Modus Operandi 11

Sarah held her father's hand and watched another explosion blossom in the city below. Smoke curled up from a hundred fires. The sky was black with smog and death. The shouts and screams of hundreds of voices rose into the sky in one maddening plea for mercy. Flashes for light flickered through the streets as the brotherhood soldiers hunted the irradiated civilians, men, women, and children, corralled them, and slaughtered them like rats. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of burnt flesh. Her father, his blonde hair waving in the breeze created by the extreme heat, looked on in approval.

"Our standing orders, Sarah?"

Another quiz. "Prospect, Preserve, Research, and Restorate." Sarah rattled off the four words.

"Their meaning?"

"Find old-world technology, repair it, keep it in good shape, study it, and use it." She said.

"For what purpose?"

"Increasing the strength of the Brotherhood of Steel."

"So that we can…?"

She watched as a small child, no more than seven years old was gunned down by the onslaught of brotherhood soldiers. "So that we can bring back the old world."

"Correct. Tell me of the Chain That Binds."

"The Chain Which Binds-"

"The Chain That Binds." her father corrected gently.

"Daddy!" Sarah moaned.

"Tell me." He insisted.

"The Chain That Binds is the cornerstone of our organization, the rock that supports the great tree of the Brotherhood and its myriad branches. It holds that orders are to flow from on high down through the ranks. An order from a superior must always be obeyed, that their wisdom may be carried out without hesitation."

"And what else?"

"Orders are to observe the flow and not skip ranks."

"And a superior?"

"A superior may only give orders to his direct subordinates, and not to those beneath them. In this way harmony of intent and cohesion of thought is maintained." Sarah finished. Her father reached down and smiled, ruffling her tin blonde hair.

"Well done, Sarah."

She beamed.

They stood upon the top of the building called Haven, overlooking the plaza. Mini-nukes exploded around the edges, creating giant craters. Fences had been constructed blocking all the alleyways. And hiding behind them, brotherhood soldiers, readying gatling lasers, missile launchers, and Fatman mini-nuke launchers. The people flowed from the mouth of the wide street opposite. Owyn Lyons smiled, watching with pride. He had planned it this way, had his daughter help organize it. Used it as a lesson to teach her how to think tactically and plan an operation.

Sarah watched as the civilians flooded into the plaza only to find all their exits blocked. They filled it from edge to edge, packed together.

The sound of heavy armoured feet made Sarah look backwards. Thirty brotherhood soldiers dressed in shining power armour, carrying Nuke Launchers and Missile Launchers stepped up to the edge of the building.

"Ready!" Star Paladin Lyons called. They loaded their weapons. Sarah watched as the civilians below caught sight of the soldiers and attempted to flow back into the mouth of the street, where a line of brotherhood soldiers was waiting to gun them down.

"Aim!" Lyons called. The soldiers on the roof raised their weapons. The people began climbing over one another like rats. In the mouth of the street, the gatling lasers had formed a wall of bodies which grew ever higher.

"Fire!" Lyons ordered.

The mini-nukes rained down upon the crowd, filling the plaza with bright yellow and red. Smoke and dust rose to the second story of the Haven and hung below Sarah; a boiling sea of brown and gray.

"Light'em up!" Lyons ordered. Sarah listened to the instruction being carried down the line. In the alleyways, the brotherhood soldiers armed with gatling lasers stood and began firing into the clouds. The plaza was filled with criss-crossing lasers so thick that Sarah could actually make out the silouettes of people as they were gunned down, their screams carried to the heavens and beyond. There was no way anything in the plaza could have survived.

Sarah glanced up at one of the soldiers standing beside her. He was carrying a rocket launcher, though his finger was off the trigger, and had a look of absolute disgust on his face as he watched the slaughter.

All at once it ended. The smoke cleared, revealing the ocean of blood beneath, unidentifiable bits floating in it.

Lyons turned to the brotherhood soldier beside Sarah. "Well done, Sentinel Ashur. Move on to the steel mill and cleanse it."

The soldier hesitated.

"Is there a problem?" Lyons asked.

He gestured down at the plaza. "Was this absolutely necessary, sir?"

"Prospect, Preserve, Research, and Restorate." Lyons reeled off. "There is nothing in our mandate which mentions the protection of human lives. Our mission is to acquire the technology no matter the human costs. Everyone knows how to make more babies, but a plasma rifle…that's a lost art. Besides, look at this place." He waved his arms at the utter destructionwhich lay beyond the sea of blood. "What was there to save? Now you've been given a direct order. Get it done!"

"Yessir." The man named Ashur saluted and disappeared.

"Rothchild!" Lyons called.

"I'm here."

Sarah's father turned to confront the middle-aged scribe, whose hair was just beginning to show gray streaks. Her father said, "Move in your scribes and collect anything useful. We're moving south in three days' time."

Rothchild nodded and moved away to hand out instructions.

Sarah's father grabbed a soldier at ramdom. "What is your name?"

"Initiate Glade, sir." The man saluted, shouldering a minigun. He could not have been more than twenty years old. His face was covered in filth, and he was villanously unshaven.

"Take my daughter below, would you?" Lyons requested.

The young man looked down at Sarah. She gazed intently back up at him. "Very well, sir." He took her hand. "Come on, squire."

"I'm going to be a knight one day." Sarah told him proudly as he led her off the roof.

"I bet. You can't be more than five years old, though."

"I'm four." Sarah said indignantly.

"A little young to be watching all that…" the knight muttered.

"Why not?" Sarah asked conversationally, "It's what we do. Saving civilians isn't part of the code."


Sarah awoke with a start. Consciousness greeted her with a pounding headache and severe nausea. The resurfaced memories were causing the added discomfort of emotional sickness. How had she ever been able to think like that? How had her father…?

Twenty three years…now she was back…

Damn the Wanderer! Damn hi-

Sarah's inner eye watched the Lone Wanderer vanish behind an enormous mushroom cloud.

He was dead.

It was all too much. There were too many emotions, too fast. She felt as if her head would burst, and half wished it so.

In order to stave off the inevitable confrontation with her own conscience, she tried to bring herself back to the present, and take stock. A bandage had been wrapped around her head. The ceiling above was orange and cracked. The bed she'd been placed on was no more than a wire grid hanging from a rusty frame.

"Glad to see you're awake." A familiar voice said. Sarah recognized it from the distant past. With great effort she turned her head and beheld a face.

A face she had seen not minutes before albeit in one of her earliest memories. It was a face which had changed with age, but was still recognizable through the dust and grime and muck.

Sentinel Ishmael Ashur leaned forward, a smile of pleasure painting his features. "Sarah Lyons…if were not for the dogtags, I would not have recognized you at all. I Can only guess that you never expected me to see them."

His smile disappeared at was replaced with the quiet focused anger of those who have kept a grudge bottled up for decades. He said, "You cannot imagine how hard it has been, waiting for this moment."


Hey, thanks for sticking with it so far.

Okay, so we're just into the double digits, so it's about time for an author interlude.

This story is a compilation of a number of different ideas I've had surrounding the Fallout 3 universe. I've tried my best to stick to the characters and make them act as they would in-game. Whether or not I have succeeded thus far is up to you, and if you have any feedback in that direction (or any other) I would love to hear it.

This is probably one of the darkest chapters in the story so far, but it solves a few problems I had with The Pitt DLC and Ashur's story. It always struck me as odd that Elder Lyons was so willing to help the capital wasteland, yet only a few years before he'd entered the wasteland, he's seen the Pitt, and simply ripped it to shreds. I feel his actions make sense if he is trying to make up for what he did to the Pitt by saving the capital wasteland. Whether it's true or not, it makes his character more interesting to me at least.

I understand that the events in this chapter may make you sympathetic to Ashur, and the Pitt (it certainly did me). And if so, then it means I've done my job right. The Fallout world was always more complex than simple good versus evil, and that is one of the issues I hope to confront over the course of this story.

I know the chapters are short, and I apologize, but it's simply my writing style. I find that a shorter chapter means I can keep up with both speed and quality. Chapters have to be Long, Good, and Fast, but most authors can only do two out of three, and I am no exception.

It also might be going overboard to choose a theme song for one's fanfiction, but I spent much of my time listening to 'Eulogy of a Ghost' by the band Clutch, so I guess that's it.

Anyway, I'll post more author notes occasionally if anything else occurs to me.