Chapter 16: Those of Iron and Mutation

House panted after me, exhausted as all hell, he hollered to me only a few steps ahead of him. His movement capabilities had atrophied slightly after all.

"Goddammit do we have to walk so fast?" I slowed down and took a deep breath. I had been fighting exhaustion for a few miles now. I had forgotten what it was like to walk the Mojave, to have to survive out in the wilderness. It was nice being back out in the desert though, the heat and the sand entering through my body like a age old friend. The mountains of the desert haven't changed, none of it had. I scaled the ridge ahead of me and sat at the top looking down at the one of the largest landmarks to survive the war; from the cinder-block walls that crept along the canyon's walls, to the water gushing out of the hydroelectric turbines. There she was, Hoover Dam. Securitrons, Rangers, and all other walks of life patrolled the great monument to humanity's need for power. In a single moment I had lost myself in the beauty of it. We were just one small ridge away from our destination point. Peace in the Mojave had been achieved, even at the cost of the hundreds of men inside the walls of New Vegas. It was ironic when you thought about it, people had predicted that New Vegas and the Lucky 38 would stand the test of time while the world decayed around it, and then the city of New Vegas sacrificed itself not for her own good, but for the good of her child, the Mojave.

I felt a light tapping on my shoulder and then the person behind me spoke,

"Welcome back to the desert commander." I turned around to see a Ranger behind me; I had forgotten how good they were at their jobs. The ranger took in a deep breath and took off the helmet, and I was amazed at who stood before me, it was that punk newbie from back at camp McCarran; Ten of Spades. I chuckled a little bit and looked at him and asked,

"You? Ha ha You? You became a veteran ranger out here 10? I tell you that's just a bombshell, I was almost positive you got killed at Hoover Dam years ago. But, no you proved me wrong in the strongest way, you survived and became a ranger. Not bad, 10 of spades."

He looked at me like I had told a joke, and said, "I'm not Ten of Spades anymore, I'm the Ace of spades. Got my eyes fixed in the hub by a doctor, real old man. Called himself Elijah. Used some prewar machine, just put a few little trinkets inside it and it gave him the equipment to do it. After that, my sniper skills just kept getting better and better."

My look of reminiscence and nostalgia quickly turned into one of fear and confusion. Elijah? After all these years? How did he survive, more importantly how did he escape? His last words to me were that he knew he wouldn't survive in the vault, and that he did what he had to, this world would have flourished again under his leadership. He regretted nothing and he was left with nothing. It couldn't be Elijah, must be an imposter. I took a quick glance at my Pip-Boy 3000 to see if I could pick up any radio signals, and I had two. I flicked on the first, and it was just normal local radio chatter, Mr. New Vegas reporting on the destruction of the New Vegas strip and how he was out a home and a fridge full of food. When I changed over to the other signal, I heard the Sierra Madre, and it's welcoming words. The memories of the hell I was trapped in for the 3 weeks that felt like 3 years. The pitch red skies, the collapsing buildings surrounding me, and worst of all, the feeling that at any moment, my head could explode on a whim of an insane old man. And then, something clicked. Ten of Spades was from Shady Sands, not the Hub.

I spun around to see his head hanging downwards. He spoke again in a robotic voice, "You are too late, Courier. Elijah has indeed escaped. The mysterious man from the east has indeed assisted in that. The man of the east has conquered and mastered the ghosts that haunt the Sierra Madre, both those living, and holographic. You've made a dangerous enemy this day."

Ten of spades turned to face me and his face began to fall apart on the ground in front of him. The drone walked forward to me, and then walked past me, and fell off the cliff. I looked down into the small valley and saw The form it had originally was gone, the machine now looked more like a robotic soldier, very archaic in design, but looked like it had some serious power. The robot's machinery began to expand, he started off at my size, and by the time he had stopped, he was the size OF the mountain.

I quickly equipped my rifle and started to shoot at the robot, albeit doing very little damage. The machine tried to grab me, it large hands slow but powerful. I took a time bomb I had made at the vertibird site, turned the timer on and right as it took another sweeping blow at me, I leapt onto it's hand, climbed the limb as fast as I could and tossed it into the machinery. The bomb's explosive yield knocked me off the arm and the arm off the robot. The arm made an enormous crash as it landed in the valley below.

The machine stood there for a minute, and suddenly, my pip boy system was frenzied. It wouldn't respond, I couldn't apply any medicine and it kept giving off this high pitch screech like a deathclaw screaming bloody murder. After a minute it stopped, and I looked up at the giant geared machine and saw the machine's heavy iron plate armor falling away from it. It revealed this immaculately cleaned steel, each part of the machine covered in data transmitters. I looked on with awe until it fired a large caliber missile at me, and I realized there were several dozen following close behind. House finally got up the ledge and was about to step out into a missile's fire when I barked at him,

"Stay down, House! Big robot, large missiles!" As I leapt out of a trio of missiles' firing paths. I saw House duck for cover and figured he'd be fine. Alas, I wasn't paying attention for two seconds and I got the tail end of one of the missiles. I was knocked to the ground in excruciating pain. I stuck a stimpak in my arm, and while it helped, I realized that only a miracle was going to save me this time. That's when he appeared. Right as a missile was about to collide with me, a man jumped in front of me and he took the missile directly like it was nothing. The man was a very tall, lean man, wearing a fancy suit like House, but wore a strange mask with a bird beak and circular eyes. He unscrewed the top of a cane he had and inside was a small longsword emitting electricity. He leapt up and struck all the incoming missiles, cutting each in half and then moving at amazing speeds to the next, and when he reached the giant robot, he disappeared for a second and then reappeared in front of the machine's one red eye. He impaled the eye with great force and the machine from there collapsed like it was made out of twigs. He reappeared over top of me and gave me a hand up. He said nothing at first, and instead just slid down the hill towards the damaged remains of the machine. I slid down after him to thank him.

"Um...excuse me sir! How can I ever repay you for saving my life just now? Please I must thank you!" I felt like a little kid standing next to a superhero in comparison to this guy, who took a large caliber missile right to the back for me.

He turned around and held up a large square piece of the robot, it was very complex and had several memory storage devices. He spoke in a deep voice, "If you want to help, you can help me scavenge all of these drivers from the golem, each of these is crucial to retrieve."

"Can I ask why you're only salvaging the drivers, I personally would salvage the missile systems on these things?"

"You think to use the technology against the people of the NCR and Legion because they are your enemies, whilst we seek to find a way to destroy these machines and their leader because they are ours. Personally you happen to be very lucky the golem didn't go stage 3 on you, otherwise it would have New Orleans or Central Park all over again."

"Wait, did you say 'we', as in there are more of you? And stage 3 what? New Orleans and Central Park, where is that and what happened? And what do you keep calling this damn machine? A golem?" He didn't answer, and instead cut open the main torso of the machine with his blade, pried it open, and pointed to it. I walked forward and saw what stage three would have been. There was 3 medium thermonuclear devices in his body surrounded by a elaborate circuit with small missile silos disconnecting the circuit in 7 different places. Had the missiles been fired the circuit would have been completed and would've wiped out the entire surrounding area, including the dam.

"So...how many of these machines are there? And why do you call them golems?"

"Before the war, a golem used to be a superstitious stone monster brought to life by a sacred word inscribed on their heads by sorcerers. We call them golems because they are pre-war machinery that is reactivated by a command word. If you speak that word to the machine, it is your servant, and will carry out your will until its demise. Before the war, the machines were going to be used as a undercover operation to wreck China by getting the golems in during stage one, and then have them go stage two and three once they reached the mainland. The machines were plentiful in numbers, but they vary in size significantly, as so far we've only encountered 3 golems. However, the mysterious man of the East who the machine told you of before he changed, has a massive complex probably filled with countless schematics and resources for constructing them. As for the organization I belong to, I am a group of extremely well trained soldiers from before the war, and some of us long before the war."

"So you belong to a ghoul only group of super soldiers?" The man's head tilted sideways and he laughed.

"Oh no my boy, we have for many different reasons, and very few among our ranks are ghouls surprisingly. For example, me, I am over 450 years old, but my body operates like a twenty year old, I was alive during the civil war my friend. My friend was a chemist, working every day to find a way to strengthen the confederate soldiers, and one day, he found it. A chemical combination that permitted cells regeneration rate to skyrocket to such a point that one could regrow limbs destroyed by cannon fire."

"Unfortunately, his small lab was in Richmond and was burned to the ground in the union siege. He probably was killed in the fire, but his formula and the math used to make it were preserved in a safe. I used his gift to keep myself alive until the time was right to reveal his research to the world. Alas, when that time came, I was too late to do any good. The U.S. Government scoffed at me and claimed I was insane for having been alive at that point over 250 years. Twenty three days later, the world was engulfed in flames."

"Hang on a second. You said the man you knew probably died?"

"I dug through the ruins of Richmond for 15 years looking for his remains, I never found them. I still search through the ruins of the world, looking for even for a trace of the professor."

"So how did you survive the war then?"

"Truth be told, I ain't got a damn idea. As the bombs were falling, I fled to the capitol building. One detonated right in front of the capitol building and screwed up my face right much. The city was on fire for weeks. Brought back memories of Richmond."

"So what did you do from there?"

"Easy, I continued on my dear friends quest. My friend had a dream to find and preserve all the world's culture from the dawn of humanity forward, so that the future would know its origins. So after around six months, I left the country to find survivors in other countries, hoping to preserve old world culture for the remains of society. As bad as things were here, they were worse elsewhere. I found few signs of life in Europe, other than the occasional band of raiders. I once saw a group of raiders trying to break into the ruins of the Vatican, and I gunned them down with a hunting rifle from my boat. Word of the slaughter reached a significant group of survivors in Venice, and upon traveling there, I was granted a gift for preserving the Vatican. They gave me a mask, and titled me the gondolier. I thanked them and asked them to carry on my mission to preserve the past. I returned twenty years later, found out they had reclaimed the Vatican and most of Italy. As I was entering the venetian port from the south, a man beckoned me to the docks. He was in his thirties, and wore drifter clothes similar to those I had worn on my first trip. I asked who he was, and he said he was a gondolite, one of the people to encounter me on my first trip. He told me he remembered the first time I landed on these shores, and how I had given them, a group of devout Catholics, hope. I was taken to the elder of the tribe, and he gave me a single gift, this cane in my hand, and told me that they could handle themselves from here. To this day, I still haven't gone back, simply because I trusted that elder. By the time I had returned home, other pre-war militants were emerging from the ashes. We banded together as the crap-shoots of society, and disappeared into the sand, only to reawaken when the past needed to be put back in it's place."

"So then, I take it when these golem things are all dealt with, you'll leave again into the desert."

"Not quite, the man of the east, Robert Lee, must be dealt with, a very unpleasant task."

"Why?" I looked puzzled at how one man could be such an obstacle for such a well trained army.

"Ummm, how do I put this, the son-of-a-bitch would be harder to kill than if some crossed genes from Joshua Graham and the legendary deathclaw."

I stuttered around trying to find a proper response to that, just barely managing to blurt out "Dear lord!" I saw House slide down the hill, and I went over to him and repeated the stories and he walked over to the masked man and asked him,

"Sir, I must ask, what is the name of this chemist you used to know?" House had a look of great interest and anticipation waiting on the man's answer.

"If you must know the man's name is Doctor Alexander Matthiason."

House chuckled a little and smiled, "I have good news for you, Alex is alive, and he's even on the way to deal with Lee. His residing facility is in the mountains west of D.C."

"Are you sure?" I couldn't see his face, but I could see a glint in his eyes that he was amazed and excited.

"Alex helped me to develop the stasis chamber I was in for 2 centuries, I made sure he had a way to survive. He was a great man. Good sense of humor."

"Yep, that's Alex alright."

I had to step in and ruin the moment unfortunately, "Now hold up just one second, before we do anything in regards to moving eastward, we need to deal with the issue of Elijah so those damn machines don't run rampant over the Mojave over the next few months."

They both sighed, annoyed but they knew I was right. The man gave us a map of directions to the Sierra Madre, said he would meet us there once we left Hoover Dam with supplies.