The sun comes up, and finds me walking. Months ago, right after I climbed out of the vault for the first time and followed my father into the wastes, I tried travelling at night for a while. The sky seemed too wide, the world too big by daylight; I constantly felt I was going to fall off into the blue, a lost little speck in all the immensity around me. Growing up in an artificial cave gives you no comprehension of the scale of the world, no yardstick to judge distance and solidity, and the result is a nearly paralyzing fear of open spaces. For days I tried moving about at night, when the sky was black and the world shrunk down to the manageable little globe of light thrown by my pip-boy.
A few near-fatal encounters with raiders, molerats, and one memorable close-up meeting with a yao-guai taught me that blundering around in the dark wasn't a good idea, especially when you're wearing a glowing "come eat me" beacon on your wrist. So like everyone else eking out a life in the wastes, I learned the basic rhythms of survival. Move in daylight when visibility and footing are good and you can see trouble coming a long way off, then hole up at night, preferably somewhere up off of the ground or down in a hole, and keep quiet and still 'till daybreak.
And that's how I lived until my father died and Elder Lyons and the Brotherhood of Steel took an interest in my welfare. Paladin Gunny showed me how to use an old secondhand T-51d power armor harness Sarah Lyons scrounged up for me, taught me to make small precise movements, and let the sensors and servos of the steel exoskeleton do the work. I used it for three months, 'till I cut a deal with some Brotherhood Outcasts and traded a complicated and messy favor for access to a big pre-war tech cache. Right in the middle of it stood an ancient but perfectly preserved harness of T-51b that I got up and running just in time to save my life when a disagreement among my employers became a mutiny and subsequently a three-way bloodbath. I got out alive. Nobody else did.
Once you learn to wear power armor, to maintain and repair it, your whole world changes. The average harness of T-51b adds a foot to your height, a hundred and fifty pounds to your weight, and makes you as strong as a super mutant. Since you can't really be unobtrusive or quiet in that rig, you have to adapt again. Now the goal isn't invisibility, but preemption. Thermal and night vision systems make turn night into day and let you see through walls. The alloy steel exoskeleton makes you immune to most small-arms fire, from .32 and 10 mm all the way up to 5.56 mm and .308. The only things you really have to worry about when suited up are high explosives, energy weapons, and rust spots. Not a lot of the first two out here in the wastes most days, and on the rare occasions when rain falls you've usually got less to fear from the water itself than from the radioactive particles floating around in it.
So now I walk the nights, basking in the lambent green glow of night vision or the lurid reds and blues of thermal mode. The wastes are surprisingly beautiful seen through the eyes of technology. Night vision brings out the details of rubble and ruin with exquisite detail, wiping away the centuries of dust and grime and laying bare the bones of the old world in shining broken perfection. With the thermal overlay engaged, the world resolves itself into a map of relative warmth and cold. The dull orange of a crumbling pre-war roadway, still radiating the heat of the day, the deep blue of shade and water, and once in a while, the shifting blob of something alive, far out in the darkness. In between the enhanced vision and the constant racket of the servos and steel boots pounding concrete, most of what you see is already running away from you, which, given the nature of the wasteland, is usually a good thing.
Once in a while, you meet something too big, too tough, or too stupid to run, and then the steel skin you wear really comes into its own. An integrated targeting and tracking system throws tactical information up onto the suit's internal display, calculating threat assessments, suggesting loadouts, even throwing a calculated lead indicator up to increase your chances of hitting a moving target. In my time in the wastes, I've seen many things that have made me wonder if the ancients of the old world were completely insane, but this machine is pure, beautiful sanity, the perfect crystallization of the peak offensive and defensive technologies of the lost world of wonders.
Right now I'm looking for a place to hole up for the day, clean the dust out of the joints in the suit, and get a few hours of sleep. I'll reach Megaton tomorrow, and there'll be a bath waiting for me, and cooked food, and a real workbench with the spare parts to do a full maintenance workup. I've been a week on the trail, following up a lead on the location of some enclave holdouts, and I'm looking forward to some downtime. There's a crumbled overpass up ahead, huge sections of highway fallen to the ground while here and there concrete pillars support a stretch of concrete and rebar, like the canopy of a ragged masonry tree. I head for the nearest standing piece of shattered freeway, where a fallen section leans up against the giant pillars, creating a dark and shady space beneath. Of course, a spot like this is likely to attract more than just animals, so I go in with my assault rifle at the ready, selector switch on full-auto.
Inside, I find a little piece of hell. Bodies lie strewn about the small space, dismembered and mutilated. Looks like three, maybe four adults, and a sad, small bundle of clothes in the corner that makes my gut clench and churn with rage. The remains of a couch, now shredded by bullets and knives, a couple of chairs, and a table tells me that someone made a home here before the raiders came. There's no rest for me here, not among the dead, but as I turn to go, I hear a bubbly choking rasp from behind me. In a moment, I'm moving from body to body, looking for signs of life. Finally, one broken form in the corner stirs enough for me to notice. I trot over, armored boots squishing and crunching over clothes, broken chairs, and other things better left unexamined. The woman's face is a swollen mess of blood, and I can tell from the color of her skin, pale like milk, that I'm too late. All the stimpaks in the world can't replace one drop of blood, and it's clear she's lost far too much already. I'm AB+, so the odds she can use my blood are tiny. I'm just thinking about trying anyway, when one battered hand reaches up, touches the steel sheathing my forearm. Her lips move, but no sound comes out. I crank the audio amplification to max and lean down to listen.
"...Knight," she says. She thinks I'm Brotherhood. Technically, I suppose she's right. I lean down further. Even with the audio pickups at max, I can barely hear her. And then I hear the word that makes my blood run cold.
"...baby," she says. Her hand moves, pointing at the door. I look over at the bundle in the corner, but how can I tell her it's too late? Her eyes follow the inclination of my helmet, and she looks, then shakes her head, ever so slightly.
"...not... her."
A weak, bloody hand flutters up, lies for a moment on my armored gauntlet.
"...please..." she says, and she's gone.
I walk over to the bundle, and see that it's just a bundle of clothes. The pain in my chest subsides, just a bit, and then flares into rage as I realize what she meant. The raiders that did this have taken her child. An infant girl, from the sound of it. I can't save this woman, but damned if these monsters will have her baby.
On my feet now, systematically checking the bodies. I've done this a thousand times, I know the places people hide valuables: a stimpack, or a pile of caps, or an ancient, battered pack of cigarettes. Out here, looting the dead is an issue of survival, not morality. She'd do the same to me, were our situations reversed, and I'd be glad of it. Better another wastelander make use of my stuff then have it broken or sold or traded away by some raider scum for booze or chems. They don't have much; a few caps, some rusty broken firearms, a small stash of 10 millimeter rounds, and a single stimpak hidden under a box, carefully saved for an emergency that, when it came, was far too swift and complete for one lonely relic of the lost world of medical miracles to make any difference.
I stop to close her eyes before I leave the abattoir that was once a home. Outside, the sun is rising in the sky, and in the light of early morning, I can see that someone got a shot off before the raiders rolled over them. A small blood trail leads off to the west. I flick on infrared, and see that the blood is absorbing sunlight faster than the ground around it, making it glow pink, just a bit. I know I can work with that, and now I'm in pursuit, power armor driving me in long bounds from one glimmering breadcrumb to another. Soon the sun is too high, the ground too warm for the infrared to detect the difference between blood and dirt, but I don't need it anymore. I've got a bearing, and I know where they're going. Evergreen Mills. It's the worst place in the wasteland, a den of thieves, killers, rapists, and bandits, a dark, crumbling factory complex where the worst human monsters of the wastes gather to trade their loot for caps, booze, whores, and chems. I know where I'm going now, and my strides lengthen again, driving the servos to full capacity, taking ten yards at a bound.
Halfway there, I find the source of the blood trail. The old raider is lying in a cleft rock where there's a little shade, a nuka-cola bottle half full of water next to his hand. He's breathing in short, panting breaths. He reaches for an old 10 mm pistol as soon as he sees me, but it's far too late and I add a crushed hand to his list of injuries. After a little work, he confirms what I already know. I don't need to kill him - I can just let the sun and the blood loss finish him slowly, but I'm feeling merciful. I'm not going waste any ammo on him - I've got the steel ball of an old trailer hitch welded to the plates covering my forearm, and one quick strike with my elbow caves in his skull and closes his pale, angry eyes forever.
After an hour, I know they're too far ahead and I won't catch them before they reach their destination, so now it's time to think, and to regret stopping to deal with the wounded raider. There's a lot of raiders at the Mills, but I've got a hate on, good and hot, and I'm not letting them have one more victim today, especially not one this small and helpless. I've got a few tricks up my sleeve, but I don't know what I'm up against, so I'll have to play this one by ear. By late morning, I'm perched on a rocky cliff overlooking the Mills. I've just missed them, I realize and suppress another twinge of regret. Far below, a string of junk clad figures is making their way into the entrance. This time of day, there's not much else stirring. In my experience, Raiders don't typically wake before noon if they can help it.
I engage the digital magnification on the suit, push it to max. I have to lock all the servos in the suit to hold me still enough that the image doesn't judder wildly out of control. The second to last raider in line is holding a small bundle, and my magnified vision shows me a chubby arm waving, for just a moment. They're inside - no rush now. I take ten minutes, come up with a plan that might work. I've been here before, so I already know what to look for. Send a monster to kill a monster, they say, and these egotistical fools have already given me one of the greatest monsters in the waste to work with. Anybody stupid and cruel enough to cage and torture a super-mutant behemoth behind an electric fence probably deserves what's coming to them.
Moving quickly, I work my way around until I have a clear line of sight to the gate of the electrified cage where the super mutant lies asleep. From here, I can also see down into the courtyard in front of the main entrance. My enhanced vision shows me two guards, one sleeping at an old school desk, the other leaning against a fencepost, cleaning his nails with a wicked-looking combat knife. Dropping down behind a rock, I unhook my pack from the steel carabiners welded to the torso of my armor and bring it around in front of me. The battered ancient black plastic case takes up a full third of the space in the main pocket, but it's worth lugging the weight and the bulk for times like this. Inside are pieces of oiled steel and polymer, oiled and shining.
Five minutes of work assembles the jumble of unrecognizable shapes into the sleek deadly form of a .308 sniper rifle. I snap the 4x24 optical scope into place, and sprawl out on top of a large flat boulder, extending the two legs of the bipod and resting them on the flat warm table of rock in front of me. I check my ranges with the suit's laser rangefinder. Readout says 825 meters to the first guard, 827 to the second, and a mere 680 to the steel box in front of the gate to the mutant's prison. The day is dead calm, and I say a little prayer of thanks to whoever's listening that I don't have to deal with windage on a shot this long. I read an article in an old copy of Guns and Ammo on calculating windage by estimating wind direction at different reference points between you and the target, but even my vault-tec issued education isn't up to doing trigonometry in my head. Elevation's no problem, though. Three clicks down on the elevation wheel puts me at 700 meters, which means I'll have to hold low on the generator and high on the two guards. Can't be helped. This weapon is loud, and I'm going to have to get off two shots real quick. I can take a few more seconds on the third, and by then the noise will work to my advantage.
I set my scope on the marginally more alert of the two guards. His eyes are open, anyway so I figure he's more likely to cause problems. I settle the crosshairs over the bridge of his nose. That'll put the bullet more or less at his center of mass, and with this weapon, and the jury rigged armor he's wearing, that should do the job just fine. I check the second guard. He hasn't moved, but the slump he's in tells me I need to hold the aimpoint half a dot over his head to get him cleanly. I track back and forth a couple of times to get used to the shift, then I take a deep breath, lock up the servos of the suit, exhale, and squeeze. The report comes as a surprise, which is always a good sign when it comes to trigger control.
Now I have to move fast - unlock the servos, track smoothly to the other guard. I know the first bullet should be hitting the first guard just as I settle the crosshairs on the fencepost a few inches above the head of the second. He stirs, but I know the sound of the gunshot is still somewhere in the air between me and him. Just as I stroke the trigger, his eyes pop open, and I know he's heard the first round. It doesn't matter at this point, so I take the extra second to watch him reach up to rub his eyes, and I'm looking right at him as the round goes home, shearing through his upraised arm and punching through his chest in a puff of dust and a gout of red. The links of the fence behind him suddenly glisten crimson in the sunlight, and he and the chair go over backwards together. I can see his boots kicking, but I figure it doesn't matter whether the kill is clean or not, because he won't be able to stop what's coming next. The procedure is nearly automatic, now. Unlock, reposition, set the crosshairs in the dirt just below the steel box of the generator, and squeeze. The box blows up in a shower of sparks, and the blue glow on the fence dies.
The supermutant is already on his feet, staring at the gate. Now I've got to make him mad. Shouldn't be hard. I put a round high up into his shoulder, aiming for his armpit. A mutie this big, that's not likely to impair his combat effectiveness, but it'll sure piss him off. His mouth gapes open as he roars his rage and defiance to the still concrete walls.
That should do it. I unlock my servos and back out of the scope, take the opportunity to replace the five-round box magazine in the rifle. Round number six is already snug in the chamber, so I'm ready to go once the party gets going. The effect I'm looking for will take a few minutes to develop - no hurry now. I pull a handful of loose .308 rounds out of my pack, reload the first magazine with five fresh glittering doses of murder.
By the time I'm done, the anthill is well and truly kicked over. Raiders are boiling out of the main entrance and onto the catwalks on the second floor. Crew bosses are barking orders, trying to get their sleepy, hung-over killers organized and into the fight. The super mutant is pounding on the door to his cage, and as I watch, the crossbar finally pops free, and ten tons of raging monster is loose among the wolves. The're not going to be worrying about anything else right now, so I leave the rifle where it lies, and scoop up the chinese-made assault rifle I use for day-to-day work. Moving fast, I bound along the ridge. Time for the scary part now. I lean out over the roof of the factory complex, say another prayer, and jump. Falling this far, you have time to think about what a bad idea this is before you hit.
When you're falling without armor, the best thing to do is bend your knees, roll into a ball, and hope for the best. In armor, it's just the opposite. You're harder than most anything else out there, and your servos, not your shell, are the weak point, so you lock your knees and let the titanium steel alloy and the shock buffers take the impact. The screen flickers inside the helmet when I hit, but only for a second. I unlock the servos and as the dust clears I realize I'm sunk like a lawn dart waist-deep through the roof of the small prefab building module I've hit. Holding the rifle in my left hand, I do a quick visual inspection. It looks intact, so I reach down with my right hand and rip pieces out of the roof until it lets go of me and I drop down into the dark interior.
Night vision comes up automatically, and I settle the rifle into my shoulder and start my sweep. The next room is a sleeping chamber, full of chaos and stumbling bodies, two or three of them small. I'm careful, and only now I realize I haven't thought this through. How many babies might be here? How many small children? I have no idea how I'll find her, or even what I'll do with her once I do. Too late to go back now, I've got to see this through. I stalk from room to room, scanning for armed figures. The suit does a lot of the work, highlighting weapons and painting crosshairs on the heads and chests of those holding them. It's bloody work, and there's no way to be sure I'm not killing noncombatants, but I don't have time to stop and interview them, so everything with a gun gets two to the center of mass before I ruck over them and move on. A lot of the bodies I see moving around are wearing slave collars, so I start using that as a non-threat indicator as well. After a while, my brain goes quiet and my body switches to autopilot, and when I look up, I've reached the front door.
Outside, the battle is still raging. I don't think that even working together the raiders can bring the hulking monster down, but I can't let either side win, or I lose. There's a raider with a rocket launcher up on one of the catwalks, and as I watch there's a sizzling shriek like tearing rubber and a smoke trail reaches out and touches the behemoth. The earth shakes, and even the monster knows it's hurt. As the smoke clears, I can see white ribs and something pulsing and pink beneath the torn green skin. The raider is showing white teeth in a feral grin as she loads another round. I wait, let her get one more off before I hit her from below, three rounds stitching up her torso, the last one going home under her chin. There's a fine pink mist as it blows up through the top of her head, and she drops like a broken doll. The mutant is staggering, now, and the raiders move in for the kill. As focused as they are on the dying behemoth, they're not watching for me, and I get three more before one of them spots me. They're down to half a dozen now, and they're low on ammo, so it's hardly a fight at all, and soon I'm standing alone on the sun-baked tarmac while blood dries on the asphalt as the flies buzz and crows and turkey buzzards gather above me.
The behemoth lies out in the middle of the courtyard, oozing blood down the pile of concrete and rebar he's fallen across. His chest is still moving in great, shuddering breaths, but I know it's not long now. I walk over to him, and I whisper to the tortured soul inside the beast that it's time to rest, that he's done a good thing today. I tell him about the baby, and his mother. The eyes blink, and I think I see a spark of understanding in them, just for a moment, before they close for good.
I've got maybe a hundred women and children inside the hulking factory behind me, and if I'm honest, I know I've got no idea what I'm going to do with them. In a minute, I'm going to have to go back in there to look for the baby I came for and face the rest of the carnage I've wrought. I know I don't want to see it, but I made a promise this morning to a dying woman, and the consequences of that have grown beyond what I expected. I won't leave that baby to grow up in this place, and I can't abandon all the widows and orphans and slaves whose world I've just blown apart. I can feel the rising certainty that I've changed my future again, that I won't see my cozy little house in Megaton for a good long while now.
This morning Evergreen Mills was the starting point for half the raiding parties in the wastes, and this afternoon it's a reeking charnel house, but tomorrow it might be something else, something useful, and that's got to be worth the effort. I don't know how this will end, but I know now what I have to do next. I'm going to walk in there and tell those frightened slaves and women and children that I'm not going to hurt them, that they'll be OK. And then I'm going to decide what to do to take care of the survivors of this place. I'm going to figure out what they need to make it through today, and tomorrow, and then the day after that until I can see where I'm going and where this road ends. That might take a while, but to be honest, I've needed a project anyway. I feel the weight of responsibility settle down on my shoulders again, and I think that maybe part of me has missed this. The shadows of black wings wheel above as the afternoon sun beats down on the newly-dead, and I turn, and I walk back alone towards the yawning gate.