The Capital Wasteland had once deserved its name; a barren desert where life struggled to grow and danger lurked behind every rock, water had been scarce, mostly contaminated and highly prized by the Capital's habitants. Now, it no longer fit the bill.
Twenty years ago, someone had crawled out from underground, insignificant and confused in this new world. This person had never had any intention of becoming a role model or savior to the people of the wastes, this had been a side effect of a quest to find one man, but if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then that which leads to heaven was built on selfish acts and ruthless determination.
From a place called Oasis bloomed a myriad of vegetal life, palm trees, pine trees, ferns, cactuses, flowers. The plants grew fast and spread fast, soon turning the DC ruins into an actual urban jungle and the Wasteland into lush forests and plains, so thick and teeming with life one would think they had stood there for centuries.
In these conditions alone, life might not have been able to thrive as it did, but a man, years prior, had sacrificed himself to ensure pure water would flow all over the Wasteland, making the Washington area both a jewel… And hell on earth.
People, mutants and animals converged on this new Oasis from across the continent, but very few would carve themselves a place in this self-healing, perpetual haven.
Atop Tenpenny Tower, Commander Isabelle 'Iron' Mann of Talon Company presided over a complete clusterfuck, the end of her and her men, at this rate.
They had taken over this place a decade prior, after old man Tenpenny had kicked the bucket, and improved the fortification job while at the same time spreading some distance underground, providing them with a decent protection.
The tower stood dead center in a circular wheat or corn field. Whichever it was supposed to be, it grew straight, twice as tall as a man and the seed clusters they grew were more nourishing than protein bars, making this an ideal location on paper, and in practice as well, to some degree, as her men never grew hungry, which attracted plenty of fresh recruits for the meat grinder.
And that's it. That's the problem, precisely. The only ammunition they could get were salvaged off dead Super-Mutants and Raiders, fuel cells for their vehicles did not provide them enough autonomy to reach Fort Independence or any friendly settlement other than the artillery base they had established at an trainyard and, to top it all, the mutants were constantly pushing to break through their defences.
Talon Company counted over a thousand combat personnel, but only about a hundred were actually suited up and ready for combat at any given time.
A group of Raiders, just over a hundred of them, was holed up in Andale, in the mountains, and fought the mutants over control of the old RobCo factory, sometimes holding on to it for days before being pushed out, only to try again a week later. The Mutants, however, streamed in continuously from the inner city, crossing the Fairfax ruins in hordes of twenty to fifty individuals, and washed up against the Raiders' and Talon's defences, sometimes with nothing but fists, sometimes with heavy weapons, once with a Behemoth.
Twice now.
The first time around, Mann had called in an artillery strike, but that would not be an option today; the howitzers were dry. Fortunately, the Raiders kept it occupied at RobCo… For now.
She'd sent some scouts into some abandoned Enclave bunker, to see what they could dig out, and the news had been… Disappointing:
One man, an egghead, frozen since the bomb dropped, supposed to be some hot shot Pentagon advisor during the war and now jacked to a VR pod where the Enclave had his brain compute solutions to whatever problem the currently encountered.
Obviously, this had not worked out well, but she still wanted to meet the man.
"Call me an optimist." She told her aide, lowering the binoculars and taking her eyes off the green giant.
The craggy faced Lieutenant scoffed, speaking with a slow Texan accent, "Yer not, yew jus' got yerself in a bit of a pickle and yer jus' hopin' this fancy-pants Pee-Oh-Double-Yew's can unpickle this sit-e-achyun for yew…"
"So I'm desperate?" Mann had no illusions that, indeed, she was in a hell of a bind, but hearing it from ol' Uncle Bill always felt odd. The man never let anything faze him, that he would see the situation as dire spoke volumes.
"Yew ain' meant to be a yellin' orders an' dealin' with po-lick-tickle bullsheet, yer a soldier, not some gun-damn…"
The Lieutenant did not finish his sentence. The scouts were back and, following in their trail was a man in his mid-twenties or early thirties, dressed in black, leather coat, sunglasses and everything, and strolling around as though this were all just business as usual to him.
The scouts had not seen fit to handcuff the thin and pale intellectual and he stepped right up to Commander Mann, offering a weak and moist handshake.
He shook Uncle Bill's hand next and cringed at the iron grip.
"I hear I got you to thank for bustin' me arse out of that pod," the man spoke with a thick Scottish accent, "many thanks, miss…"
"Mann." She answered, causing the scientist's eyebrows to shoot from behind his glasses.
"Bullocks, sorry lad, I thought you were a lass there…"
The scouts snickered and Mann shook her head before spelling it out slowly, "Isabelle Mann, Commander of Talon Company. It's my name." Well, that was one thick scientist. So much for him solving all her problems.
"Ah, I'm very sorry, seems I've gotten dumb as a brick over the years… How many years has it been, anyhow?"
The scouts had filled her in on their find via radio, but she had instructed them not to talk to the man.
This explained his casual attitude; he thought… Well, who knows what he thought? Most certainly, though, he could not imagine the complexity of his situation.
"Two hundred." Mann did not sugar coat it. Never did.
He took it in stride, literally, just walked up to the balcony and stared straight at the RobCo building.
The Behemoth roared in rage, the round rolling across the fields to shake every window left on Tenpenny Tower. When he spoke again, it was not with a Scottish accent, but with an exactitude and sharpness that spoke of years spent making speeches and reading scientific works.
"What the hell have you people been up to while I was gone?"
By the time of his death, in eighteen-ninety, Sir Richard Francis Burton had been a spy, a soldier, an ambassador, an explorer, a linguist, a fence, a cartographer and the man to bring Kama Sutra to occident. Generalists like him have all but disappeared now, in the year twenty-seventy seven, the requirements to be considered any of these things are much higher now, the education costly and time consuming.
Doctor Nathan Burton, a self-proclaimed descendant of that same man, gets it pretty close, however… A mathematician before anything else, Burton, Nathan Halls of his birth name, has completed his first Doctorate thesis before being legally allowed to celebrate it at the nearest pub. Instead, the gifted teenager moves on to economic studies, then politics, anthropology and psychology, landing a job in the United-States' Department Of War by his twenty-sixth birthday…
Admiral John Carver is not impressed by the sardonic playboy sitting in his office, pointing out design flaws in the scale model Destroyer that sits behind a crystal clear glass at eye level on the Admiral's bookshelf.
The flaws are not reproduction errors, they're structural weaknesses and design oversight of the actual ship.
Nathan Burton is spot on, of course, and these flaws, ones that took years for the Navy to pinpoint, are the reason Helios-Class Missile Destroyers are no longer being used.
Thus, the kid is just speaking to himself and wasting Carver's time.
With the war going on, five minutes of the Admiral's time can mean the death of hundreds. He does not wish to indulge this hotshot scientist's antics.
"Mister Burton…" He begins, letting some bitterness creep in his voice.
"Mister Carver." The boy's tone is calm, but the message clear.
"Doctor Burton, could I please get your take on this?" Burton leans back in the padded leather chair and nod.
"You got it, Admiral! So; Total Nuclear Annihilation…" He speaks the words as though they're a brand name. Once, twice, a third time to test its effect, then leans back forward, tired green eyes, lined with red circles the Admiral has never seen before on the exuberant young man. "The blast radius of a nuke means more than ninety percent of the Earth, I'm talking oceans and ass end of nowhere here, won't be touched. Vaults aren't as important as NBC shelters, truth be told."
"So you think it will happen?"
Burton smiles, a sad, empty smile, one deeply contrasting with the bubbling energy he's displayed in their previous meetings. No, this is not smug self-confidence, that's fear, buried under humor and arrogance.
When the smartest man alive is scared, so should you be.
"We both want the oil. Sure, there are other power sources now, but stepping down would give the other guy an edge. At this stage in the war... Outcome's the same. If we win, the nuke us, if we lose, they nuke us, if we back down, the conquer us, we nuke them, if they back down, we conquer them, they nuke us." He gets off the chair. Normally such a meeting would last longer, include flowcharts and graphics, but today, it's different.
"I hope you have a very deep hole to… Actually, don't hide in a hole, tectonic shifts would burry you alive." He scoffs, turns and his hand in on the doorknob when the Admiral speaks again.
"Then they will need you."
Burton sighs, shaking his head at the futility of this conversation "Who?"
"When they leave the Vault, they'll need smartasses like you to rebuild." The Admiral is setting up the paperwork. This is no job offer, it's fact, it will happen, like it or not.
"Rebuild? This world is about to commit suicide, why would you want to resurrect it?"
Despite his pessimism, he lets go of the knob.
"Goggles." Spoke the man, reaching out for the Commander's binoculars. She let him have them and asked her questions as he carefully inspected the plains and jungle that stretched before him.
"Who are you?" A decent start, straightforward and legitimate.
Were it so easy.
"Ah, that's the wrong question, doll." He shifted his sight to Andale. The path from the town to RobCo's factory could not be seen from any angle, thick bamboo or similar plants growing along its edges, but smoke rose from behind a crest, on the left… Eastern, edge of the hill.
Dark, thick and oily smoke.
"Oh?" Mann traded an annoyed glance with her Lieutenant, "What's the right question, then?"
The scientist calculated something off the top of his head and shifted back to the RobCo building, focusing on the swamp that made up Fairfax's ruins.
"You need to know what I am." He responded, distracted and only half into the conversation. "You don't need to know my name, that's irrelevant, you need a miracle, and you hope I'll be that miracle."
"Am I wrong?" He shook his head, not at the meaning, but rather the tone of her question.
"What you need is to give me access to all of your tactical data, Ess-Oh-Pees, supply lines and inventories, then, you need to do what I say without question. You trust me enough to do that?" His sardonic smile made it clear this was a rhetorical question.
She replied nonetheless, "No."
"Then whatever I do will only make matters worse." He seemed perfectly okay with that concept, as though it was all a relaxing game of chess. "But I'll tell you that much; There's bunch of tribals up that hill," He pointed to Andale, but sought no confirmation from any of the others, treating this assumption as fact, "Mutated humans cross that swamp at regular interval, about… Fourteen a day, if my calculations are correct."
This had been observed by her scouts a few months ago; twelve Super-mutant per twenty-four hours, the rest being killed off by Outcast patrols, crossed the ruins and followed the road before pooling up in a decrepit power station.
"They both fight for that factory down there." He continued, caught up in his observation, "The tribals use it to…" He spun on the spot and pointed to Mann with joined hands. "They both try to get a piece of you whenever they get the chance, right?" The Commander produced a dismissive confirmation, "With projectile weapons only about half the time, am I right?" She nodded, wondering how he could infer that much from simple guesswork, "Yes, right… And the tribe takes a shot at you pretty much whenever the mutants go medieval, yes?"
A look at her Lieutenant was required, but the Commander quickly gave him an answer, "Just about, yes…"
"Did they attack recently?" They had not tried anything for a week, at most, "Well, they're going to hold that factory some more, say… About until tomorrow night, then give you a shot and, then, you'll have green guys with guns all over your lawn."
The Lieutenant told Mann about his analysts' take on the situation; They did not think the Raiders would hold through the night. They had faced lesser odds before and backed down, no reason they would act differently now, and the Super-Mutants obviously had no guns, they might scavenge some from dead Raiders, but nowhere near enough to arm the whole lot.
"Thus, they reckon this guy be full'a shit." He concluded, a thin smile tugging at the corner of his dried and scarred lips.
Mann nodded. No matter how smart, there was no way this guy could just guess the flow of a battle like that, from a glance. Hell, Murphy's law is clear: No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
"What's your name, then?" Asked the Commander, deciding here and there that this guy was nothing but some arrogant pre-war prick who would be put in his place within a week.
"Doctor Burton," Replied the other, giving back the binoculars as Mann signaled the scouts to get that nutjob off her balcony. "You can call me Nathan…" He did not resist as the scout team's NCO pulled him by the arm, instead asking if he could get a drink and a shower, preferably somewhere without too much radiation.