The good news (depending on one's interpretation) our local kingpin's lair may have been in sight already, and it wasn't far away.
Moving past the wind-carved canyons, we emerged onto an open gorge flanked by high ridged cliffs. There was one distinct landmark of great interest within the landscape, and that was the very massive, distinct symmetrical shape fixed within a large peak about four hundred metres high at the other end of the gorge. Even from here, it was plain to see that it was a made structure with a functional purpose. A door, if I wasn't mistaken.
Thanks to my maturing connection to the Vortessence, I had access to a limited amount of shared information held by the collective consciousness of the Vortigaunts, and I was able to realise that this specific island held one of the numerous facilities established by the Nihilanth when he made a refuge for himself here in the border world. I was able to recognise the octangular shape of the door quite vividly, thanks to my shared reminiscence with the vortigaunts; that, up ahead, was one of those old facilities. What precise purpose it had before, I didn't know, but brutal subjugation and labour occurred in there all the same.
Whatever was now in charge of those Controllers had to have taken up residency in that ruin of a bygone era. Of course, I had no definitive proof that it was there, but it was where we needed to be, regardless. There was a piece of equipment in there that we needed to get to the relay station in an instant, and that was not an exaggeration. And should this kingpin happen to be standing in our way, I was confident Shephard and I could make short work of it (so I prayed).
As was typical of Xen's behaviour, the rubbly gorge we had to traverse revealed its own slew of unpleasant surprises. Large boulders coated with an array of Xenian overgrowth consistent the majority of the uneven terrain of the gorge, ranging from melon-sized to house-sized. This was most likely the result of previous rockslides at various points in the past; the surrounding mountain walls did not look the most structurally sound, as I could see a copious number of cracks and crevices all across their surfaces.
While it may have looked empty at first, this gorge was most certainly a deathtrap all the same. Shephard and I discovered from a distance before even setting foot down in the gorge that this place was populated by a very distressing race of monsters that rose out from large burrows in the ground. Enormous, towering beasts with sturdy, limbless, stalk-like bodies and rough greenish-yellow skin that generally rose an alarming twenty feet above ground.
Their heads were a frightening display, consisting of large, black sharply-pointed blade-like noses that almost resembled exposed claws, a fleshy sucker at the bottom of their heads, and crimson orbs just behind those-claw shaped noses that looked like they glowed in the bottle green hue of the nebulae in the tumultuous sky. We were lucky to get a preview of these creatures at a safe distance when we witnessed one of them slice through an unwitting hammy that happened to be frolicking through the gorge and getting a little too close to it. The tentacle-creature's bladed nose sliced clean through the hammy with terrifying speed and precision.
There was no apparent way around this deathtrap, and we couldn't rock wall climb around it because of how brittle the surfaces looked on either side of the gorge. So, we were left with the only obvious option, which naturally happened to be the worst possible one. We were doing this all for Red Bay; we had to keep reminding ourselves of that.
Thanks to a beneficial tip from Shephard, I learned that these towering behemoths were particularly irritated towards sound. He apparently encountered a few of these things in the zoological labs while wandering through the bowels of Black Mesa and nearly got his arm sliced off. I was surprised that these things could hear much of anything at all while they were moaning deafeningly out into the open air.
The gorge was not too extensive, roughly less than four hundred metres, but it was the waiting and the hasty evasion from the ferocious stationary creatures that made the trek especially tedious and nerve-wracking. While we had decent-enough space to navigate over and around the massive boulders of the gorge out of the general range of the tentacle creatures, their horrendous, low moaning and their impulsive picks at the ground with their huge, claw-like noses made me jump nearly every time. That would explain all the bits of loose rubble all over the place.
"Good God, these bastards just can't shut the hell up…" Shephard cursed with rumbling frustration, trying to concentrate on our surroundings as we moved diligently while having to endure the horrible moaning of the tentacles.
"If only our helmets could be soundproof; I would love to just hear ourselves through our comms right now," I vexed, keeping low to the ground as I looked up cautiously at these giants while my tail flicked impulsively out of agitation.
"Heckin' yeah?" Shephard was spurred with insatiable desire at the idea. "Every single one of these mofos sounds like the drummer to some shitty garage band. Bang, bang, bang―doesn't even have a beat. Their vocals suck eggs, too. Imagine these guys trying to sing a cover of a damned Chris Barnes album."
I could tell he was mostly venting to himself, but I found it a little funny, regardless. Even when suppressed, laughter, even in its smallest portions, could satiate a stressed mind. Every little bit helped, especially in a strained situation like this.
Eventually, in no small part due to sparing a few of his rifle's grenade rounds, he managed to trick some of the monsters in our path to focus their attention on the preceding explosions a distance away while we sped away like LightFoots while they were distracted by those raucous combustions. This tactic worked rather favourably for the rest of the way until we made it to the other end of the gorge, clear from the towering monsters' dwelling as well as their only hunting ground. We both snagged a minute to catch our breath, as it was quite an intense sprint.
"It was touch and go for a minute there! Yeesh…" Shephard sighed tiredly, laughing a little bit with me.
"Nice shots on those explosive rounds, Corporal. You have terrific aim," I praised, making Shephard shrug his shoulders modestly (the best his armour plating could allow for, anyway).
"I'm good at what I do. I guess that happens to be shooting. Better than nothing."
I was about to follow up on his subversive self-derogatory statement when, all of a sudden, the gravelly ground beneath us began to tremor unbearably. And before either of us could properly hope to run up the hill, another one of the giant tentacle monsters burst from a hidden burrow a few meters away from us, roaring with fury as it towered twenty feet above us. My reflexes proved to be a little faster than this monster's deadly quick strike.
Fuelled by a visceral spike of pure fear and desperation, I whipped my staff out and indirectly unleashed perhaps the deadliest learnt spell my staff had ever collected, which happened to be the disintegrating particle field I encountered in the emancipation grill in Arbeit #1. This whole section of the gorge flashed with white light as a stream of deadly particles slashed across the monster's stalk of a body with my arm motions, and then there was a deadly silence as the monster froze in mid-rise.
Shephard and I gazed up in awe as the upper half of the monster's body began to slide sideways off the main stalk, creaking and snapping loudly like falling timber before lifelessly crashing into the ground right next to us with a mighty crash, while its other half remained still as it stuck out of the ground. We both looked at the giant severed body on the ground; its black, cauterised stump still sizzling from the intense blast that cut straight through it like a laser knife. We were both shocked at the sight.
"Woah…" Shephard said in amazement as he slowly got up next to me, looking at my staff with twice as much amazement. "Hey, uhm…it ain't my place to judge how you do your thing, but where was that several minutes ago? Could've chopped all those terror trees down with one swipe, just saying."
Immediately following my shock was an intense petrification that lasted a brief moment as I looked at my staff. I had not used this new ability since I fought that giant bruiser in the shipping depot beneath Arbeit #1. My hands began to tremble in the same way again. After a long, deep breath, I got control of my shaking again and turned to my inquisitive friend with a gentle sternness.
"Adrian…I know I told you that rocket boost trick was my least favourite of the things my staff can do, but what I just unleashed in a panic…" I paused, trying to suppress another round of shakiness that tried to foul my composure. "Until I learn how to master this new ability, it will not see usage. Under any circumstances going forward."
Thankfully, our remaining trek up the hill was very uneventful, but we weren't clear of any danger.
As we approached the yonder compound, we were quickly made aware of several massive airborne creatures flying about overhead. Their finer features were obscured by the low-hanging haze, but we could see that they had rough black skin and large, striking wingspans and were very bat-like in design, with dark magenta patagia spanning between their thin, expansive fingers. They also had thin lower bodies that ended in a spindly tail, though I couldn't make out if it had lower legs or not.
They didn't seem to notice us as they flew around the peak of the hill that the compound was built into, but Shephard and I were very careful as we tried to keep under cover as we moved, which fortunately, there was an abundance of as we made our way up the hill. A few of them could be heard screeching up above, sounding similar to how the hammies screeched before unleashing a sonic blast, which did little to quell our nerves. We inevitably made it to our destination without alerting those ferocious-looking beasts, and we continued thanking our lucky stars when we found a probable entrance into the mountainside compound.
The massive octagonal and eerily organic-looking door had no clear way of being able to get opened on the outside, but we weren't expecting to find any while on the way here across the field of moaning murder asparagus (as Shephard affectionately called them). However, we discovered that there seemed to be "dirtier" ways of getting inside. Exploring around the hill that housed the semi-subterranean structure, still keeping to cover to avoid the menacing-looking avian creatures flying around up above, Shephard and I came across a series of what looked to be exhaust ports or maintenance hatches of some kind protruding out from the ground.
With no other apparent way inside, Shephard advocated that we jump down the biggest one that would fit us, for that would surely take us straight inside the alien facility. I was hesitant to do it at first, but Shephard insisted based on his track record on finding shafts or air ducts as reliable alternative routes, and little seemed to convince him that alien ducts were different. I had a drive in me to dispute him about that, but we had to work with what was available, and those flying creatures were making me anxious the longer we were outside. Alien shaft it was.
The drop down was several feet, a relatively comfy jump and not so hard on our knees. The shaft continued in a horizontal direction forward, and there was enough room for us to crawl around in. Courageous as he always was, Shephard crawled in front of me and kept his eyes open for any cranial pests lurking around inside with us.
My telepathic sonar was in full swing as we pushed forward. While I couldn't sense anything at the moment, I had to assume that the alien alloy used to make this shaft was similar to the Combine's for safety's sake, and I told Shephard to remain on guard for any surprises, though he was already doing that very thing on instinct. I couldn't be sure what purpose this shaft truly had, but one thing was for certain: even in here, I could tell that this facility had been dead for a long, long time.
Despite the place being well abandoned, there was still a faint glow emanating through the semi-transparent panelling that flanked our sides, which was the colour of moss. We also tried to avoid the large red particles that just hung in the still air, not unlike the particles that hung over that arid region we walked through more than a few hours ago. Our air quality metres displayed a warning sign, so we were keeping our helmets on nice and tight until further notice.
Eventually, much sooner than either of us was truly expecting, we came across a potential exit in the form of a rectangular hole in the narrow floor, which prevented us from progressing further down the shaft that continued past it. With literally no other way to go, Shephard took a peek over the hole and found a debris-littered surface for us to get down on, just about ten feet below. Feeling eager to get out of this cramped passageway myself, I followed Shephard's lead and dropped down after him.
Once out, we found ourselves in a large and very dark room (nearly pitch-black), which prompted us to switch on our suit lights. With luminous rays shining from our upper abdomens, we shone them around as our bodies turned, illuminating a room that was, indeed, as dead as we presumed. The walls and ceiling were an odd design with a display of organic-looking curvature and porous indents, but they had a distinctive metallic sheen, making me question what kind of material they were made from―whether it be natural or forged.
"Well, I doubt this place is gonna pass a safety inspection. Probably never did, even before, if my hunch states anything," Shephard stated, turning his body to shine a light down on the floor just beyond our debris-covered platform. It was a twenty-foot drop onto a rustic floor that didn't look much cleaner than what we were currently standing on.
"We'd better climb our way down. Whatever this rubble is on top of feels too rickety for my comfort," I nudged, drawing attention to the waning instability of our platform's integrity.
"I hear ya. Let's just climb down from the ledge here before we fall into some vat of mystery sludge."
With only a small corridor serving as the only way out of that room, which took a moment to locate, Shephard and I departed down it.
While detecting no telepathic signals nearby as of yet, I still felt watched somehow. It must have been my vortal chord; places identical to the ruins we had just infiltrated were the sites of terrible strife for many of the Vortigaunts enslaved here, providing me a shared sense of innate dread. It almost felt like I had real memories of being here and forced to work until my legs gave out, but this was a result of my growing presence within the Vortessence. I was aware of the risks when partaking in this profound method of transcendence, but I hoped they didn't get more intense than they were right now.
While the corridor itself was quite vacant, with little debris strewn around, we were soon led to a much larger chamber, and it was then that the borrowed memories really began to percolate in my subconscious. The high ceiling, the spires, the conveyor tracks, and the terminals that were placed around various stations. It was all shown in the rays of our lights. Our footsteps began to echo stridently as we emerged into the dark and forgotten ruins of this very familiar-looking facility.
This place had been dead and forgotten for ages, and many of its foundations were shown to be deteriorating. A few of the columns that held up the conveyor track had toppled over and were now piles of rubble around the chamber floor, along with the portions of the track they had been holding up. The uncanniness was unsettling in a way I don't believe I can ever truly explain.
We stepped out deeper into this cavernous facility with our weapons drawn, but our shoulders loosened the more we took in the volume of this forgotten place. We were likely the first things to step in here in a very long time. Shephard, unlike myself, having a micro identity crisis while taking in these familiar surroundings, looked around with fascination as he shined his light on all that he could see while he spun his body around.
"Well, this is new," he said, quite unacquainted with the sights of Xen's more "industrial" side. "The hell kind of place was this? A big storage house?"
"A factory," I answered, shining my light over areas where ruthless figures of the Nihilanth's authority had once been stationed to oversee the workforce, but now only dust and fallen debris littered their old posts.
"For what, you think?" Shephard asked further, inquisitive about my pre-emptive knowledge of this place.
"The Nihilanth's army," I added, rimming the staff's shaft with my thumb. "It was facilities like this where he created his troops."
Shephard paused his slow stride for a moment, paying closer attention to the debris across the floor as he shined his light on one of the toppled columns. "Created?" he perked, getting the notion that I didn't mean any recruits were being trained in here.
"Yes. The Nihilanth's soldiers were produced here in facilities like this in vast quantities," I informed, still visualising in vivid detail what this place may have looked like through the eyes of my Vortigaunt friends. "Exactly what method he used to pull this off is still unknown to me, but I'm keenly aware that spliced Vortigaunt genetics were used in their creation alongside several other creatures to create an army of beastly soldiers."
After approaching an alien terminal, which was dusty from fallen debris, I began wiping my gloved hand across it. "They weren't particularly a clever brood, but there were armies of them, and many more could be made to supplant the fallen. Their purpose was to overwhelm and destabilise for rapid conquest, something they exceeded at quite well during the Resonance Cascade, if my shared memories reveal anything."
"Shared memories…" Shephard repeated, at odds with that concept, more specifically with the Vortessence as a whole. While finding the idea of having a live connection with sources out of demission useful, the very nature of it ruffled him innately. "And this is how you're able to know that there's a transporter somewhere in here that will get us to the relay station?"
"Yes. In theory, anyway…"
"Naturally," Shephard said complicitly.
Before entering this place, I explained to Shephard that the Vortigaunt workers were regularly ushered to transporters that took them to various other facilities and outposts in the regions of Xen that the Nihilanth controlled. They were teleporters, powered by the exact same crystals that tuned human teleportation tech. My shoddy plan involved finding this factory's transporter and using that to locate the relay station, for it was possible to aim the bloody contraption at areas not on the charts, and the Vortigaunts were providing me with the memories needed of many of them operating it effectively. My plan was hairbrained and required much more review, but we were conditioned to improvise out here.
"Where do you suppose one of these transporters will be?" Shephard wondered, shining his light to give me visibility to walk along while I used mine to follow the dilapidated conveyor above us.
"I don't know, I'm afraid," I admitted disconcertedly. "Each of these factories had these transporters in a different spot. The one here could be anywhere."
"Well, we did kind of get ourselves trapped in here," Shephard stated bluntly, "not much else to do but to go look for it. At least it's quiet in here. Picking up any bogies on the radar yet?"
"Not as of now," I relayed, "but I would still advise great caution. Those Controllers outside could come and go from these facilities easily. I worry they may still use it to house themselves. It's one thing to cross paths with them in the wilderness, but to be caught invading their den…"
"Nothing we can't handle, Pop-Tart," Shephard reassured, trying to play it cool within the eerie blackness of this long-abandoned alien factory. "We'll find that transporter whatchamacallit. We've got time, bullets, and a death ray. But I guess we won't ever be using that one, sadly," he teased, not fully understanding why I was extremely reluctant to use my syphoned emancipation particle field.
"My magic. My rules," I refuted with a snort, making Adrian mumble a bit to himself. I felt quite confident in my policy at this time, but I began to regret it a little later on. Neither of us truly realised what it was that was waiting for us within the halls and chambers of this forgotten Xenian base.