said.

"Yeah," Splice replied. "I'm good."

"Okay, one other thing. Splice: in case worst comes to worst, I need to know where this device is hidden."

"Yeah that makes sense," she said. "In the center of the junkyard is a huge crane. There's a car, faded red, two door, across from the it, where the cabin of the crane is facing. License plate says HL2-EP3. It's in the trunk of that car, beneath the carpeting. It's in a small gunmetal gray case that should be sealed up tight. Got it?"

He repeated it back to her and she nodded.

"Okay, good, let's do this."

They crept up out of the underground.

The opening let into the basement of an old apartment building that wasn't all that dissimilar from the one he'd been evacuating his people from not too long ago. It bothered Eric how recently that was. It was still today that had happened, but it felt longer already. He'd had to live this life, always on the run, catching sleep and food where he could, thrown suddenly and violently into pitched, haphazard gun battles, and it always fucked with his sense of time.

Eric led the way, emerging first and listening for signs of life. When he heard nothing beyond the low level ambience of the city, less low level than average, though, he had the others come up and they picked their way carefully through the dim basement. There was just enough light to see by from the Combine-provided streetlights glaring in through the dirty, slit windows high up in the walls. They moved carefully between heaps of garbage, old shelves, and battered, long-dead washers and dryers, making inexorable progress towards the exit.

It felt strange to be back to work, mainly because of how easily he was slipping right back into it. It was like he'd never left, or had been gone for weeks instead of months. It felt good to be back in the company of professionals, doing dangerous and necessary things. He paused, thinking of Lara. Well, competent people, at least. He wasn't sure if he'd go so far as to call her professional. As skilled as she was, he couldn't deny there was an air of immaturity about her. Although he couldn't exactly blame her, given how her father was.

The guy wouldn't let her do anything.

And then there was Splice. They'd run a few missions together and she was almost as good in the field as she was in bed.

They emerged in the ground floor of the old building, finding it unoccupied and in a state of decay. The trio gathered at the broken-in front entrance, crouching in the shadows and studying the situation. The apartment let out onto a street packed with more structures like it.

"Okay, what's the actual path?" Eric murmured.

"See that gas station?" Splice replied, nodding.

"Yeah," he replied, looking across the street and up a bit.

"We get there. There's a fence behind it. On the other side of that fence is the junkyard."

"Easy," Lara muttered.

"Mmm," Eric replied.

"What?" Splice asked.

"Too easy, maybe. I don't know. Nothing's ever easy in this business."

"You're getting paranoid," Splice said. "Sometimes things just go right."

"I guess we'll see." He looked around again. It was a relatively straight shot to the gas station. Despite all the activity, he saw no Combine in the immediate area, and a few of the streetlights were out, giving them the cover of darkness. "Okay, go when I go, stay on me. Low and quiet."

"Check," Lara replied.

"I'm ready," Splice said.

He waited another moment, then set off. They followed. The three of them moved fast and kept low, constantly checking for signs of enemy activity. But the street seemed vacated. Eric kept his pistol in hand, ready for the worst. But they managed to reach the gas station without any hint of trouble. The lot to either side of the structure was absolutely packed with junk, mostly old vehicles and machinery piled up haphazardly, so the only path forward was through the station itself.

Eric studied it as they approached. Like everything else, it was old, tired, and worn-out. The windows were broken and the gas pumps were long since sucked dry, not that it would matter if anything was even left in there, given the gas would be long past useless by now. As he approached the front door, still intact, he paused as he saw signs of recent use. Eric held his fist up and took another look at the prints in the dirt.

Not bootprints, but…

He peered cautiously inside, seeing not a whole lot because most of the interior was taken up by bare, dusty shelves and a long counter. Eric reached out and tapped out a little code on the door's frame. A long pause went by, then he heard four taps in acknowledgment somewhere deeper in. One, two fast, one.

"Friendly, inside," he whispered. "Vortigaunt. Come on."

"What's he doing here?" Lara murmured.

"Let's find out."

They slipped inside and he felt extremely grateful that no bell dinged as they came in. It was amazing how many little shops and stores had that, even now. Eric could faintly hear breathing somewhere nearby.

"Friendly, identify yourself," he whispered loudly.

A pause, then a low voice that sounded almost like it was buzzing asked, "The Bishop has returned?"

"...Radek?"

Everyone jerked slightly as a Vortigaunt stood up behind the counter and regarded them with a big red eye, and three much smaller eyes orbiting above that.

"You know him?" Splice murmured.

"Yeah. Radek. Holy shit. What the hell are you doing here?" Eric asked.

"We could ask you the same thing, Bishop," Radek replied in his humming voice. "It is good to see you again. Are you still in mourning?"

Eric chuckled softly and walked back behind the counter. "Yeah, you could say that. But, uh, I guess I'm back in the Resistance."

Radek hugged him suddenly. Eric hugged the Vortigaunt back. "We are sorry. Your pain was great, but you hide it well. Your tragedy is immense and your adamant resolution is encouraging."

"You really have a way with words, Radek...thanks. I appreciate it," Eric replied. "How are you?"

"We are well. We are now busy. The One Free Man has returned."

"You know that he's back, for sure?" Splice asked.

"Yes," Radek replied, disengaging from Eric. Vortigaunts were not known for their hugs, but when they gave them, they tended to be long. "We know. He has returned to us. The Combine's reckoning is at hand at last."

"Well...great," Lara said.

"How's it actually going?" Splice asked.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, but we have a job to do. Radek, are you alone? Are you busy?"

"We are indeed alone. Our team is dead. Our mission is failed. We are hiding. But we were successful in our subterfuge. No one knows we are here. We can help you," Radek replied. "We are uninjured and capable."

"Thank you," Eric replied, feeling relief. Radek was a very capable agent. "There's a junkyard right behind this place we have to get into, retrieve something crucial, and then get back underground and deliver it somewhere...what was your mission? Do you still need to complete it?"

"Assassination, and it matters not in the grand scheme of things. This mission was one of chaos and opportunity. Fate frowned upon us and chaos turned against us, as is the nature of things. We are yours for now."

"It'll be like the old days," Eric said.

"Ah yes. The halcyon days of old. Madness and murder and mayhem. Regrettable though it may be, it is necessary. And the Combine have earned our ire for all eternity."

Radek raised one very long-fingered, alien hand and Eric grinned and slapped his own hand into it, gripping it tightly. If he wasn't holding a pistol, he'd have pressed his other hand against the back of Radek's to finish the shake.

"I have never seen someone so friendly with a Vortigaunt," Lara said.

"Many humans are uncomfortable with our mannerisms," Radek replied, "but the Eric Bishop understands us as few others do. He is different. We remembered him from...before."

"Before?" Splice asked. "What does that mean?"

"Before now," Eric replied firmly, "right Radek?"

"Correct," Radek answered only after a pause.

Sometimes, he thought the Vortigaunts liked messing with him. Probably because they remembered how many he'd had to kill in Black Mesa. He'd never fully gotten a grasp of precisely how Vortigaunts experienced reality, but he did know that they had some kind of collective memory, and they knew. They were also willing to keep secrets.

But Radek liked to mess with him, occasionally, and clearly that propensity hadn't left him.

"Radek and I ran several missions back in the day," Eric said as he moved to the back door. "He's hell on wheels and he's pretty damn powerful."

"You didn't...are there female Vortigaunt?" Lara murmured.

"We are not having this conversation and no, not quite in the way we think of them," Eric replied.

"...so you have had this conversation?" Splice asked, grinning. Eric sighed.

"We have," Radek said, and Eric sighed louder.

"Wait...so were you asking Radek to hook you up with some alien strange?" Lara asked.

"Focus on the mission," Eric replied.

"Oh my God, you were! Splice was right, you are a whore," Lara said, laughing.

"Oh like you wouldn't if we could go interspecies!" Eric snapped, looking back at her. She opened her mouth, then closed it, blushing suddenly in the pale light. Splice struggled to contain her laughter. "Yeah, I thought so," he said.

"Humans will fuck anything," Splice said.

"Exactly my point. Now drop this and focus up. Seriously, this is life or death."

"Focused," Lara said, then cleared her throat.

Eric shook his head and zeroed himself once more. Definitely not professional. Though he supposed he couldn't quite talk. He carefully opened up the back door and looked around. Still nothing around, still mostly silent. He led the way, pistol in hand, into the alleyway of space between the back of the building and the fence behind it. There wasn't as much room as he would've liked, but that didn't really matter.

They came to a hole in the fence and he peered slowly, cautiously through. The junkyard was poorly lit and looked very abandoned. From what he could tell, it was essentially a large, square lot, the periphery of which was full of all sorts of junk, mostly the skeletal, burned-out remains of old cars, gutted washers, dryers, fridges, and other assorted bulky household appliances, and a random mishmash of everything else.

The center was dominated by a massive, rusted-out crane that towered over everything like an ancient, brooding metal sentinel. Between the two was a ring of mostly open space, dotted by random cars and other piles of junk.

He didn't see anything that looked like life, but something had him paranoid. As he was crouching there, considering it, two things happened. The first was that he spotted the vehicle in question, about fifty feet from where he was right now.

The second was that it began to rain, hard.

"Oh come on!" he hissed.

"Great," Splice muttered.

"The sky weeps for our sins," Radek murmured, looking up with his great red eye.

"Vortigaunts always have the weirdest shit to say," Lara muttered.

"We remember you, Lara Rift," Radek replied, shifting his gaze to her.

"What? We've never met...I think," Lara said.

"If you've met one Vortigaunt, you've met them all," Splice said. "They've got some kind of collective consciousness."

"They're hardwired to each other all the time?" she asked.

"Yeah, basically."

"So why the fuck don't we have them work as, like, living radios? Why don't they feed us more intel if they can all see everything that they're all seeing?" she asked.

"It doesn't really work like that, believe me, it's been thought of. Now everyone shut up. Radek, you're gonna back me up. I'm going to make a run for the car. I see it. Splice, how do I get it open?" he asked.

"Just give it a hard yank," she replied.

"Fine. You and Lara stay here and watch my back. I'll be back with it as soon as I can," Eric said.

"Check," Splice said.

Eric carefully stepped through the hole in the fence, grateful for the bit of space that had been cleared in the junk field ahead of it, and then made room for Radek. Once the Vortigaunt was through, he crept up, crouched low, mostly hidden by the stack of junk to either side of him, and paused at the threshold.

"Okay, let's go," he said softly, and set off when he saw still nothing.

Having Radek backing him up once again...it was like no time had passed at all. He could sense the old Vortigaunt at his back, almost perfectly in step with him, making almost no sound. They'd run dozens of missions together. Despite everything, despite the gap of communication between them, (even after months of learning), the fact that he'd blown away dozens of his people in and around Black Mesa…

Radek had been one of his closest friends. As odd as it seemed, Radek seemed to get him in a way almost no one else did. Eric suspected it had to do with the fact that he was one of the few (not counting all the other Vortigaunts) who knew the truth about him. He was lost in time, and Radek and the other Vortigaunts could see that, and tried to comfort him…

Mostly. Sometimes they were still annoyed he'd killed so many Vortigaunts.

The rain was bitterly cold, pelting him relentlessly as he hurried forward across the junkyard. Visibility hadn't gone completely to shit yet and he was focused on the car. The distance disappeared, foot by foot, until finally he was there at the trunk.

"Bishop, something is wrong," Radek growled.

"What?" he asked as he holstered his pistol and grabbed the trunk.

"I am not sure, but danger lurks in the swollen shadows…"

He grunted as he popped the trunk and reached in. He pulled aside the carpet and-

"Got it!" he whispered, snatching it up.

"Now! Now! Go! Take them out!"

Lights snapped into being, several mechanically-edged voices starting shouting, and before he could get a few feet, gunfire shrieking his way. He reacted immediately even as he heard Radek charging up his electrical attack, holding onto the case tightly as he drew his pistol. Ahead of him and to either side, he saw white-masked, armored figures popping up out of the junk. And then it was pure chaos as he returned fire.

Beside him, Radek launched his first bolt of yellow-green energy. It struck one of the troopers squarely in his chest and, armored or not, it knocked the bastard clean off his feet. Eric aimed and fired, hearing the satisfying combination of the long beep-whine of a dead Civil Protection officer and the distinct sound of a bullet punching through armor. He twisted and fired again, punching several rounds into the chest of another exposed officer.

Then he was ducking down behind the car, bullets plinking off the metal, looking around frantically. Radek charged and fired another bolt of energy.

"We should retreat post haste," he said calmly.

"I know! I'll provide cover fire, and you-"

He cut off as an awful sound came to him. The heavy whirring of a Hunter-Chopper on rapid approach to shoot the hell out of them.

"Aw shit!" he snapped.

"Let's go, Eric!" Splice yelled. He tossed a glance their way and saw the two women now in the narrow corridor of junk he'd left behind to get here, both of them firing away at the guards scattered across the junkyard.

He cursed, aimed, and emptied his pistol into a pair of the bastards as they both came up from behind a car to try and take him out. They went down screaming, their blood spraying across the rusted out pile of junk behind them.

"Not yet!" he snarled as he ducked back down, secured the case, and slapped a fresh magazine into his pistol. "Radek! Get under the crane and juice it up as fast as you can!"

"We understand," Radek replied, and took off running.

Eric cursed and provided some cover fire for the reckless Vortigaunt, injuring another metro cop before being driven back into cover by return fire.

"Eric, what are you doing?!" Lara demanded.

"Just fucking hold position!" he snarled.

The Hunter-Chopper was almost here, and they had to take it out if they were going to successfully get away. They didn't have anything big enough to do so, meaning he was going to have to improvise. And it was going to be a hell of an improvisation.

He heard the distinct sound of energy building up, and saw a glow of greenish light coming out from beneath the huge piece of machinery. It was easy to miss, but the glow quickly began to suffuse the entire structure of the crane. Now it was time to do as he'd done so many times before: gamble. Hope that his plan worked out. Eric kept firing, emptying another magazine at the Civil Protection bastards that pinned him down, and put down three more of them in quick succession. He glanced up as the chopper appeared.

It was a sleek, black nightmare cast in gleaming, wet metal. It had been rigged with a chaingun and already the big weapon was spinning up. Great. The rain was going to complicate things somewhat.

"Radek!" Eric called.

"We are listening!" Radek called back from beneath the crane.

"I'm gonna need you to-shit!" He ducked down behind the vehicle as the Hunter-Chopper opened up. A barrage of lethal lead crashed into the metal frame and rattled it mightily. Abruptly, the gunfire fell away.

"This seems an inopportune moment for defecation!" Radek called.

Eric let out a wild laugh. "Radek! Just hit the chopper towards the thing sticking up out of this big machine, got it!?"

"We have it!"

"Go! Now!"

Radek scrambled out from under the crane and loped towards cover as Eric abandoned his own. He emptied his pistol as he ran, raining a hail of fire on the cops that he could see, their masks glowing white in the gloom. Lara and Splice seemed on top of the situation. Even as he caught sight of another one, the white mask snapped back and a spray of blood burst in the rainfall. Good. He needed to get this chopper off their ass. Even the short distance back to the underground was too much with a Hunter-Chopper.

Though if this didn't work, he was going to have to risk it.

Eric managed to reach the body of the crane just as he heard the distinctive sound of a Hunter-Chopper spinning up for attack. He put the crane between it and himself, then hunkered down and waited for the storm of bullets to pass. They rattled the old crane and he genuinely worried it might just give up the ghost then and there. But, as his elders had always been so fond of reminding him, whoever built this thing had built it to last.

He clambered hastily up onto the machinery after holstering his pistol, needing both hands for this. Radek was shouting something, what he recognized as a battle call in Vortese or...whatever they called it. Splice and Lara were still firing away. As he got up to the cabin and glanced skyward, he saw one of Radek's energy bolts hit the side of the chopper and nudge it in the right direction. Good. It began drawing a bead on the Vortigaunt. Bad.

But now was the moment of truth. Eric yanked on the cabin door a few times before it gave reluctantly and granted him access. Slipping inside, he felt a jolt of hope as he saw several of the lights lit up on the dashboard. He hastily flicked a few switches, then grasped the controls and started trying to move the five-story crane around.

It gave, slowly, but it gave, and began to drift up, rising higher. The chopper was low, lower than it should have been, either overeager or overconfident, he didn't care which. Radek managed to punch it once more with another bolt of energy before it opened fire and unleashed another volley of screaming metal death down onto them.

Staring up at the chopper with wide eyes through the grimy, rain-streaked windows of the cabin, Eric honed all his attention down to a laser focus. He had to get this right, and it was all the more difficult because this fucking crane moved slower than molasses in January, but it was moving. And the chopper was moving, bobbing up and down, drifting back and forth. He kept pressing the crane up while simultaneously shifting it towards the chopper.

It was so close! Eric grit his teeth, his muscles clenched, body trembling in anticipation as he saw that the height was right, but it was drifting away from the crane faster than he could move it. Radek just had to-

A bolt of energy smashed into the side of the chopper and nudged it, hard, into the crane. The reaction was immediate and exactly what Eric was hoping for. The spinning blades instantly shattered as they came in contact with the old but solidly-built metal tower sticking out of the crane, and the chopper began twisting wildly, trying to cope with this sudden development. But it was already starting to plummet earthwards.

Cursing, partially in triumph, partially in anxiety, Eric threw himself out of the cabin and all but fell down the big piece of machinery. He saw Radek loping towards the other two and began sprinting to join him. Civil Protection officers were shouting and firing wildly, the chopper's blades came down in a spray of flaming, metal hail, and chaos owned the junkyard in that instant. Radek made it to the alcove of space beside their exit, and then Eric was there, and then the four of them were racing back out, through the gas station, and then towards the apartment.

None of them spoke until they managed to make it safely back underground, and then they all stood panting in an underground tunnel, listening to the distant sounds of rain and the occasional explosion.

"Eric...that was the most amazing thing I've ever seen," Lara said as she got her breath back. "How in the hell-"

"Eric's a goddamned grandmaster at making things work in the heat of the moment, and yeah I meant that both ways," Splice said, laughing. "Whew! Goddamn that is the spice of life!"

"Yeah," Eric replied. "You okay, Radek? Is everyone okay?"

"We remain uninjured," Radek reported. "Truly, you are a master of improvisation. We have missed this about you."

"I missed you too, Radek," Eric replied. After a few moments, he took a deep breath, straightened up, and let it out. Then he investigated his pocket. Carefully, he extracted the slim metal case he'd tucked away and passed it to Splice. "Well?"

"Hold on," she muttered, pulling out a small but powerful flashlight and cracking the case open. Inside, a glittering blue piece of technology, studded with silver and gold, rested in black foam. It looked...incredibly expensive.

"Wow, what the hell is it?" Lara asked. "A motherboard, you said?"

"More or less," she replied, studying it carefully. "Looks good. This is what we need." She resealed it and handed it back to Eric, who made it disappear into his hardened inner pocket.

"Let's keep moving," he said, and led them back into the subterranean gloom.