Here is the long awaited sequel to Capital Cowboys! Enjoy!
In a bare metal cell lay a man. He was of middling height, and of no remarkable features brought about from his birth to his present condition. The malnutrition had made him emaciated, a shade next to other men. The radiation had made him blind and prone to nervous fits and convulsions. The "treatment" his captors gave to him resulted in little more than broken bones, split cartilage and bruises beyond counting.
Except that the prisoner had counted, had noted then number of bruises left on his torso, his arms and legs and it was three and forty marks his captors had been generous enough to leave on him.
And for many starless nights the man had lain in this cell, dreaming and seeing the world beyond his cell and its passageways. There threads began to emerge, patterns dancing through his sight as though they were jumping up and down, waiting to be found. Patterns could be exploited.
Threads could be interwoven.
So he watched during the starless nights and sunless days. He spent his solitary time looking at the threads.
And he waited.
Anatoliy Turchin had never been one for puzzles. He had always liked breaking down components, reconstructing machines, repairing weaponry and other similar tasks which had always puzzled him as to why he didn't find riddles or games of the mind enjoyable.
Maybe it was the intellectual aspect, the idea of analysis. Maybe Nate didn't like to waste otherwise valuable time with contemplating a game when the world outside his four walls conspired to kill him in any way possible.
You didn't need to be overtly academic in the wasteland, the land of slavers and raiders; mutants and feral ghouls; Deathclaws and Mirelurks; even less exotic deaths like thirst, starvation, indigenous wildlife, disease and of course radiation. Radiation was the pale horseman amount a nuclear warhead, and it had a propensity to kill wastelanders more frequently than anything else.
In a place where the air you breathed was slowly killing you, the need for philosophy and inventions of education were only important in their pragmatism: You could read a book that would help you grow better crops, or learn how to read to understand a caravan contract, but you wouldn't read a book on the nature of human evil, in part because humanity was evil to begin with.
Nate sighed and rubbed at his temples, trying to make sense of the tattered ledger that lay on his workstation. It looked like every other ruined, molding pre-war book in he had ever laid eyes on. Except that it wasn't in several capacities.
For one, it was the only book he had found in The Antagonizer's lair, one week prior. It was sitting on the middle shelf of a five shelf tower. The other shelves had been filled with either wooden boxes crammed with toys, spare parts, and other bits of junk, while this book sat squarely in the center of this intermediate shelf.
Nate had grabbed it along with anything else of value in the Antagonizer's bedchamber before Anais found the explosives. At the time he figured it was more than just a ledger, something that would have been valuable two hundred years prior to the war, but now only academic in its existence in the wasteland. He realized that there was a strong possibility that the item was valuable.
It turned out that Nate had stumbled onto printed gold when the group evaluated the spoils back at Ridgefield.
It hadn't been much of a problem for a heavily armed and only slightly wounded war band to trek across the wastes, so the return trip was only mildly eventful, with a small pack of mole rats attempting to savage the group. (On a side note, Nate decided he would have to try Leon's famous Mole Rat Bacon in a few hours, when the sun rose.)
Upon arriving, they were greeted by the Lazarus, Rafael, Becca, and the ever surly Jaxon. Despite their injuries and pitfalls, the group came out ahead, netting a hefty two thousand caps between their reward from Roe, their scavenging and reselling of the goods from Canterbury's service tunnels, and finally the miscellaneous caps acquired from the various raiders and other malcontents they had slain to, at, around and from Canterbury itself.
So he had been paid by Haskel and had returned to his workspace in the basement of his house and he let himself get lost in the cleaning and maintenance of a dozen separate weapons.
Later that night he was summoned to a small meeting at the officer's house, for reasons not made apparent to him. Nate would have been lying if he had said he wasn't exhausted from the events of the last few days. Death wasn't exactly a refreshing vacation.
Nonetheless, he wasn't about to turn down an order, not so soon after getting paid by Haskel and especially not if Palmer had been sent to fetch him. He had ambled up to the Officer's quarters, where Vincent, Lazarus, Leon, Haskel and Palmer were waiting. Becca showed up right after Nate, looking unnerved.
The large living room was dominated by two separate couches with a coffee table between them. Vincent sat in the middle of the couch opposite the doorway, with Leon and Lazarus flanking him. Haskel stood towards the back of the room by what looked like a bar and poured several drinks, while Palmer leaned against the wall left of the door. Nate took his seat on the empty couch while Becca stood for a brief period before giving up and sitting on the couch, her eyes immediately darting to the ledger on the table and widening with shock.
"It can't be…" Becca murmured, eyes transfixed on the unassuming book sitting by itself on the coffee table.
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves now; we don't know anything for sure." Leon offered in a placating fashion. Haskel offered Nate a glass of Whiskey, which the young man politely turned down.
"It's just a moldy ledger kid, stop getting your hackles up over it. There's nothing in it but pages upon pages of inventory and other pre-war garbage, nothing wild and exciting." Palmer muttered. The lumbering security (ex-security) chief was still shaking off his injuries he sustained in Canterbury.
"Still, if this is the case, and we are correct in our assumptions…" Lazarus offered vaguely.
Nate slammed his hands down on the table, thoroughly irritated by the antics of his superiors.
"All right, no more magic mystery ерунда! I've been nearly killed three separate times by explosions, raiders and exposure. I've had a ghoul doctor use god knows what kind of medicine to bring me back, and I have a mountain of things I need to get done. With all due respect Captain, either enlighten me or stop wasting my time." The mechanic stared into the eyes of his leader, newfound fire grounding his well-honed senses of self-perseverance or safety.
Vincent nodded before turning to Becca. "You grew up in the wastes, did you not?"
Becca, eyes never leaving the ledger, nodded in agreement slowly. "I did so. My parents were scavengers from the Metro, but we moved out towards Megaton after I was born. We did a lot of traveling, followed in the shadow of the caravans mostly. Picked up on things, learned with my eyes. Heard a lot of talk, heard a lot of stories. Some just fables, others…" Becca waved her hand over the ledger.
Something began clawing at the back of Nate's mind, a foreboding dread that creeped into his mind.
"Well? It's a ledger, is it not? It's just a big book of inventoried items." Nate said, trying to diffuse the situation, to shove the warning signs down with logic.
"No, we looked it over. It's faded but post-war. Nate, this ledger is a post-war book of documentation. Beyond that there are all kinds of clues throughout the book, abbreviations of post-war towns, and references to people even." Lazarus added in defense.
Nate sat quietly, beginning to form a picture of what might be sitting on the table in front of him.
"So it's a guide, or a roadmap?" 'Still nothing to go wild over, or hold a 2 am meeting.'
"Yes, I can quite evenly declare this to be a roadmap. But in regards to its intent you must examine the item for what it is. Go ahead Anatoliy, open the book and read." Haskel waved his hand over the table, as though permission was his to give in this process.
Nate picked up the ledger and inspected the outside, before flipping it open and reading the passages.
It didn't take a Brotherhood Scribe to determine that the pages were covered in a thousand kinds of crazy.
"It's not a road map… it's… I don't know what in the holiest hells this is. More exposition please?" Nate added, exasperated with his peers. Little did they see the flush of panic creeping up his neck.
"Riddle Trailers weren't uncommon up north. Scavengers frequently used them as means to find their way back to their treasure stashes. Other times they were traps meant to lure in scavengers rob them." Lazarus continued.
Nate sat back, waiting for Vincent to tell them all that they were wrong and that they could return to doing what mercenaries did.
"You're telling me this thing is a treasure map?! A follow the trail to the treasure kind of map?" Nate concluded.
"The thing is though this isn't your ordinary bread crumb." Leon added, taking a swig of beer while languidly sprawled on the couch. "You see, Riddle Trailers are typically recorded on holotapes and left scattered about. Writing though? That's old fashioned and rare. There are far fewer scavengers who know how to write properly."
"So it leads to a trap then." Nate continued, ignoring the gnawing feeling in his stomach, the dredging up of old memories.
"At first we thought so. Riddle Trailers are almost never maps to treasure, especially ones written as opposed to being recorded. The problem is there's no destination." Haskel supplied from the bar, standing a gingerly sipping at his whiskey.
Nate turned a confused look to Vincent. "I thought that the point of something like this was to lead you somewhere?"
"Not unless it is triple layered. Not unless there is code underneath the code, the true code." Becca finished shaking.
"All right then." Nate was giving Becca a fantastically unimpressed face. "Look, if you want someone to break the code, why not get Mirza on this? He's the king of hacking this kind of shit." 'You knew someone like that once little Anatoliy.'
"We would, but there is one small, almost insignificant problem we've found so far."
Palmer snorted. "Way to sugarcoat it Sforza. Nate, the third layer is written in a script none of us recognize."
Nate's heart skipped a beat.
"Barnaby recognized the script from pre-war propaganda. Nate, he says that it's Russian."
Nate sits quietly before inhaling deeply. "After Nikolai was expelled from Rivet City our family followed him out into the wastes. It was the principle of family that kept all of us together. It was something drilled into our heads for years. My mother spoke of never being able to trust outsiders, never mind the fact that she was a wastelander herself. It was the Turchin mentality that kept us together. We were refugees before the war, during the war, and after the war. We had no one else to lean on but each other, and after Nikolai's actions things only got worse. Family came before all others…" Nate recited calmly.
"All right Nate, but what does that mean exactly." Vincent inquired, taking another sip of his whiskey.
"I'm getting there, let me fill in the cracks. My grandfather had three children that left the city with him: Natalyia, the eldest had a husband and several children. Her younger brother and the middle child Ilyich remained a bachelor and had no offspring, whilst his younger brother and Nikolai's youngest Andrei would go on to have three children with his wastelander wife Patsy. I was the youngest of those children. My father was still a child when we left, and his oldest sister was barely thirteen at the time. Twenty years passed before Nikolai succumbed to radiation poisoning while scavenging the DC metro tunnels. By that time we had established a small ranch west of Megaton…"
Leon shifted uncomfortably, a fact that neither Vincent nor Nate miss. Nate continues nonetheless. "By the time my grandfather had actually passed away, my father and his siblings were doing all right by their trades and talents. Natalyia had met a dour if hardworking scavenger and did right by her. Ilyich however… he was not content with the quiet ranch life. He wanted to strike it rich in the wastes, but he was always bound by family. My father told me that Ilyich and Nikolai fought incessantly and that Ilyich was constantly chafing under his father's commands. After he died however, Ilyich realized how much he was needed for his family. So he stayed with us, but he never really forgot about his dream…"
"Another decade passed, and soon the ranch was becoming cramped between Natalyia's brood and my own branch of the Turchin family. Ilyich and Natalyia's husband got along just as poorly as Nikolai had with my uncle. For years things tensions had been building between the two, never quite settling. I was still a very young boy when Ilyich left, and I only remember his tall tales of the wasteland." Nate pauses, massaging his throat tenderly.
"Eventually Ilyich and Natalyia's husband got into a fight over something or other and he drove him off. My father was disappointed by his brother-in-law's behavior and I don't think he ever quite forgave Natalyia for failing to stand up for her younger brother. Eventually Natalyia's children began to have children, and our little family of five was too much as well. We split off from them and found smaller accomodations further west. We thought it was a good maneuver at the time…"
Nate sighs regretfully, his body shaking. "At the time a band of raiders had been making their home in a nearby canyon. At the time it was a small group, but they were vicious and soon they became famous for their aptitude for slaving and raiding. I was fourteen at the time, and I had snuck off to the nearby hovel of Jury Street to see the exciting caravans. There I met a handsome tribal trader and I found myself spending the night at Jury Street."
"When I returned to my home the next day, the ranch was burnt to ash, and my brother and father's bodies were… displayed against the walls of our home. I never saw my mother or sister. She was barely older than me..."
"I eventually returned to Jury Street, and traveled with the caravan to their next stop, which happened to the depressed settlement of Grayditch. I said goodbye to the tribal man and plied my trade with electronics and machinery for the next few years."
"I never forgot about Uncle Ilyich, but I never heard anything about him after he left. We assumed he was swallowed by the wastes, as most scavengers are." When Becca gave him a sharp look Nate raised his hands in an attempt at peace. "Most scavengers."
Vincent tapped at the coffee table. "Do you think that your uncle somehow survived, and this was his Riddle Trailer?"
Nate shook his head in disbelief. "Is it possible? Yes. Is it unikely? I haven't heard a word about a Russian scavenger in the 11 years since Ilyich left Natalyia's ranch. Still, stranger things have happened in this godforsaken basin."
"This is all pointless though, isn't it?" Leon interjected, staring questioningly at Nate.
Holding back lash worthy comments, Nate asked Leon to clarify. "Well, for starters we can't read the thing. Even if we can properly decode it, it's in Russian."
"Yes, such a terrible shame we don't have a Russian mechanic raised by Russian ex pats who occasionally swears at his teammates in Russian." Haskel deadpanned from the bar.
"Wait, how do you know I swear?" Nate asked incredulously.
"Context my dear Anatoliy, context is everything." Haskel replied.
"All right, but can he read written Russian, Margulies?" Leon shot back.
Nate nodded. "My reading was always better than my speaking."
Vincent rapidly stood up. "You, Mirza and Haskel and Lazarus will work on the decoding and translation of the Riddle Trailer. Let me know when you've found something. Meeting dismissed."
And we're off! Expect a lot more content in the days to come! :D Thanks for reading and be sure to review!