Borealis

"Destroy that ship! Whatever it takes!"

- Eli Vance

The Borealis is an Aperture Science shipping vessel introduced in Half-Life 2: Episode Two. The ship disappeared, along with part of the drydock upon which it was stationed, under mysterious circumstances. It became a legend amongst the scientific community; it was assumed, given Aperture's infamously blasé attitude towards safety and accepted scientific principles, that the Borealis contained an immensely powerful and dangerous secret.

Episode Two


Many years after the Combine invasion of Earth, Judith Mossman, a Resistance operative, found the Borealis in an arctic location. She was attacked by Combine forces soon after, and was only able to send an incomplete transmission of her discovery to the White Forest Resistance base. This was intercepted by the Combine, and in turn stolen back by Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance from the Citadel Core during their flight from City 17.

Mossman was cunning enough to encrypt images of the Borealis itself within her message. Once Eli Vance and Isaac Kleiner had decoded these and realized the full significance of the transmission, a rift opened between the two Resistance leaders. Kleiner believed the technology the Borealis contained could be used by the Resistance against the Combine; Vance, haunted by memories of the Black Mesa Incident, believed that the Borealis had to be destroyed at all costs.

It is not known whether the Combine know of the Borealis, and consequently if they themselves have some interest in the ship's contents. Given the attack upon Mossman's forces, the interception of her message and the fate of Eli Vance, it seems very likely.

Episode Three
The Borealis is expected to appear in Half-Life 2: Episode Three. The first revealed concept art reveals a ship, which on it reads "B-EALIS", where the O and R are covered by Combine technology, stuck in ice, and Advisors floating through the canyon. It is likely that the Combine will have already discovered the ship when Gordon gets to it.

An image from the game files shows two of the unknown scientists of Kleiner's Black Mesa main team photography, a bearded man and the only woman, are also seen posing in front of the Borealis. Future games, such as Portal 2 or Episode Three, might reveal details about these scientists, and elaborate on the relationship between Aperture Science and Black Mesa.

Behind the scenes


The Borealis was to appear in Half-Life 2 but was cut before the final release. It was to be set between two other cut chapters, the Air Exchange and Kraken Base.

Gordon was to encounter Odell, the ship's engineer, on the coast, and reach the ship on a tugboat. The ship, whose captain was called Johanssen, was an icebreaker supposed to ship supplies to Kraken Base. Half of the ship's crew consisted of scientists. The ship finally got stranded in the ice and the Combine found them. They threw Sacktick shells on the ship, and the creatures attacked the crew. Odell noticed the creatures didn't really like the cold so he shut off the generator to let the whole ship ice over, and it killed the creatures, but most of the crew was already slayed. In search of survivors, Gordon and Odell visit the ship filled with the corpses of the original crew members of the ship, Stalkers, zombies, tanks containing Combine Assassins (probably in stasis) and Combine soldiers. Odell and Gordon leave the ship with a small submarine and proceed to the nearby Kraken Base.

This chapter is included in the mod Missing Information, but the maps are not completely finished and the ship workers' corpses are missing. The E3 version of the chapter, where the Borealis is not stranded in the ice, is used.

The Borealis was scrapped around August 2002, as the last Borealis maps to be edited, "d3_borealis_01_017" and " ", were edited on August 9th, 2002. However, a few of its props, prominently the blue barrel, are used in the final version of Half-Life 2 and are stored in the folder "props_borealis".

Trivia

 * Johanssen, the name of the ship's captain in the original story, is quite similar to Johnson, the name of Aperture Science founder and CEO, Cave Johnson. Also, "Arbeit Laboratories" can be seen on some crates inside the ship.
 * Sound files from the 2003 leaked Beta reveal that the ship was originally called "Hyperborea".
 * Odell's face was recycled for Odessa Cubbage.
 * The Borealis' teleportation shares many similarities to the urban legend of the Philadelphia Experiment in which the USS Eldridge was rumored to have been rendered invisible by experimental technology, and in some versions of the story the ship had accidentally teleported from its dry dock to a U.S. naval base over 200 miles away. And in the most radical versions of the story, the ship achieved accidental time travel.