Samus strode to her gunship and looked it over as best she could in the middle of a sandstorm at night. It had been covered in dirt and dust, giving it a tan tint. The landing gear raised at her command, lifting the ship's belly two meters above the ground, and lowering a lift. She stepped in and it brought her into the ship, which lowered to its previous height.
The inside was small, with a single cramped cell in the rear for prisoners and two seats for her and a passenger. She sat down in the front seat.
"Computer, begin diagnostics."
Text began to appear on a holographic display in front of her, showing her the status of the assessment.
Scanning ship systems… 12%... 44%... 92%…Done.
Armor integrity at 94%. Remaining repairs are solely to minor systems but will take approximately 40 hours.
Weapons at 72%. Some ventral and dorsal beam turret systems still being repaired, limiting multi-directional fire support to Nova Beam, Wave Beam, Power Beam, Ice Beam, Battlehammer and Volt Driver. Forward cannons are limited to the same beam weaponry until repaired. Nova Beam function of forward cannon is fully functional. Ship missiles and targeting systems are fully functional.
Life support systems at 100%.
Sensors at 56%. AESA radar and passive detection of most wavelengths functional. Sensor range currently limited to 5,000 kilometers.
Engines at 41%. FTL travel currently impossible, and escape velocity cannot be safely attained. Mobility in atmospheric conditions at 90%, Mach 2 attainable.
Utility systems at 80%. Ship Grapple is online.
Overall systems status: 73.8% of optimum.
Well that's good, I suppose. After I secure the Ragnarok's surviving crew, I can have them sit tight. I'll take Hawk with me as a guide to wherever the Sleipnir crashed, do the same there. By then my ship's systems should all function.
"Scan for Galactic Federation distress beacons."
After a few seconds, two popped up within a few kilometers of her. An arrow indicated another one outside of the currently displayed region. The map of the devastated Earth zoomed out, and back in on the east coast of what was once the United States. The hologram added an overlay of what her sensors caught of the devastated Washington DC region before her ship was shot down. Two beacons were displayed there.
Washington DC. Never been there, but it's supposed to be majestic and a great tourist destination. Pictures I've seen certainly look nice.
Looks like the fore went down in the National Mall, and the aft section landed north of DC, near a small town.
Hawk knows the place better than I do, and he probably has connections there he could use to help me out. Those "Brotherhood of Steel" guys sound like they might be helpful, and with their mutual history he'd be able to get help from them for sure.
What is Hawk's deal anyway? He's had it real hard, that's for sure, but he doesn't seem all that bitter about it. The way he cracks jokes and fights for what's right even after all of that's come back to bite him doesn't make sense. He's reckless, overconfident, has somewhat lackluster social skills, seems to hold grudges, bounces between logic and instincts on a whim, and has a shakier moral compass than he'd like to admit.
Well, some of those apply to me too, so I guess he's not that different.
But if he keeps giving his all trying to make the world a better place and getting screwed over, he's going to break eventually. His altruism is just making things worse, because he helps everybody except himself.
Well, I don't mind him tagging along as long as he stays useful and keeps kicking ass.
Samus leaned her head back and drifted off to sleep in her chair.
This was a seedy part of town, so to speak. Really, most of the Korvik's inhabited regions were dense megacities with relatively consistent levels of criminal activity, so it wasn't actually any worse, just poorer. The white-collar criminals lived on the upper strata of the city, and the others on the levels below.
Samus walked across the streets of the mid-city, her orange armor just making her another oddity among the dozens of species roaming the district. She was tracking a regional drug kingpin known as "Mother Maya", who oversaw the production of half the system's sky-sand.
The popular drug combined the properties of opiates and hallucinogens, and could change its chemical properties based on temperature. Below 250 Kelvin, it was an amphetamine, above 300 it was an opiate, and between the two it was a hallucinogen. It was an expensive drug, but the popularity made it a cash cow. A few planets had been settled for the express purpose of producing large amounts of sky-sand.
Bingo.
Mother Maya's personal vessel rested outside an apartment building. She often checked in on her makeshift factories, which were well-guarded. The hazardous task of sorting, refining, packaging, and loading the varieties of sky-sand into transports was accomplished by children.
Some of them were orphans who'd been adopted and then forced into labor, some were sold into the workforce as slaves, some had been kidnapped. They were given three square meals a day, slept on cots, and allowed to bathe every day. It was almost always better than their lives before. Mother Maya would occasionally come by and check up on her workers, treating them for a few hours as she would her own children, more or less conditioning them to be unshakably loyal to her.
She reviewed the bounty information she had as she leaned against a wall across the street, looking as casual as she could. For what it was worth, that seemed to be working.
Target: Maya "Mother Maya" Solesti
Species: Siaran
Gender: Female
Age: Unknown, presumably middle-aged
Wanted: Dead or alive
Crimes cited: Drug trafficking (fifteen counts), slave use (2,000+ counts), slave trafficking (2,000+ counts), kidnapping (143 counts), homicide (12 counts, suspected in 113 more)
Reward: 100,000 cR dead, 80,000 cR alive
Miscellaneous: 10,000 cR deduction for each civilian casualty.
Samus planned out her tactics. She couldn't guarantee perfect accuracy, and there'd definitely be flammable materials inside. Walls would be thin and frail enough that over-penetration was an issue. Collateral damage was to be avoided at all costs. Gas leaks couldn't be ruled out either. That meant no high-temperature weaponry, explosives, ricochet weapons and high-penetration weaponry like the Magmaul, Judicator, Plasma Beam, Nova Beam, Battlehammer and other high-yield weaponry. The Power Beam, Ice Beam, Imperialist, and Volt Driver would work best. She opted for the Volt Driver.
She walked across the street and entered the apartment building. A humanoid thug swung a crowbar at her to little effect. Samus hit him with a left hook and fired a pair of shots into his abdomen point-blank. There was no hiding the distinct "zap" sound the weapon made, so it was logical to assume the other guards were alerted.
After that, she fought her way up a flight of stairs, killing at least a dozen guards before she reached the next floor. Judging from where they came from, Mother Maya was on the second floor. A few more thugs fell before she entered a room where children were huddled around her target.
Samus switched to her Imperialist and shot her in the head, killing her instantly. The children cried and screamed, shaking and hitting her limp body, trying to wake her up. It was no use. They were on their own again in a world that had ignored and neglected them.
The huntress wondered if they would have been better off as Maya's labor force than they would be on their own. The answer seemed to be a disheartening "yes", but that was just one more thing for her to live with.
"Hey, Sleeping Beauty, wake up." Hawk was perched on the front of her ship, knocking on the window.
"I'm up." Samus stood up and walked to the lift in the back of the gunship. It elevated her to the roof of the vessel, where she hopped down. The Galactic Federation Marines and Stray Dogs were all ready to go, so they left.
It was a couple hours of travel before they reached the beginning of what Hawk referred to as the "High Road", an elevated highway fifteen or so meters above the sandblasted ground.
The sandstorm below obscured the fore section of the Ragnarok, which had collapsed a section of the High Road just ahead. The majority of the vessel had landed further on. As the group approached the steep ramp the crash had had inadvertently created, Hawk motioned for them to hold up.
"The sandstorm down there's pretty fierce. I can't see much. Samus, can you make anything out?" He asked loudly, trying to make himself heard over the storm below.
Samus filtered through her visor modes, before settling on her X-Ray Visor. She looked over the area surrounding the wreckage, which was sizable enough to hold the entirety of their party twice over with plenty of room. The size jump from a light frigate – like the one that'd landed on Aether years ago – up to a light destroyer was a drastic one.
"The wreckage is about thirty meters ahead once we reach the ground. The area looks clear, but I can't see inside the ship, so the radiation and environmental shielding must still be intact. I say we move before that changes," She answered.
"Alright then."
Samus rolled down in her Morph Ball while the others simply slid. She beat them down and returned to her normal form. From there, she headed towards the ship until she was seven meters from the hull, the others close behind. Most of the Strays had pulled up khaki-colored cloths over their faces to keep the sand out.
A blue hatch caught Samus' eye, an airlock from the looks of it. She shot it and ran in as it opened. The rest of the group followed her into the airlock, which ended up quite crowded once they were all inside. Fortunately, she was already at the other end of the airlock, which she opened as soon as pressurization was complete.
The inside of the vessel was in rough shape. Bulkheads had mostly sealed off the ship from outside dangers, though sand had still found its way inside. Walls and floor plates were dented inwards from the impact, creating an uneven interior surface. Lighting was irregular, as most of the lights were damaged by the crash, the rest were a mix of emergency lighting and some floodlights manually placed through the hold.
"Man, this place is fucked up," One of the marines muttered.
"You think maybe nobody's home?" A Stray Dog wondered.
"Alright, spread out. Strays should go with marines to avoid misunderstandings, but marines can go without Strays," Samus said. "If something comes up, don't be afraid to call for help over the radio. Hawk, with me."
"Alright, ladies first." The Ranger switched to his shotgun.
The huntress and Hawk headed straight towards the bow, where the bridge and combat information center would be located. The corridor was tilted to the side slightly, making it a bit annoying to traverse. After a short while, they made it to the hatch leading to the CIC. A group of corpses in deep blue jumpsuits littered the room.
"Looks like an argument got out of hand."
Samus scanned the computers nearby, looking for a log of some kind.
"Found something. Putting it on-screen."
A cracked screen flickered to life, with a shoddy framerate and low quality. It was perfectly easy to discern everything onscreen though. It was like a movie from the 1970s with half of the frames missing.
"I hate to say 'I told you so,' Captain. That transport we were escorting seemed hinky from the start of our escort tour," A young man with a Southern accent and an engineer's yellow pauldrons said. "The spooks were doing something on that ship, and keeping it secret doesn't inspire confidence."
"It's not like we had any choice in the matter, Chip," A middle-aged man with brown hair replied. "Do we know what happened?"
"Well, after we got sent through that wormhole with the Sleipnir and entered orbit around this planet, our fuel tanks ruptured."
"We already know that!"
"Yeah, but the Sleipnir experienced the exact same thing at the exact same time, according to our sensors. I can say with complete certainty that our 'accident' was anything but. It was right along the secondary reactor in the middle of the ship. If I was gonna kill an Aesir-class destroyer, that'd be how I'd do it. At least we still have a week of backup power, and most of the systems in this section of the ship."
"You think it was sabotage?" The captain asked.
The engineer chuckled emptily. "I know it was sabotage. Probably had something to do with whatever was going on onboard the Sleipnir. Galactic Federation Security Agency had to clean up after one of their projects."
"Dammit, Chip! Will you take off that tinfoil hat and stop blaming the Federation for this?" A gaunt young tactical officer with a Commonwealth accent shouted.
"It wasn't an accident, and it sure as hell wasn't one of our crew that did it!"
A shouting match ensued until the tac officer broke the back-and-forth.
"Hold on! Sensors are picking up a small starship entering the atmosphere, less than a hundred kilometers away."
"Identification?" The captain asked.
"Custom gunship, a Delta Hunter-class. IFF comes up as a female mercenary currently working for the Galactic Federation… I'd say she's here to find us."
"What's the status of our beacon?"
"Weak sir. I don't think anyone will find us from the air if we don't do something right now."
"Alright. Lieutenant Anthony, what's our weapons status?" The captain inquired of his tactical officer.
"Pulse beam turret is functional. We can probably signal her through the ambient radiation if we fire a charged shot near enough to her sensors to pick up. She could trace the shot back down from there."
"Do it."
The entire bridge went dark for a few moments.
"Oh no."
"What?"
"The magnetic coils must've been misaligned-"
"Lieutenant, what happened?"
"The shot hit her ship, she's going down!"
The situation deteriorated into a heated argument, which soon descended into violence. Samus cut the feed after they started shooting.
There was a long silence after that.
"I guess we know what shot down your ship," Hawk said to break the silence.
"But I can't help wondering what was going on the Sleipnir," Samus said. "There's nothing else on the bridge's databanks."
"We'll probably find more in the back part of this ship. We'll definitely find more information in the Sleipnir."
She nodded. "We'll finish the sweep for survivors here and then head to the aft section. Chances are we'll find the crew, flight logs and visitor logs for this ship in the main datacore."
The title from this chapter and the prior one are taken from an episode of The Twilight Zone. I'm still surprised by the lack of references to that show in Fallout.