A warm shower after a successful operation, it was a tradition that I'd long upheld and there were few things outside of sex that felt as good.
The fact that this was my first shower in 210 years made it all the better.
After I'd sent my message to Lexington, the rest of the operation had gone perfectly. The children, a ten-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl, were scared and cold and filthy. But thank whatever deities remained, they were unharmed. Their mother had gotten lucky as well, apparently the raider that had drawn the lucky straw had been just getting down to his task when Goris stormed into the room like a long clawed hurricane to prevent him from continuing.
To my surprise, they'd known about Goris, he'd been staying in their barn, but was off hunting when the raiders hit. A shit bit of luck that, as Desmond would say. Being on good terms with a nigh invincible post-apocalyptic apex predator, and a bunch of half-wit savages show up the one time he's not there.
In any case, we had gotten them out and, considering that their homestead had been burned to the ground and their husband and father murdered, decided that Sanctuary would be a far better place to exfiltrate to. Preston had managed to make his run to Tenpines Bluff and back by the time I returned to the neighborhood with my refugees in tow. He heard their story and almost fell over himself welcoming them and swearing their protection under the Minutemen.
I dunked my head under the spray, letting it hang their, letting my hair form curtains around my face. Preston liked to play the hero, you didn't have to be an analyst to see that. He probably thought everything we were doing was to rebuild the Minutemen.
Hell, maybe it was. I didn't know the exact details, but from the bits that I'd picked up, they were some kind of militia in the vein of the original colonial minutemen. He didn't seem to have a whole lot of understanding of history, but he had enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm was good, enthusiastic locals were easier to talk into charging headfirst into the gaping maw of a machine gun nest. Mikhail and I had handled force multiplication operations with local militia before, Mexico and Belarus.
I didn't doubt that we could rebuild Preston's group, I didn't doubt that we could decimate these half-brained drug addicts that the Commonwealth called raiders. Quite frankly, we could do the latter without assistance, based on my experience so far.
The problems would come afterwards, assuming we didn't find a more competent group.
We would though, the operatives who took Shaun and killed Nathan hadn't been raiders. They were professionals. They had needed Shaun for something, he was the only one they took. He was the outlier, the first rule of analysis, look for the outliers. They didn't just need an infant, they needed one from Vault 111. And why did they need an infant from Vault 111, why not just one from anywhere in this godforsaken wasteland.
There was only one thing that was immediately apparent, unlike pretty much everyone else since the apocalypse, Shaun had never been exposed to radiation or FEV. They had wanted Shaun and no one else, not Nathan, not the other residents in cryo.
"At least we still have the back-up." The words echoed in my mind, the back-up. He'd been looking at me when he said that, he'd been talking to me.
I was the back-up. If Shaun was the primary, then I was too old for whatever ends they had planned. They wanted his DNA, my DNA, that was the only reason they would want him specifically, that was his only unique trait, they wanted the DNA. That was the only reason they'd want me as a back-up, Shaun was my only child.
But I could make more.
Assuming this, then my survival wasn't a fluke, not an accident, it couldn't be. If I was the back-up, then I was specifically kept alive by them, whoever they were. And if I was kept alive, then by definition, that meant that the other residents of the vault had not been, either through direct action or mere indifference, they were responsible for the other deaths. And If I had been kept alive, and through accident or malice the others had been killed, then that meant Mikhail had been kept alive as well.
But why? The obvious answer to that question was something any thirteen-year-old would know, it took two to make a child. But why kill Nate, he was Shaun's father, if they wanted back-ups, then why not spare both of us? Why not have the ability to create the closest possible thing to an exact duplicate of Shaun possible.
There were two possibilities, either the merc, and I was assuming he was a merc because of how different he was from his companions, he had the look of hired muscle, had killed Nathan without permission, then they saved Mikhail to salvage the situation. That was the likely scenario, the other one was that they considered Mikhail a better match for genetic reasons
There was a logical progression here. For one reason or another, they wanted my son's DNA, it was the only reason they would take him in particular. They left me alive because they needed a back-up plan in case something happened to Shaun, they left Mikhail alive for the same reason.
This was bad for multiple reasons. They were after Shaun, and they knew about me, Nathan, and Mikhail. That meant that they had access to pre-war records, and if they knew enough about our genetic structures to target us, then they had access to more than just Vault-Tec records, they had access to in-depth medical records. They also had the ability to open a sealed vault door, something you needed a pipboy with the proper decryption keys or a password to do. Then there were the high end hazmat suits that the people with the mercenary were wearing, those weren't easy to get a hold of before the war, I can't imagine how difficult they are to get now. And the ability to either save Mikhail and I, or kill everyone else in the vault.
So we had an organization with access to pre-war technology, private pre-war records, vault access codes, the abil1ity and willingness to kill everyone in a vault, and the money to afford mercenaries.
There was one organization I knew of that fit that description…
No, there was no way they survived through nuclear fire and two hundred years of hell.
Besides, based on the terminal entries, the abduction had to have happened a minimum of a year after the bombs fell.
I was missing a piece, there was some piece of information that just wasn't there, why had they wanted my child's DNA? What did they need it for? And who were they in the first place? If I could find any of this out, then the rest would just fall into place.
But first I needed to find the man who'd killed Nathan, he'd be able to answer my questions, or at least put me on the right track.
The water ran cold, shocking me out of my analysis and making me realize just how long I'd been in here. I twisted the knob, letting the stream trickle to a stop. Pulling the curtain aside, I stepped out and grabbed the towel off the toilet. My hands looked like prunes, I'd been in there far longer than I'd meant to be.
Still, at least it wasn't a waste of water, I'd gone over the schematics of the vault. The water just flowed down the drain to be purified and reused.
I stepped out into the bedroom of the late Vault 111 overseer. I'd commandeered it for myself, no one else had wanted it. Asher had offered to help me move a bed from the vault, like the others had done, but I'd declined.
I couldn't sleep in my old bedroom, I hadn't tried, but I knew I couldn't. Sleeping in our old bedroom, in our ruined old house, as if nothing had changed, it felt like a mockery of Nathan, of our marriage.
I'd had Codsworth and Asher help move stuff from my bunker into the vault. Nothing massive, just some clothes, some of my books, and a fresh set of sheets for the bed. Well, as fresh as two-hundred-year-old sheets can be. In terms of things I'd done at one in the morning, moving boxes that didn't contain nuclear material was certainly one of the least exciting.
Still, I was grateful for the sweatpants and CIT hoodie to change into, and even more grateful for the 83, 293 now I guess, year old highland single malt.
After a single glass, I tried throwing myself into sleep.
Instead of the amorphous liquid realm of slumber, I ended up hitting a brick wall of insomnia, each brick made of those thoughts that you avoid like the devil in the waking world.
Who was I kidding? I slept here because that house wasn't my home, it had never been my home. Nate had been the one who wanted to move to the suburbs, I'd been perfectly happy in the city. And if I slept there, I'd have to deal with the grief of losing Nate.
Or, far worse, the lack thereof.
It wasn't that I didn't feel terrible about Nathan dying, I did. It wasn't that I didn't have a slow burning flame of hatred in my stomach, demanding vengeance, I did. But it was that familiar old veil that fell on my shoulders, the sadness at the loss of a comrade, a close friend, a brother in arms, and the resolve to avenge him. I felt that, but that's not the way he'd want me to mourn him.
I knew the kind of sadness he'd want me to feel, the shard of ice cold despair piercing my heart, spreading through my gut, and threatening to tear me apart, the kind of sadness that never went away. I'd felt that already, for Ming, and she was the only person I'd ever feel that way for.
There it was, that underlying crack that ran throughout our entire marriage. That sham of a thing we pretended was real, that we pretended wasn't the result of a night when I'd been drunk, stupid, and weak.
I didn't know who to blame more, me for stumbling to his door that night, half drunk, drowning in despair, and desperate for the comfort of human touch. Or him for letting me in, for taking me to his bed, and pretending that it was more than a moment of weakness. Pretending that he could ever take Ming's place.
That night had made Shaun, Shaun…
I didn't know what to do about that, I never had. I'd considered getting rid of the child so many times during the pregnancy. When Karen suggested I take maternity leave, when Nathan proposed, when we'd moved out to the suburbs, when Nathan had been called up for the Anchorage offensive. I'd collapsed in tears the first time I'd visited Ming afterwards, hanging on her hospital bed and begging her unconscious form for forgiveness. I don't know what kept me from going through with it.
There was a gap in me, in my soul. It had formed when they abducted Shaun and it wouldn't be fixed until I had learned his fate, until I had rescued him or, failing that, wrought my vengeance upon his kidnappers.
Still, a tiny part of my mind wondered whether it was really Shaun that I wanted, or if it was just that missing piece that would solve the entire puzzle.
These thoughts bounced around my head as I forced myself to sleep, woke, and forced myself back. After about four hours of this, I gave up. Checking my pipboy, I saw that it was only six, two hours before anyone would be up to do anything. Or at least, that was how it worked before the war, I had no idea how the schedules of post-apocalyptic settlers worked. I was assuming that circadian rhythm was still in effect.
In any case, trying for more sleep was a lost cause, I crawled out of bed, pulled on a pair of socks and shoes, and went out into the office. The former overseer's skeleton no longer sat behind the desk, the shelves were back upright, and the detritus spread across the floor had been swept away. With nothing better to do, I decided to try and catch up on my political philosophy, if one wanted to build a nation, the best way to do it was by using the shoulders of giants as your stepping stones.
Thankfully, Nate had never gotten around to building a proper bookshelf for the doorstoppers I had kept from law school. If he had, they wouldn't have survived in the bunker. I started where all modern philosophy starts, with the ancient Greeks, more specifically Plato. I'm afraid the world as it stood was no more the Kallipolis now than it was when Socrates first imagined it. Capital only reminded me that Marx must have been grinning smugly in his grave, having been proven right. Hobbes's points never seemed more relevant. Eventually I fell back on my personal favorite, Machiavelli, Il Principe.
If we were going to stabilize the wasteland, democracy was out of the question for the immediate future. A single leader with little to no accountability wasn't something that I usually advocated, but this wasn't the time for a slow moving bureaucracy, or representatives jockeying for power and pushing regional interests. We needed centralized leadership that could make decisions as needed and respond to crises as they arose. Mikhail could handle all of that, I've never been one for inspirational speeches.
The passage talking about the purging of one's political enemies brought me back to Marcy Long. She was a destabilizing factor, an agitator. A big part of me thought that I should arrange an accident for her now, before a conflict could arise and her sudden death would arouse suspicion. Still, it was too much of a risk, if anything went wrong, all of the others from Preston's group would raise hell.
There was a knock on the door, pulling me from my political ruminations. "Come in."
The door slid open and in stepped the strangest sight I'd seen since waking up from cryo. A robed deathclaw with his hood down, and a tiny set of spectacles perched on its… snout? I didn't know what to call it and it seemed rude to ask.
I stood up as he entered, "What can I do for you Goris?"
Goris waved a claw dismissively, "Please, don't get up on my account. I merely seek peace and good conversation."
I sat back down and grabbed the bottle of scotch from last night, or this morning, whatever it was. I poured myself a fresh glass. I held up the bottle, "I can't promise either, but would you like a glass?"
I had no idea if these things even drank, I had no real idea of anything about them really. The level of incongruity between Goris and the beast I had encountered in Concord was too immense to be comprehended. Still, it was polite.
"Yes, thank you." He took a few steps forward and sat down on his haunches. I dug another glass out of the desk and poured us each a finger.
I took a sip, enjoying the rich vanilla taste. "Goris, tell me about your… I don't mean to say it like this, but, your kind? I killed a member of your species in Concord, and in comparison to you…"
Goris picked the glass up between his thumb claw and forefinger claw and brought it to his toothy maw, taking a small drink. "You're wondering if we are all intelligent." I nodded, "That is a complex question, if you're wondering if you could have talked them down, then the answer is no. The majority of my brethren lack the… social skills that myself and my pack have."
"Pack? Are there more like you?" if there were more like Goris, I needed to get them on my side. These things were, quite simply, the deadliest thing I'd ever encountered. They were like organic tanks, all the armor of a Hannibal MBT, all the grace and flexibility of a tiger.
The look on his face wiped any ideas I had about the force multiplication potential. I hadn't thought such a beastly face capable of projecting such profound sadness. "No," his voice was quiet, and his next words were barely audible. "Not anymore."
That could only mean one thing, my hand went unconsciously to my collar. "I'm sorry."
He took another sip of his drink, "Thank you," his voice still quiet. Then he shook his head, as if trying to shake himself out of a dark memory. When he spoke again, his voice was normal. "But to answer your question, it depends on which definition intelligence you subscribe to. In terms of animal intelligence, hunting, killing, social structuring, etcetera, they are extremely intelligent. Most of my species have some human cognitive ability, the human named Piaget would probably describe them as being in the sensorimotor stage. Some progress further than that, and there are groups in the Midwest that have matched my pack in intelligence, though I believe them to be a different species entirely. But as far as I can tell, only my pack are the only true deathclaws capable of abstract thought and reason."
They were widespread enough to have a subspecies, and most of them were unintelligent animals out to kill whoever their instincts told them to kill. Perfect, "Don't take this as offensive please, but I'm surprised you're familiar with Piaget."
"The vault my pack made its home in was stocked with a large amount of human literature, something to which I am infinitely grateful for. And I've made a habit of procuring any information I can in my travels." He was from a vault, interesting.
"So, pardon my bluntness, your species was the result of another of Vault-Tec's little experiments?" I gestured to our surroundings. "So is my continued survival for the past 210 years."
He took another long drink and closed his eyes. "The vault was our home, but we did not come from the vault. I cannot tell you exactly how our species began, though I assume we are the result of contamination by the Forced Evolutionary Virus, deliberate or accidental, as most of the creatures of the wasteland are. My pack in particular was captured and genetically modified by a group claiming to descend from the pre-war government…"
No, no, it couldn't be them, those idiotic plans couldn't have worked. They had to be dead, of all the people who died in nuclear fire, how could those most deserving of horrible and painful deaths survive. "The Enclave?"
Please say no, please say no, please, please, please, for the love of what little in this world is sacred, say no.
His eyes opened and he blinked in surprise, "Yes, how did you…"
"Damn it!" I slammed my fist on the desk hard enough to make the glasses rattle. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I dropped my head to the desk. Taking a deep breath, I slowly calmed my fury into a simmering hatred, then pulled myself back up, looking Goris in the eyes. "They are not descendants of the pre-war government, if they are who they claim they are, they are descendants of a small cabal of bought senators, CEOs, corrupt high ranking military officers, and the vice president who used their positions of power and various pawns to further their own interests."
"You…" Goris spoke slowly, like he was choosing his words as carefully as possible. "Have had dealings with them then?"
For some reason, a mad laugh burbled up out of my throat. "You could say that." I downed the rest of my drink and poured myself another two fingers. "They killed my mother, they broke the love of my life, and they nearly destroyed the organization to which I dedicated my life." I sat back in my chair, sighing, "Yeah, you could say I've had dealings."
His head dipped, "You have my sympathies, if it helps, I understand your pain. They wiped out my pack, and desecrated my home."
I fixed him with a hard gaze, "Thank you, but I don't need your sympathies, I need your information. You're going to tell me anything you know about them, particularly current members and locations. Even if they are just taking an old name they found in some pre-war database, that organization will not be allowed to exist."
At that, he bared his teeth. For a second I thought my demand had pissed him off. Then I realized it.
He was grinning. "I'm afraid you're too late for that. Myself and a few friends broke into their headquarters on an oil rig, and we destroyed it with nuclear fire. The NCR, I'm sorry, New California Republic, cleared them out of the west coast. And from what I understand the division in Washington D.C. was destroyed by the Brotherhood of Steel."
His answer left me with a lot more questions, but at least those idiots were taken care of. "I've got quite a few questions for you, if you don't mind?"
Goris nodded, "I'll happily answer them, but if I may, I have a question for you first."
I didn't like that, one answer for many usually meant the one question was personal. Still, I needed information. "Sure, name it."
"The raider, the one you allowed to escape. You terrified him, purposefully I believe, but then you let him go, why?" he cocked his head to the side quizzically.
Not nearly as personal as I was expecting. "Force multiplication, if it worked, he'll be running straight to Lexington to tell a, no doubt exaggerated, story about a technological demon wiping out his crew. The fact that I mentioned their leader by name and referenced this 'Sight' that he's obsessed with, makes it more likely they'll take him seriously, and if they believe that it's only their leader this strange new enemy is after, they might begin to splinter. Best case scenario, they fracture and start killing themselves, worst case scenario, the raider is hiding in a hole somewhere praying he never sees me again." I went to take another sip, but stopped myself, a good scotch is to be savored after all. "it's a no lose situation."
Goris made a gravelly throat clearing noise that I assumed was the deathclaw version of "Hmm. And what about the melodramatic part about the Reaper?"
Ah, that was one of my favorite parts. "Psychological warfare, melodramatic though it may be. The second you can qualify something; it becomes less terrifying. Once you know something is flesh and blood, you know you can kill it. Something unknown, something that sparks imagination, and lets your primal fears run wild. That's what brings true terror."
Goris's eyes looked at me a little too perceptively for my liking. "But you enjoyed it, correct?"
That gave me pause, but I answered honestly, "Yeah, I enjoy reminding ingrates like that what a real monster looks like."
Goris gave me an interesting look, then raised his glass, out of etiquette, I mirrored him.
"To monsters."
I grinned.
"To monsters."
…
Okay guys, last one for this week, I should probably stop saying this because they're all expositiony, but yeah, this one is expositiony to. I wanted to demonstrate an analysts perspective of the early game situations. I tried to look at the situation solely based on the information available to a first time player at this point in the game, but considering I'm on my seventh or eighth playthrough, my outsider knowledge might have bled through. Does anyone think the logic I presented is faulty, if so feel free to tell me so I can rework it.
I do think that the ending leaves a bit to be desired, I was kind of petering out at that point and just trying to write myself through to an ending. What do you guys think?
Also how do you like Goris, he's an interesting character to write for.
In case you can't tell, I yearn for feedback, my liberal arts mind needs stimulation other than this bloody math course.
Either way R&R people.
