This story is a work of fanfiction. As such, it owes a great debt to the creators of the characters used herein: Rumiko Takahashi, Kunihiku Ikuhara, Naoko Takeuchi and the creative teams of Interplay, Obsidian and Bethesda.
(シーンブレイク)
Annulled Destiny II:
Wild Wasteland
A reminder: Japanese speech is delineated using 『Japanese double quotation marks』
Chapter 4,
Skeletons in Cupboards
(シーンブレイク)
Optimist studies English, pessimist studies Chinese, realist studies Kalashnikov
(Russian folk wisdom)·
(シーンブレイク)
The air in there was warm, dry and stale. The revealed room was about thrice as large as the first one, elongated and noticeably less rusty. Right beyond the faux wall there was a wide, waist-high rise shaped like a truncated metallic cone. The side walls of the room were lined by tables with terminals on them, intermixed with various tech-looking boxes with blinking lights, huge reels of tape beyond glass doors and other such things.
Ami beelined towards a huge computer towering at the back wall like a round-edged two-meter cube glowing red with panels of tiny lights, a small screen in the center looking disproportionally small.
"What is this?" Akane was eying the cone-shaped construct suspiciously. There was empty space inside, occupied by an ergonomic chair. A wooden tabletop was running in semi-circle along the top, cluttered with various electronic innards. And, like a cherry on top, a brutal looking solder on its support. "A table? But why in such shape, you can only reach it from inside."
"Must be for the big boss," Ranma concluded as she boldly sat down in the chair. Its back consisted of several horizontal bars clad in artificial letter. "So that no one else is pawing his papers or something." She tried spinning on the chair. It emitted an unoiled squeal.
"This is the Overseer seat," Narg explained. "But legends say that the Twelfth is an unusual Vault, having no Overseer seat."
"We ourselves discovered this secret not long ago," Tim admitted. "Well after the exodus and re-settling. Long after Nataly visited us."
"We be thinking, does it have machineguns like that one in the Thirteen?" Sulik mused out loud.
"Machine-guns?" Tim asked, surprised.
"The den rises baring a surprise for attackers," Narg confirmed. "I never understood what does that mean, but if the ancestors were calling this table 'den', it means it should be able to rise. Not the chair, for sure."
"There should be a button?" Ranma bent down ducking under the table top in curiosity.
『No, you won't!』 Akane barked forgetting to speak in English. 『What if it shoots?』 Nimbly jumping up onto the tabletop she pulled Ranma back up by the pigtail.
"Careful!" Tim exclaimed. "Some of these parts are unique!"
"I'm sorry!" Akane squeaked. Glancing at a big valve, densely packed with tiny innards, that she had almost stepped on, she got off the table slowly and deliberately.
『I wasn't going to push!』 the redhead retorted, deeply offended, as she made a point of standing up. 『Who are you taking me for?』 She walked away into a corner to pout.
"Never the less..." Tim glanced at the sheepish Akane, then by some reason at Usagi. The goth girl replied with a nervous 'victory' gesture. "Never the less, an extra machinegun would never hurt. Joe-the-Green! Sebastian! Get over here with tools!"
They did not have to wait long because at that point, it seems, the entire modest population of the Vault was crowding the room. Two ghouls with pliers fell on the Overseer seat like locusts. First they wrenched the chair out as it was getting in their way. Then Tim had to hurry saving the electronics piled on the table from being too close to more and more heavy tools as the ghouls switched from pliers to hammer and crowbar. Then they volunteered Narg and Sulik when the wiry but thin ghouls proved not mighty enough to tear something off.
For several minutes everyone was busy. Ami was working her magic on the mainframe making it beep from time to time. Tim was replacing the electronic parts in table drawers. The tribals and the techies were trying to tear something off without twisting the crowbar in the process. Ranma stopped pouting and was watching their struggle with interest. Something was cracking, metal creaking, but there was no discernible result yet. Then Mike came with a sledgehammer. They didn't trust the delicate work to him, took the sledge from him and used it themselves. Against such argument even the sturdy pre-war construction had nothing to say. Soon, the two ghoul mechanics were picking at the table's innards. They exclaimed in joy as they found something that made them bring a cable they then spent a long time attaching to somewhere inside the table, swearing. Suddenly, there was sparkling, an electic motor whirred loudly and the entire table jumped up like a Jack-in-the-box rising some meter and a half on a thick column. It now resembled a mushroom.
Two six-barreled machine-guns lowered down from under the mushroom cap, pointed at the crowd of onlookers in the first room. The barrels began spinning up. The gawkers displayed excellent reflexes by jumping toward the walls. Akane stuck to the ceiling. Ranma was on the other side. Only Usagi froze like deer in headlights.
『Dodge, you fool!』 Ranma yelled at her.
"Shut it down!" Tim hissed.
The mechanics fumbled in their haste.
Grabbing the cable, Sulik heaved. Lighting the sudden darkness up with its sparkling end, the cable tore from the table innards. There was dying whirring of the slowing barrels, a couple seconds of silence, then first nervous laughs of relief were sounding. The darkness was far from complete, there were screens glowing along the walls, multitudes of orange lights blinking, the mainframe was glowing with its crimson panels. There was also dim light reaching from the corridor.
"Folk wisdom sez:" Sulik declared in wise voice, "for electreecitee to die, tear the wire!"
"Excuse me, did I miss something?" Ami asked worriedly.
Ranma snorted suppressing a laugh.
『Nothing special,』 Usagi reassured her. 『Just the locals discovering an interesting secret... And fate reminding me to be careful with my wishes.』 Her voice was full of dry humor. 『The outcome could've been very funny, to think of it.』
"With your wishes?" Ami asked, not understanding.
"Don't get distracted," Ranma distracted her. "Keep working, they'll repair lights any moment now."
Akane cast a worried glance at Usagi. Considering what·the Goth Senshi was wishing only a couple hours ago — namely, to lie down and die quietly — such gallows humor was quite worrying.
Tim, meanwhile, was dressing the two unlucky mechanics down in a whisper. It looked like they were finding excuses. The ghouls' whisper was husky and Tim's monologue so fast and furious than neither Ranma nor Akane recognized anything.
The light was back in two minutes. The crowding ghouls began examining the six-barreled monsters letting out appreciative whistles.
『They are so glad,』 Usagi noted in Japanese. 『Are these that valuable?』
"Useful things?" Ranma asked addressing the community in general: Tim was too busy.
"Why, these are miniguns!" one of the Glowing Ones replied. "If we sell them at the bazaar, it's five thousand caps for each!"
"We won't be selling them," another ghoul retorted. "We'll put them n the corridor near the entrance, it would be a surprise sentry post for attackers!" He had a creaking fit of coughing or maybe laughter.
Mini·guns? Ranma thought. I'm missing something here.
"We'll sell the second one anyway!" the first Glowing One disagreed. "Just think how much goodies we can barter for it!" He rolled his eyes dreamily.
"And where are you planning to get spare parts for repairs?" the second ghoul wasn't giving up. "Filing 'em by hand from raw chunks of metal? All for some puny five grands? What are you planning to do with these? Go chasing girls in Reno? Those folks would quickly put you six feet under!"
『They are discussing if they should sell it or hoard it,』 Ranma translated for Usagi.
The mechanics, meanwhile, fell on the exposed, defenseless column with screwdrivers to begin quickly reducing it into a pile of parts. This process was accompanied with esoteric exclamations like "Oooh, this collector! The collector!", "Just look at this baby! It even has factory grease left!" and "The worm gear drive is meh." For Akane they looked like vultures cleaning a cattle carcass. This wasn't far from truth: soon there was only a bare frame left of the Overseer seat while the sated techies waddled away carrying big piles of parts. Tim could not spare any time for the guests: he was too busy making sure the less talented representatives of the ghoul kin do not drop the machineguns on the way to the armory and do not pocket the ammo.
Is short it was a merry madhouse.
Ami, it seems, never noticed any of that, busy staring at something inside the mainframe. Shifting to one of the terminal tables absent-mindedly like a sleepwalker, she found some cable in its drawer without looking and connected the terminal to the mainframe. After wich she dove into the terminal, unaware of anything around her, typing on the archaic-looking keyboard with her left hand and tinkering with her wisor with her right.
Ranma approached to look over her shoulder. There were columns of numbers and symbols flickering on the screen. She moved away quietly to avoid distracting Ami.
Tim, meanwhile, was explaining finer points of prospector craft to the tribals: "You should be searching not for a cave, but for traces of construction work. Any Vault does have a concealed navel point, a tunnel from which digging was started. And a road to bring in construction supplies and remove mined rock. Construction of such scales is impossible to conceal completely, so how do you think it is concealed? Thus, that navel point is camouflaged as a minor military installation. Unimportant enough that enemies wouldn't waste a nuke on it and remote enough for the Vault to survive if the nuke is dropped anyway."
"You be saying we must search for a petty pre-war military bunker," Sulik asked, "with traces of big digging?"
"Exactly," Tim confirmed. "But the traces of digging will be thoroughly camouflaged. As an underground hangar or a foundation bank for a shed, or whatever the old world people had imagination for. The Thirteen will be around half a mile away from that. Most probably on the other side of some ridge.
Both tribals sighed.
"Won't do," Narg said. "To succeed, one has to... read these ruins like we read animal tracks. Me and Sulik would do no better than a Vault City citizen trying to hunt geckos."
"I can help!" Ami piped in, raising her head from her work. "I cant detect underground hollows—"
『Don't get distracted!』 Ranma berated her. 『That will be our plan B! Do you realize how much you'd have to comb?』
"No less than a thousand square kilometers." Ami wilted a bit. "All right, all right. I almost figured this out..." Judiging by frustration in her voice, she got stuck at something, with that 'almost' threatening to stretch into a couple hours.
"There is something troubling you?" Tim asked diplomatically.
"This battery of analog to digital converters here," Ami explained pointing at the back of the mainframe. "It has multitude of cables attached, it's obviously some sort of sensor grid. The program processing its input is extremely tangled, I couldn't figure out its purpose. But it's this program that has highest priority, currently taking up eight cores out of nine surviving. Initially, when there were sixteen of them, it should have been less noticeable, but now one core carries out practically all system tasks including interrupt processing. While this ADC alone generates three hundred thousand interrupts per second."
"You mean," Tim said, squinting, "that our mainframe is so slow not because it is a rusty, worn out pile of scrap but because it is busy with some, pardon me, fucking nonsense?"
"Umm, I'm sorry?" Ami grew confused. "But this process processes data from a sensor grid—"
"Which we had no idea existed," Tim cut her off. "Meaning either these sensors had croaked long ago, or it is calculating some nonsense like number of rats in the desert, or checking if Chinese bombers fly overhead. Shut that process the fuck down...! Pardon me, Miss."
"Are you sure?" Ami hesitated. "I wouldn't want breaking something vital. Like nuclear reactor control."
"Nuclear?" Tim asked, clearly confused. "You probably mean a fission·reactor? No, there is no such thing in our Vault, only standard fusion generators. That are completely self-sufficient, I dare say."
"Fusion means thermonuclear," Ami replied. "Do these it have their own computers?"
"No, no!" Tim corrected her. "Not 'thermo'. Just your everyday cold fusion. There is no need for a computer there, their design isn't more complex than a common fusion battery."
"Cold fusion?" Ami asked, shocked. "But it's... How could it... It's impossible! Even the Silver Millennium science..."
"Impossible?" It was Tim's turn to be confused. "But they were using such batteries in the thousands before the war!" He turned to the crowd of gawkers: "Hey, someone go to Griz and grab me a fusion battery."
The crowd let out a collective groan and began drawing straws: ostensibly, to make Griz part with that battery was a task not for the faint of heart.
『Something impossible again?』 Ranma intruded in on Ami, grinning. 『Come on, brace up. This lost look is so not you.』
Ami grared at the redhead sharply, a heated retort on the tip of her tongue. But she thought better.
『If I made a lost puppy imitation each time I encounter a new screwy martial arts style...』 Ranma provided an example, leaving her phrase pointedly unfinished.
『A martial art style...?』 Ami frowned. "But that's... You are right!" She continued with palpable relief as she obviously thought of something. "Yes, right! There are no perfect truths in science, all too often practical applications stay undiscovered or rejected for decades if not centuries. The scientific community could be as short-sighted and set in their ways as the regular people. Take, for example, Helicobacter pylori accepted only a century and eight years after its discovery. People conducting experiments could err as well, resulting in an idea being rejected as contradicting reason.(note 1) Maybe it's the same with the cold fusion...? I wouldn't want this world to have different laws of physics."
Meanwhile, swearing echoed from the corridor. The squabble between the ghoul sent there and the unfriendly stock-keeper could be heard even from this distance. Tim apologized as he went to resolve the situation.
While waiting for him to return, Ami was browsing something lazily on the screen. She then peered closer, frowned and began browsing quickly, purposefully.
Ranma leaned over her shoulder. To the left, there were two tidy columns of numbers and letters divided to smaller, two-character columns. To the right, there was a thinner column filled with a mess of symbols with English words embedded in it, wrapped to the next line strictly on the column's boundary. Ami stopped browsing and Ranma squinted at the right column, reading the compressed text: "Chinese bombs shoot this processor the fuck down pardon missing... What is this crap?"
"Right!" Ami exclaimed. "Speech recognition! That's what the mysterious process eating up the computation power is!"
"Speech recognition?" Ranma asked, puzzled.
"That's no sensor grid!" Ami explained. "These are hidden surveillance microphones! While the speech recognition serves for compressing the information: recording sound from how many... ah, one thousand twenty four channels is too much for any tape. So they resolved this by using speech recognition and recording the resulting text. It's very compact but partly messed up. 'Bombers' turned into 'bombs', 'shut ' into 'shoot' and 'Miss' into 'missing'." She looked at the leftt columns. "It's strange, the earlier part of our conversation is missing. It's like recording started from the word 'Chinese'."
"Nothing surprising!" Tim's voice reached from begind them making Ami start. "It most probably does have a list of key words to detect seditious topics. The magnificent bastards!" He put a heavy, rounded cylinder the size of a soda can on the table next to the terminal. "Let us try finding where this big brother was tattling to. I wouldn't want to find the hard way that there is a bunker with a terminal that lets read all our talks. It's a severe security breach!"
Both began picking through mainframe's memory even as Ami kept glancing towards the cylinder, curiosity gnawing at her.
Ranma walked away to not distract them.
『What did they find?』 Akane asked her in a hushed voice in their native tongue.
『A clever surveillance system listening the entire Vault,』 Ranma replied as quietly. 『It's still working.』
Akane frowned: 『How much was that boss of theirs mistrusting his own people if he made that. And put machine-guns under his table too, the paranoiac. This feels so filthy.』
『All of that was factory-made,』 Ranma corrected her glancing at the gutted table. 『A single paranoiac couldn't have done it himself.』
『A happy world wouldn't have blew itself up,』 Usagi concluded philosophically.
Ami and Tim were done with the mainframe in a quarter an hour, amputating several extra parts when it refused to boot up without the surveillance module. Then Tim was running tests, awed at the freebie computation power. Then she was scanning the dead cores marking intact parts. It was looking promising, Tim could probably assemble two working ones from these seven.
Finally Ami could run a keyword search after she, in only five minutes, wrote a program that made the tape drive work five times faster than was considered possible. Two boxes at the back wall were whirring and whispering as they wound thick, plate-sized spools of magnetic tape. The mainframe cores freed from their big brother job were processing unfiltered signal directly from the reading heads, five times faster than the dedicated tape drive controller could.
Now she could focus her attention on the thing making her curiosity burn. Tim had called it a 'microfusion cell'. The heavy, rounded cylinder had a safe connector protected by a shutter. Not surprising, considering the label '1040,8 Volts DC'.
"I'm intrigued myself," Tim said. "maybe you'd find something new here as well."
"So..." Ami was turning the cell in her left hand manipulating her visor with her right through the earring. "In the center we have... I think it's a capacitor. Thin like a pencil. Around it, in rings, a voltaic pile of thin-film cells. Exactly nine hundred. Deuterium, Palladium, Osmium. That's strange. Our people tried that, it worked no better than a perpetuum mobile. A jacket of paraffin and lead. Quite expected. Hmm... Such interesting plastic. No wonder it's still intact after so many years. Rings of the same plastic along the outer and inner edges for insulation between... Wait, stop. There's too little Palladium, it couldn't absorb even a thousandth of Deuterium present. Deiterium is there in heavy water form. So this ring is to keep the water inside the cell...? Then what Palladium is for...? A suspension of nanoparticles in heavy water. I don't get it. And Osmium...? A coating on the top membrane of the cell? And what's this...? Traces of mechanical wear? From what...? Now, what do we have at the butt-ends. Aha, a complex controlling mechanism at the top. Such an impressive transistor...! Next, the bottom end. Such recless design is a crime against safety! A tiny radioisotope cell outside the protective jackets, could be destroyed from a simple dent in the casing! And who was the bright mind to choose Cesium for it? Recycling such batteries should have been be a nightmare. Hm... But they'd died long ago otherwise. Now, what else do we have here? Piezoelements...? And a lot of transistors for them. So then the main battery is ultrasonic-activated...? But how would that help...? maybe cavitation at the surface nanostructures of the Osmium film?"
"Well?" Ranma inquired: for her, all that rubbish, said in English at that, had been nonsensical, utterly out of her grasp. "Is there progress or is it eating your brain?"
"That was more than I knew about the microfusion cells," Tim admitted. "They don't tell such things in books: the blasted commercial secrets. While disassembling is fraught with terrible explosions."
"Explosions?" Ami asked in surprise. "But there's nothing in there that could..." She frowned fingering her earring. There were tables and graphs flickering across her visor. "I see... No, wait... Photonium...?" Her features reflected utter disbelief. Then she narrowed her eyes, her movements growing calm and collected. "That explains much, then... But how did they... Charged·Photonium...? Oh, of course. If they copied the standard schematics turning it on its head... Yes, looks like it." She kept studying the cell for a while, then handed it back to Tim. "Thank you, now many things are clear."
Ami did shrink when she noticed everyone's intense attention focused on her.
"Excuse me, but what exactly is clear?" Tim voiced everyone's curiosity.
"Umm," Ami mumbled sheepishly as she realized how much her disjointed rambling must have intrigued them. "You see, the technology employed here couldn't be local... I mean, from Earth. This doesn't look like natural development. It's like the creators of this battery had a standard Tantrium cell from the Silver Millennium tech base on their hands. They then re-created its crude copy using the 22nd century tech base."
"You say they got their paws on alien tech?" Ranma asked.
"That, or they had a Silver Millennium relic," Ami replied. "This is either a proof that Moon Kingdom existed in this world or that humans are not alone in this galaxy. Considering that hyperwave echo..." Turning to face Tim, she explained it for him: "The central pencil-sized part is a Photonium accumulator obviously copied from the output cascade of a Tantrium battery and then merely lineraly resized. Here, at the side," She pinted at the top of the cell, "they squeezed in a crude and low-power Photonium generator, at most one or two Kilowatts. But the accumulator capacity is increased by several orders of magnitude. It can store up to, uhh, almost a hundred Megajoules."
"A hundred and sixty," Tim corrected.
"Err, one hundred sixty Megajoules," Ami echoed. "Such increase of capacity at the cost of reliability is appaling, this energy is equivalent to forty kilograms in Trinitrotoluene!"
Most ghouls, as well as Ranma and Akane, took a step back from Tim holding the cell.
"Don't worry, the accumulator is almost empty!" Ami hurriedly reassured them. "To initiate recharging cycle, you have to place a strong magnet against this yellow circle here at the bottom. Then this... ultrasonic-initiated cold fusion voltaic pile would completely recharge the accumulator in 24 hours."
Tim was silent for a while as he digested the information. Then he asked slowly: "You mean these cells... They are rechargeable?"
"Definitely," Ami confirmed. "I can't tell for sure but I think they should survive from twenty to a hundred cycles. The accumulator, by its very nature, could last for near eternity, but the generator and the voltaic pile do not. Thus, recharge cycles would be getting progressively longer. Judging by minor wear, this battery had been recharged a few times."
"Bloody hell!" Narg commented, face-palming by some reason.
"You be living, you be learning," Sulik consoled him philosophically.
"Everyone, you got it?" Tim growled addressing his fellow ghouls. "You heard nothing! And if you find a discharged microfusion cell, you grab it simply because you're that bad a scrounger, nothing more!"
The ghouls cackled en masse rubbing their hands.
"I collect them in loving memory of my deceased grandmother!" some wannabe comedian injected from the back ranks.
"And I want to collect a thousand to build a power plant in my garage!" another added.
"Excuse me...?" Ami said in puzzlement.
"Am I thinking correctly that common knowledge is that the cells are not·rechargeable?" Ranma inquired innocently.
"Definitely," Tim replied. "Now, if you'd be so kind to not proliferate this, ahem, priceless knowledge..."
"We have no need," Sulik reassured him. Then he took an exaggerated thinking stance. "Well, if for us and Narg personally... But are we having any need?"
"Highwayman!" Narg reminded him. "It guzzles them like Hakunin ratburgers. Aww, why oh why did I throw it away yesterday!" He shook his head ruefully.
『What's with them?』 Akane asked Ranma in a whisper: while her English was more book-smart than redhead's, her lack of real practice left her lost in this pile-up of hints and omissions.
『They will be having hefty profits with these cells,』 Ranma explained, whispering as well. 『Everyone thinks these cells are one-use and throw them away, but they are rechargeable.』
"By the way," Tim asked Ami, "what is Photonium?"
"It's a kind of matter that consists of photons forming a stable crystalline lattice," the girl genius explained gladly. "Generating devices are simple but the theory behind them is not. It's extremely complex computationally. Natural progression of earth science and technology gives access to hard light around the twenty sixth century. There are... self-strengthening hard light structures used in the accumulator of this battery, otherwise such energy density would've been unattainable. The design is pure aping, copied without understanding the math behind it. Otherwise why make the accumulator so long and thin? No, they obviously took an existing design and just added more layers. More so because charged·photonium requires much higher level of understanding and matter manipulation.
"Fantastic!" Tim was awed. "I'm so glad I met you. Who would have thought that things so common could have such skeletons in their cupboards!"
A bout of awkward mutual praising followed, coupled with a brief educational-level review of the twenty sixth century science. To be honest, Ami knew most of these matters on the educational level herself, without unnecessary detail. She had been vary to ask the pink-haired time traveler too much lest the timeline tangles into an even worse knot. Her knowledge of spatial physics and her ability to make portals were Ami's own research, based on object lessons provided by the Dark Kingdom generals and cultists of the eldritch Pharaoh Ninety.
Tim never asked about some things he was acutely curious about, Ranma noted. Namely, their Senshi powers and how twentieth century girls could know twenty-sixht century tech.
When the mutual praising lost its steam and Tim had to deal with the crowd that grew too rowdy without supervision, Ranma quietly shuffled to Ami's side to support her with a talk.
『Sooo, how's this world?』 the redhead inquired in a whisper. 『The distorted evolution... Dang it, I meant the effect of 'a tree that hit a glass ceiling'.』
『Everything around is simply made·from that distortion!』 Ami whispered back. 『First, and most noticeable, they knew how to make transistors. Very good transistors. But the microchip was never invented. Instead, their computers are based on insane gas discharge and capacitor matrices animaded by a scanning electron beam. In fact, every 'valve' in such computer is a microchip equivalent with thousands of active elements. It works, and works well. But it cannot be miniaturized further! A dead end. The mainframe is much more powerful but it's built on entirely different principles. It has three-dimensional grids of ultra-miniaturized valves, two thousand ninety per one vacuum envelope. It's very reliable and time-proof but I fear to think how high the production cost was. Assembling each multi-valve requires lots of manual labor and there are thousands of them in the mainframe. Only to achieve computational power on par with some personal computers back home... A dead end again. To step further they'd have to invent something entirely different from scratch!』
『I see. They kept inventing the wheel. Any practical advices?』 Ranma asked her.
『Don't grow complacent. This world's science could have had breakthroughs in utterly unexpected fields, that's not counting the obvious alien influence. Many things could be not what they seem. Like the seeming likeness of these processors to simple valves.』
『I got it.』 Ranma nodded severely.
Then, finally, the mainframe finished abusing the tape drive. With a grumpy click the spool began winding back while Ami dove into search results saved on the terminal's holodisk.
Long, boring picking through notes for thirteennth days of month, through orders for thirteen pieces and other such junk only resulted in a short adrvertising text.
After reading how wonderful a Vault the Thirteen is, placed so conveniently under the downtown of Bakersfield, Narg grew sullen: "Bullshit."
"Bovine... feces?" Akane echoed.
"Well, Bakersfield is to the west from here while the Thirteen is somewhere north-east," Narg explained. "Pure bullshit."
"There be long word 'disinformation'", Sulik injected.
"But why lie about the location of the Thirteen?" Narg was grieving. "Nobody tried to hide the Twelfth! Neither the Fifteenth!"
"I can't figure out why," Tim replied. "Memories fade with time, but there was never a case of a Vault location being secret. 12th in Barstow, 21st and 34th in Vegas, 92nd, 101st and 112nd in the Capital, 114th in Boston... Heh, I haven't forgot it yet! But I, until your ancestor's visit, was sure that 13th is in Bakersfield, where Broterhood den is now."
"The brotherhood decayed," Narg shared bitterly. "In that Maxxson of theirs, even on the streets—"
"There is... table of other color," Ranma attracted their attention, standing on tip-toes to survey the tabletop of the still raised Overseer seat. "There was a terminal?"
Truly to her word, the tabletop was discolored slightly less at one spot.
"There was, but it's broken," Tim explained pointing at one of the non-working computers in the terminal room. "It was dumb, without a data storage, but its networking chip is fried. We keep it for spares."
"Let's see." Ami walked to that terminal meandering through the crowd to scan it. "Aha!" she exclaimed victoriously, perking up as she turned the massive desktop onto its side as easily as if it was light like a feather. Pulling one of the screws in the bottom out with her two fingers, she turned it with a click then pushed it back in. "A breaker in the power circuit of a holodisk," she explained to the stunned spectators, "concealed in the bottom part of the chassis."
Pleased, Tim hurried to plug the terminal to a wall outlet. Soon it woke to life rustling its holodisk. Glowing boot lines faded in slowly on the screen. Then a password prompt emerged.
Tim immediately turned this into a terminal hacking practice for Ami. Judging by agitation and crowding of all other ghouls around, the chance to observe such skill in use were rare indeed. "Memorize the key sequence," Tim was explaining. "Hold AR2 at boot, when input prompt appears, press F8 without releasing AR2."
"Hmm," Ami did as instructed. "It looks like the usual debugging mode. What is the difference?"
"It starts before the shell," Tim explained. "The password protection is implemented at the shell level. Now memorize the name of the swap file. Have you opened it...? Now the main trick. The authentication subroutine always uses the same virtual memory page. You locate it like this... And voila. It's taking just one screen, filled with garbage and somewhere inside lies the unencrypted password."
Ami frowned as she read words scattered among a mess of random characters.
"I know, I know," Tim agreed. "The hole is just horrible! But there were few in the old world who knew about this. Yours truly was one of the rare privy people. The knowledge itself was considered seditious while distributing it was treated as an act of terrorism."
"Why haven't they just closed it?" Ami asked, disbelief in people being that·irresponsible thick in her voice.
"You'd have to ask the intelligence agencies," Evan croaked as he returned to the room. "Who else benefits from a hole allowing to hack into any terminal? They used it to search for dissentients."
"For industrial espionage too," Tim added.
"Disguising," Akane voiced her opinion.
"Guinea pigs," Ami said incongruously as she tapped the keys.
"Guinean swine?" Akane asked, confused.
"It was his password," Ami explained, her attention on the text scrolling across the screen. "The words denote someone who is experimented upon... Oh my!" She froze staring at the screen in horror.
"What is it?" worried Tim leaned over her shoulder.
"But of cooourse," Evan rasped leaning over her other shoulder. "What else could you expect from these nice people?"
The tribals grew interested too, leaning in turn over the ghouls' shoulders. Ranma squeezed from the side, hanging with one hand on the table and one foot against the wall.
"It's atrocity," Ami mumbled as she browsed through something akin a diary.
"So he ran," Evan noted. "Had he weighed chances sensibly to decide it was safer outside the Vault? Or had he just panicked?"
"Impossible to tell," Tim replied after some delay. "Too careful a bastard, was watching his words even in his diary. I'm more interested in him mentioning 'control' Vaults. If this is not ramblings of a madman..."
"Then most·Vaults are just experiments on humans," Ami finished for him, her voice wavering. "Why...? What for...? I don't want to believe this. It's beyond evil. Just madness... Right, of course! This Overseer was just suffering from mental illness..."
"I ain't proud of bursting your bubble, Missy," Evan croaked, "But it was the whole old world that was suffering from mental illness."
"You are simply blissfully unaware of many historical facts," Tim added. "The pre-war government and corporations were such humanitarians·that I, in all honesty, am glad to live in wasteland inhabited by mutated beasts and raging bigots. It's kinder·this way."
"And his password hints without subtlety," Evan injected.
"What is the matter, will anyone tell me?" Ranma grumbled. 『This diary is practically made of hints and half-words, my English skill isn't that·good!』
『The Vault door was deliberately made not airtight,』 Ami explained. 『People were experimented upon, something about radiation exposure. Like lab rats.』
『I feel sick,』 Akane complained.
"What does 'control' vault mean?" Narg asked. "Were they... controlling the experiment from it?"
"Not at all," Ami hurriedly reassured him. "It's from 'control group', meaning a group of lab rats deliberately left untouched as a sample to compare the test subjects against. Both groups are put in similar conditions to tell the effects of the experiments from all other factors... Like food or temperature, for example."
"In his words, the 8th and the 13th were control vaults," Tim noted. "I'm afraid your quest just grew complicated."
"Yeah," Narg agreed grimly. "Such people wouldn't keep the location of the clean specimen next to test subjects."
"Why?" Akane did not get it.
『In case the test subjects·figure it out,』 the redhead explained. 『And wish to share... the brunt of responsibility.』
Ami combed through the entire Overseer's holodisk, even checked its bad sectors, but she did not find anything more concrete than that one vague mention. "There should be another·grid of shelters," she said with conviction trying to console Narg. "For the experimentalists and their masters. We can... search for it."
"Where would we search for them, no one ever heard of them." Narg just grew more depressed.
"Nobody be knowing before that Vaults be·different kinds," Sulik disagreed. "We be thinking, which is which? And if masters having... Holy gekk."
No one of the girls recognized the last word, it sounded vaguely like 'gecko'.
"But then we'd have to comb through all the Vaults!" Narg cried out. "In lands who knows how far! While some may be not opened yet!"
"Sierra Army Depot," Sulik reminded him.
"There should be computers," Narg though out loud, perking up. "More serious that this one here!"
"We will gut them and find it!" Akane promised fiercely: the dirty machinations of those unknown experimentalists were causing an acute allergic reaction in her. She was itching to find evil, catch evil and punish it good.
"The military could have had the Vaults locations to protect them in the worst case," Ami thought out lout.
"Or not have, to avoid temptation to take them for themselves," Ranma disagred.
"In any case the military bases are our best chance," Narg said, his confidence returning. With the help of Miss Ami it increases greatly. You won't leave us hanging, won't you?"
"Saving people is our calling," Ami admitted modestly.
"Are you kidding?" Akane was indignant. "Our serasenshi·powers were given to us exactly for that!"
It was decided to wrap things up at this optimistic note. However Ami wanted to stay longer in such interesting place, she had to admit that further research was giving diminishing returns. Narg was in a hurry, urged by the hope enkindled anew. Besides, neither water nor food of this place were suitable for any of them as the ghouls had to admit with sadness. They had nothing to do here.
The ghouls were following them in a merry crowd almost stepping on their heels and stinking up the narrow corridors noticeably. Someone was dragging a torch, someone was dragging a Glowing One by their hand in the role of a light source. The concrete caverns enshrouded in darkness weren't feeling like a restless tomb anymore. More likely a merry witches' sabbath at a cemetery.
Tim fell back, then caught up with them almost at the entrance, accompanied by Evan arguing with him.
"..eally?！" Ami caught the tail of their conversation. The weapon-laden ghoul was displeased with something.
"Consider it gut sense," Tim parried. "With such a company and such heritage, how long, do you think, before they stumble into a threat to the very existence of the world? I don't believe such forces gathering together could be mere coincidence."
"All right, but why the 3000th? What they need it for?"
"To help in their epic overcoming at the critical moment, especially... Oh, Miss Ami? We recalled you complaining about your lack of a portable computer. I'm not sure if this could be a replacement at all... But please take it as a gift from all us. PipBoy 3000, Mark Six. "He handed her something akin to a massive, dull green bracer with a small screen protruding on one side among verniers and buttons. "This is the best our world can provide."
The crowd of ghouls hushed, there could be heard awed whispers ranging from 'we were hoarding such a treasure?' to 'who else if not her!'.
"I... I can't accept such gift...!" Ami tried to cocoon up in horror: she realized immediately how rare such thing was if Sulik, in his entire traveling life, only saw one working and one broken. It was an artifact worth an entire town!
"Oh come on! You've already rendered a priceless service to us. Two, if you'd be able to keep that, ahem, charged discovery a secret. Let me." He opened the clasp with a click making the bracer-shaped computer open into two halves on a hinge showing worn fabric of soft padding inside. "It is worn on your left forearm."
The crowd supported him noisily and wholeheartedly even as there were tears of envy visible.
Barely holding back her urge to fidget Ami put the PipBoy on. Designed, it seems, for an average male, it was dangilng on her dainty forearm clad in the white glove of her Super Sailor Mercury uniform. Turning it on on Tim's insistence to make sure it was working, she was too off-balance to even check what's inside, bowing repeatedly and being generally nervous. But the farewells were interrupted.
"I smell blood!" Ranma said in clipped tone when they reached the opening of the narrow tunnel to the right.
"And I gunpowder," Evan added throwing his monstrous shotgun off his shoulder in one smooth motion.
Ranma made to dash in there, but Akane caught her by the scruff of her neck: 『Get used to using one of us as a meat shield, will you,』 she berated her husband. 『Whose magical regeneration is still working, you think?』
"Shabon spray" Ami said drowning the side tunnel in fog. She then explained for Evan: "You are allies, so the fog is half-transparent for you. For enemies it looks impenetrable, neither light nor sound reach further than one... than five feet. Including a torch in the hands of any of you."
"Magic?" he asked peering into the grayish murk. The darkness in that tunnel wasn't complete anymore, the fog was glowing a bit allowing to vaguely see the contours of the walls as darker shadows. "How does it tell friend from foe?"
"I was thinking of you as allies," Ami explained briefly. "It doesn't go further, there is no automatic IFF mechanism or the like."
Ranma, meanwhile, tore free to dive into the fog, indignant Akane on her heels. Ami ran after them. Usagi and the tribals followed her and Evan was limping last, falling behind.
The source of the alarm was found in the cylindrical room at the tunnel crossing. There was some bulky shadow laying unmoving, a dark shape in the luminescent fog. The bristly greenish guardsghoul from the first encounter was sitting closer, on the side shelf of the tunnel. He was busy dressing a bleeding leg wound with a dirty rag.
"It's us, and Evan with us!" Ranma reassured him when he grabbed for his shotgun.
"Have you croaked too?" the ghoul replied incongruously.
"Eeeh," the redhead mumbled, confused.
"Nobody ain't croaked," Evan rasped catching up to them. "That's all that attacked?" He pointed at the dark shadow with his gun's barrel. There was thick smell of blood coming from the unmoving carcass.
"Well, yeah," the wounded confirmed.
"Then I remove the fog," Ami said. In one brief gesture she transformed the surrealistic grayness into common darkness lit only with a torch long ahead. The fog disappeared in just a second.
"Hey, everything is all right but you got a wounded!" Ranma bellowed in the direction they came from, her hands forming a mouthpiece. Because who else? Not Evan, with his raspy voice, for sure.
"Wut? Waddat yer superpower?" the bristly one finally figured it out. "I thought I croaked from blood loss and it was how ghosts see the world..."
"Magic," Ranma explained, wise-faced.
The ghouls stampeded in jostling each other and clogging up the tunnel.
"And you told me to give the boomstick to you," the wounded barbed Mike who was limping hurriedly to administer first aid.
Gaining detail in the light of a torch brought closer, the animal carcass turned to be a bald, wrinkly mole of either red or reddish color. Its incisors were ugly, its opened maw like sharpened tongs wide enough to grasp a man around. The spear was laying broken nearby, the fragile aluminum pipe bent into a pretzel. It wasn't the reason for monster's demise, but rather the broken mess at the back of its head. Brains and other sticky chunks were decorating the ceiling and the back wall of the cylindrical room.
『Was he shooting into its mouth after it had brought him down?』 Ranma mumbled under her breath.
The wounded was soon led away, two supporting him under his arms. Doc went with them.
"Let me stand the watch or something," one of the crowding ghouls suggested picking the double-barreled shotgun up.
"You go get shells from Griz first," Evan berated him. "It's empty...! All right, everyone, com'here! Who ain't needed, shoo. Butchers bring your tools, I'll stand the watch myself while you cut it up. Sort your roles who'll be carrying provision to hang in the sun."
The overall spirits were high, along the lines of 'we'll be feasting soon!'
『Who could've thought, it's really a giant mole,』 Akane said surveying the ugly, wrinkled carcass sporting tufts of hard hairs. The blown out brains weren't making it any prettier.
『I tooold you!』 Usagi whined shuddering at the sight of incisors.
『You said it was the size of a horse,』 Ranma criticized her. 『While in reality it's barely sizes up to a wild boar. It's only a hundred kilos and a half again!』
(シーンブレイク)
Somewhere far, far away, in a black, black room a black, black man cussed trying for umpteenth time to tune up something in an relay rack. The sinusoid on the screen wasn't going to stay still, bouncing and writhing.
"Do I have I again to save your nigger ass?" someone from his back asked.
The Afro-American picking in the electronics started, the back of his head bumping against a pulled out block.
"Fuck you and your jokes! Try it yourself if you're so smart!"
"Stop being all hot and bothered over that," a third voice added from the darkness. "These were taps for Vault 12. It's a bloody miracle they survived up until now!"
(シーンブレイク)
July 24, 2016. Translated August 05, 2016.
Author's notes:
1
She missed the descovery of Roman concrete. It totally wipes the floor with Portland Cement and is cheaper to produce to boot! And the ulcer bactery is an unremovable stain on the medical science. I was lucky to be born in the last part of 20th century, I got cured of gastritis. But how many people died in 20th century from ulcer?
Thanks for C&C to:
— Златовласка Зеленоглазая