Half-Life: Phase Transition (A Novel Excerpt)

Halfway through the first lockdown in 2o20, I was feeling pretty bored. All the projects I was working on were well into production, and I didn't have a lot of writing to do. To fill the time, I'd started penning video game criticism again, just to scratch an itch. I hadn't written prose in a long time, and I'd honestly forgotten how much fun and enjoyment it gave me! Shortly after, I realised I wanted to write a novel.

It was going to be a Half-Life novel, one that would take place before the comic series I'd been producing. It would be short, perhaps 200–300 pages, and tell the story of two people—Ray and Gemi—in the first years of the Combine's occupation. I sketched out a plot, peopled it with a cast of characters, and set off, little knowing where it would go or if I would even finish it.

It is now 2024. Half-Life 2 just celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and my novel is, at long last, finished. It sits at an obscene 960 pages, a bit off the initial 300-page mark. Writing it has been a wonderful, miserable pleasure, but the time's come to let it go—to send it out into the world and see what comes of it.

Whilst that release is a couple of months away, I'm debuting a small excerpt on SUPERJUMP. It takes place about halfway through the novel, in which Ray and Gemi have embarked on a dangerous mission to rescue a scientist called Delilah Savage—and the secret she holds.

Without further ado, I present Half-Life: Phase Transition.

All across the city, great black airships and cyclopean stations were moving into formation around the rim of the portal, now close to its final state. Whenever it flashed, snatches of the world beyond were unmasked: someplace with red dust for a sky, where starlight was being smothered. The portal seemed to induce madness in all below it; Combine alarms blared like malfunctioning robotic owls, the antlions grew more frenzied, and Overwatch’s resistance bloodier. Even the snowy tempest was touched by that otherworldly delirium, the particles a turmoil of white.

Gemi, a hand held against the wind, crawled into a crouch behind a corrugated iron fence and reloaded, trying not to think about the fleet in the sky. They had escaped the steelworks, but the fighting had forced them to take a separate route back to the train station.

“Where are you taking me?” Savage asked Ray.

“A place called Club Mapa,” Gemi said. “It’s a secret enclave inside the city. You’ll be safe there.”

Delilah Savage turned her eyes to Gemi. They thinned to hostile clefts, and she pointed to Ray. “If you wish to communicate, do it through him.”

“Fine.”

Gemi found Delilah Savage’s beauty even more striking up close. Her big jade eyes looked cut from gemstone. She had short raven hair slicked back, with three thick strands hung over her eyes. Her accent was peculiar—somehow French but not. She was a little different from the posters, too; now she had an array of scars across her forehead that had the semblance of a constellation. Gemi knew Delilah Savage would be dangerous, but she hadn’t expected to be so unnerved by the woman’s presence. Why had the Count wanted her to survive? The key in the house of steel.

“We’re a stone’s throw from the tracks, but I’ll be damned if I know how we’re gonna reach them,” Ray said, peeking through a gap in the fence.

“What a masterful plan the two of you have,” Savage derided, trying to see for herself.

Ray frantically pushed Savage back. “Down, down!”

Gemi mouthed “what is it?”, and he shook his head at her, scared out of his wits.

They heard the clomp of hooves on the other side of the fence, and flattened themselves against the iron, shoulder-to-shoulder. Ray had stretched out an arm to pin them back. A shadow moved over their heads with a sequence of synthetic croaks. Gemi twisted her head, just a bit, to see. A vertical strip of serrated metal peered over the fence. It had two eyes, ports plugged into the side that sparked like waning bulbs, and was scanning the alley, searching for the fugitives.

Gemi squinted through the gap in the fence. Overwatch were riding horseback, but the horses were mutilated, their heads decapitated, the neck ending in a stump where the strip of metal had been soldered. The riders carried lances that crackled at the tips with hot white light. Gemi shuddered once she realised there was no path through, at least not without a fight. She looked to Ray, and saw that he knew it, too. Delilah Savage, sandwiched between them, glared harshly at Gemi. Then the mechanical horse croaked once more, the movement of the metal jittery. Its eye ports blinked red as chittering shapes began leaping from the nearest rooftop, wings flapping to slow their fall.

“Overwatch, swarm outbreak in sector nine-dash-two,” the rider called, turning his horse to meet the incoming antlions.

“Give me a gun,” Savage snarled.

Gemi hesitated, then picked the spare she had brought from her backpack, and handed it to Savage. “Conserve ammunition. We’re low.”

“Contact confirm, prosecuting.” It wasn’t a rider.

The three of them turned together: a soldier had spotted them from their side of the fence.

Ray cried, “Go!”

They broke apart, the spray of machine-gun fire smashing the iron in a terrible thunder. Gemi didn’t have time to look back as she slipped through the fence. On the road, Combine riders lashed at the antlions with their charged lances, the horses kicking up snow. Gemi wove a path through it all, dodging the antlions as they stabbed at the horses. A lance swung towards her and she ducked. It surged upwards, catching an antlion that had sprung for her, and raised it shrieking into the air as the electrical charge ran through its body. Then Ray was with her, urging her on. Savage sprinted ahead of them.

“Overwatch, sector infected!” a rider cried. “Outbreak, outbreak, outbreak!” An antlion plucked him from his horse and impaled him in the snow.

Gemi, Ray, and Savage freed themselves from the road and hurried down an alley, both walls stuck together with the antlions’ black honeycombs, and onto the next street. They could see the train tracks, across from where the road made a sharp right turn from an overturned flatbed. A long freight train slowed down and stopped, but the patch of snow they had to cross to reach it belonged to a herd of antlions, who picked at disembowelled soldiers. Gemi hid behind the flatbed, Ray and Savage joining her. More of Overwatch’s soldiers occupied a barricade at the far end of the road that ran parallel to the track, the heavy snow drift making them oblivious to the danger behind them.

“Now what?” Gemi said.

“I need another clip,” said Ray, ejecting his empty.

Gemi passed him the last she had. “We can’t shoot our way through.”

“Where I grew up you didn’t call the cops,” Ray said, throwing a glance at the soldiers on the barricade. “Not when you had skin like me. No matter what had happened, they’d always find a way to pin it on you. The law scared me more than anything. Anything.” He sighed. “That was a real shitty way to grow up.”

“Ray, why are you telling me this?”

He looked at Gemi with a hard expression that made her flinch. “Because I’m gonna call the cops.”

He went wading through the snow towards the barricade. Gemi watched anxiously as he crept past the antlions, then laid down in the middle of the road, all but disappearing. For a moment, nothing happened, then there was a shot, followed by a second and a third, spaced neatly apart. The soldiers spun, returning fire with an almost mechanical predictability. The antlions hissed and turned when the gunfire reached them. They bounced up and down, then started towards the barricade, clearing the path to the train. The armoured soldiers smoothly filed into a column, lowering their left arms in unison to activate a row of transparent blue energy shields.

“Contact: biotics. Wallhammer engaging,” the leader declared, then charged into the oncoming bugs.

Ray came running out of the snow. “C’mon!” he cried.

The train’s horn was tooting, the wheels turning. Savage was already there; she smoothly leaped into an open carriage. More antlions flew out of the honeycombs, dropping onto the barricade. The soldiers’ shields were flicking off one-by-one as they succumbed to the onslaught. Gemi was running after Ray. The snow slowed her. She didn’t want to look back but she did. The antlions had seen them and were flapping their wings and vaulting into the air, closing fast.

“Gemi, take my hand!”

Ray was already in the carriage, but it was picking up speed fast. Gemi ran harder, the antlions’ chittering a riot in her ears. Her good arm reached out and she clasped Ray’s hand. She was lifted from the snow, her legs kicking, and pulled into the carriage. Looking back, they saw the train quickly outpace the antlions, and the besieged sector finally began to recede, the steelworks lost in the snow.

“Overwatch acknowledges critical exogen breach. Airwatch augmentation force dispatched and inbound. Hold for reinforcement.”

Thanks for reading! Half-Life: Phase Transition will be released in early 2025.

At a science station in the New Mexico desert, an experiment goes very wrong, thrusting humanity into an ancient cosmic war. An authority called the Combine swiftly seize military control of the planet, and impose a brutal totalitarian state on the scattered survivors. Prisons masquerading as cities begin to rise, where scientists are hunted, truth is twisted and abused, and friend is pitted against friend.

In the midst of this discord, two people find themselves caught in a web of conspiracy and murder, and must embark on an odyssey across time and space, to the heart of the Combine’s dark rule, and perhaps to the lone spark of hope that may save their world…

Set within Valve's acclaimed Half-Life world, Phase Transition is an apocalyptic tale of science and revolution, of hope and despair, and of a humanity finding its place in a war waged across the stars.