milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Shephard's gonna be in Poland, or what used to be Poland, real damn soon. He's got a helicopter to fly and then a lot of hell to raise (once he gets past the throwing up part, which has unfortunately become pretty much ritual for him whenever he touches down successfully). He's just tidying up a thing or two before heading out, and by 'a thing or two' we mean 'the hide of a yerik that he managed to take during his visit to Pandora with Tsu'tey'. The hide's upstairs. He spoke with Tsu'tey at some length and came up with a chemical bath that he figures should do the trick for turning it into the equivalent of a buckskin. That's gonna take a few days, though, so right now he's not touching it. He's going over the one other thing he took from the yerik instead- the animal's largest teeth. Elk on Earth have big damn canines that make for nice carved ivory objects, and yerik teeth look to be about the same.

Oh, don't look at him like that. Tsu'tey's people got the meat.

Anyway, feel free to bother the fellow in military fatigues who's currently meticulously cleaning the rather large teeth of an animal found nowhere on Earth. Or don't. Up to you.

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Grace takes a long, long, long swig from her mug.

Respect a gun. What the actual fuck.

"Grace," she says, in a tone that leaves no room for argument. "Dr. Augustine, if you want to be polite."

She's not suggesting he has to be. "There's not much that surprises me these days. I've kept a Dinicthys as a pet; I used to love watching people's reactions when she'd slam her 9-meter mass into the glass back at my lab, and snap those pretty little jaws."

Shephard's going to have to think about this for a bit. Especially the nine meters part.

Eventually he says, "Please tell me you ain't talkin' 'bout a lab at a place in New Mexico name of Black Mesa."

She squints through the smoke coming off her cigarette, and gives the question some thought.

"Hell of a long time since I've seen New Mexico."

Beat.

"No, I'm a few light-years away from Earth these days."

Shephard exhales. "All right, I c'n live with that. Black Mesa was a fuckin' shithole'n those dinoshark motherfuckers we got in the ocean now wouldn't be there if it weren't for them."

He got through a whole sentence about Black Mesa without using the word 'eggheads'. This is a considerable improvement over everything else he has ever said about the place.

"Never heard of them," she mutters dismissively, yanking her cigarette away from her lips. Shepherd gets a long hard look.

(Sorry, son. She's not eyeing you up in return.)

"Did you say you have dinosharks? Living in the ocean?"

It's that last part that really gets to her.

Probably just as well, really.

"That's what most folks call 'em. Reckon they got a scientific name but fuck me if I remember what it was. Ain't like the pissfuckin' things're from Earth or nothin', so it ain't gonna be a name that makes any fuckin' sense. All's I know is, goddamn bastards're big as a great white, twice as nasty, and they wouldn't be in Earth's ocean if some fuckhead hadn't fucked up a dimensional science experiment'n torn space'n time a whole new set of assholes."

Grace leans back and goes over that information one more time in language that's only slightly less colorful.

"You have an alien species living in your oceans."

Living in his oceans.

"Where are you from, exactly?"

"Little town name of Rowlesburg, West Virginia," says Shephard with a crooked smile. "It's on Earth, only it probably ain't your Earth. There's a shitload of different versions of Earth got representatives here. The one I'm from, we got us a whole huge motherfucker of an alien invasion 'bout, mmm... twenty years back, and then we got another one 'bout four years after, and it's absofuckinglutely sucked since."

Really, what, does she expect him to report something like 'universal stream 376.42, timeline Lambda'?

It would probably make just about as much sense as what he actually went with.

"Representatives from different Earths. Sure."

Why the hell not? She pinches the bridge of her nose, and turns back to her mug. "So, you're here from some post-apocalyptic world where aliens have come to take over -- or cohabitate -- and fill your oceans with Ichthyosauria."

Beat.

"For science."

"Somethin' like that," says Shephard. "Human scientists fucked up'n the first aliens showed up. Far as I c'n tell the dinosharks got into the ocean on accident. Black Mesa was studyin' anything from Xen they could git their mitts on first. Had a couple of the shark fuckers in tanks on the premises. The ones in the ocean, I reckon they just showed up on accident when the experiments went to shit."

"Why am I not surprised to hear that it was the scientists who screwed everyone over?" Grace mutters, with a generous helping of sarcasm. "I suppose the military had to swoop in and save the day, right?"

"Tell you the truth, ma'am, the day ain't been saved yet," says Shephard. "Earth's been pinned down under Combine occupation sixteen fuckin' years now. Those alien sons of bitches rolled over every fuckin' military force on Earth in the space of seven hours."

He's doing his best to stay polite and keep a good mood- yes, for him 'being polite' still includes liberal use of the word 'fuck', you might as well ask him not to breathe- but this is treading perilously close to 'Marines are morons' territory and he really doesn't want to get into a mental space where he has to punch somebody in public.

If Grace looks to him like the wilting flower type who will shrink away at the mention of profanity, he needs to take a second look. Or just stick around for a while, and see how she does with keeping up.

At least his answer calms her down a little, though there's still a hard set to her eyes. It's about as good as anything you're going to get when you involve a "marine moron" and a "civilian egghead".

"Did anybody bother to find out what they want?"

Shephard's trying not to laugh. Really, he is. He's just... not trying very hard, and it eventually breaks out in a wheezing, half-choked chortle that leaves him wiping his eyes.

When he sits up straight he sobers up just enough to say, "Reckon maybe the pissmonkey who arranged the surrender did... Dr. Augustine, the Combine Empire's a goddamn buncha planet raiders. Motherfuckers punch through from one dimension to another'n roll over whatever the fuck they find that looks good to 'em. Massey Coal fucked the everlivin' shit out of my home county back when I was a boy but they didn't whip through town'n cram everyone's head fulla more chips than a goddamn Pringles factory so's they'd make better slave soldiers."

She doesn't see the humor in the situation. Well, she does in that it's not her problem; but other than that, she had been serious.

"Wait, surrender?"

She grinds her cigarette out on the sole of her shoe, and leaves the butt on the table.

"So, that's it? The human race is subservient to some otherworldly locust invasion?"

Well, you know, it's kind of like asking whether anyone went down to talk to the Cheat the day of the '85 flood. Who even thinks of that kind of thing?

"'Fraid so," Shephard says, sobering a bit, "though it ain't like we ain't tryin' to fight back. But there ain't a whole lot of folks in the Resistance compared to how many Combine there are, and we ain't exactly the ones with the synth armies engineered way the fuck to hell and gone from all the races the Combine done conquered before this, so it's goin' a little slow."

Shephard might notice the subtle change in her expression as that final remark distracts her from the topic at hand. Is he talking about genetic modification? The manipulation of potentially hundreds of different alien genomes into a super-species?

That happens to be a subject that Grace has a good deal of interest in. She has to put some thought into exactly how tactless it would be to ask him more, given his situation.

She blinks. "Are we talking scientific advancements beyond anything your scientists could replicate in defense?"

"'Fraid so," says Shephard. "Most of the scientists still alive're engineerin' and physics types, least that I've seen. They got a real sweet teleportation system up'n running but as far as chem/biol shit goes we mostly wind up workin' with scientists here. Best we could do was git a satellite off that'd block Combine troop transport'n info transfer back and forth to their homeworld."

"Which will only do you so much good before they send out another raiding party," Grace guesses. "You said you work with scientists here? So, you've been able to bring in some of this technology?"

She leans forward.

"Yes, ma'am," says Shephard. "Brought Dr. Solus some samples from one of the critters the Combine're usin' to try'n transform our atmosphere into somethin' they can breathe, 'n he worked us up some shit that'd kill those motherfuckers dead if we hit 'em with enough of it. Combine mostly use gengineered critters wired up with all kindsa control shit to do their dirty work anyways, so it's just repayment in kind."

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