Cocooned inside her power armour and leaving Far Harbor flanked on either side by both her Brotherhood of Steel soldiers and her Children of Atom disciples, Rachel had initially found it all too easy to occasionally think this course of action she was taking would somehow be much more straightforward than she had first thought.

She didn't think that now.

Just a short distance away from the outer edges of Far Harbor itself they had lost their first soldier: Brother Thomas, a young Child of Atom who had been unfortunate enough to step on a buried plasma mine. His right leg had been reduced to a scarlet cloud of liquidised meat and bone in an instant as he was thrown backwards several feet, before colliding so heavily with the side of a tree stump that several of his ribs audibly turned to splinters. Knight Vasquez, the Brotherhood field medic Rachel had assigned to her strike team, had immediately rushed to the boy's side, clearly hoping to at least stabilise his condition until he could be properly treated back in Far Harbor, but the dying boy batted him away with weak, desperate fingers. He had reached toward Rachel with an outstretched hand and whispered "Emissary… bless… me", before he had slumped backwards in a lifeless heap. A wet, pitiful gurgle had been the final sound that came from his throat.

Vasquez hadn't even had time to get his medical kit out. Rachel had heard him muttering vivid curse words through her helmet's comm system as he drove his suit's armoured hand into the ground in frustration.

Rushing to the boy's side and positioning herself forcefully in between the devastated Vasquez and the boy's body, Sister Emily had begun sketching uneven atomic symbols on his slack features with the piece of charcoal she had had stowed in a pocket of her robes, before she turned and motioned for Rachel to come and join her by his side. She looked up at her Emissary with pleading eyes.

"Bless him, Emissary," she begged. "He hasn't received Atom's sacrament yet. Bless him. Please."

Triggering her armour's release mechanism, Rachel exited her metal shell and knelt by the boy's corpse, placing her gloved hand on his pallid forehead. "Atom be with you, brother," she said softly, tears blurring her vision for a moment. "Walk in His light until we see each other again." She bent down further so that she was able to close his unseeing eyes and plant a brief, gentle kiss between them, and then pushed herself to a standing position again. Wiping her wet cheeks with the back of one hand, she pointed at the two knights who were closest to her. "You two, sweep the area for mines as best you can. Let's try to avoid any more surprises, shall we?" When the knights had moved off to carry out their orders, Rachel looked down at the still-kneeling form of Sister Emily, who was quietly reciting verses of her scriptures over her dead fellow believer, and gently placed her hand on the girl's shoulder. "Be strong, sister," she said softly. "He's with Atom now."

"I know," Sister Emily whispered, her head down and her words punctuated by sobs. "It's just… I didn't think Tektus would tell his followers to do something like this."

Rachel took a deep breath and helped Sister Emily to her feet before she tentatively enfolded the younger woman in her arms and pressed the shorter woman's shaven head to her shoulder. She felt a swell of relief when her hug was returned, however weakly. "I'm sorry, sweetheart," she said in a soft tone, "but it's pretty clear Tektus just wants to kill his enemies now – and when you left that submarine base, you became the enemy. All we can do now is stick to the plan and hope we get to our objective before we lose anyone else." She helped the younger woman to her feet and then gestured towards Brother Thomas's mutilated corpse. "Form a burial detail for him. I'll say a few words before we move on, I promise."

She watched Sister Emily walk off towards a group of Atom's chosen in order to recruit them for her assigned task, her head held as high as she could manage, and couldn't help but feel an involuntary swell of pride that the young, naive girl she had first met at the dock of Far Harbor was continuing to prove herself a capable leader who people would actually listen to without question. She never would have expected that after seeing her being so mercilessly humbled by the old preacher in the Last Plank.

"Hey, Blue," came Piper's voice from behind her. "How you holding up?"

Turning on her heel to face her fiancee, Rachel shrugged. "I've been better. I should have expected some kind of counter-attack."

"Come on, Blue, don't go down that road," Piper told her firmly. "You couldn't have known Tektus would go this low."

Rachel snorted in disgust. "I should have. Nate would have thought to do some more recon before leaving Far Harbor, especially when the enemy has to know we're coming." She closed her eyes for a moment as she rubbed the bridge of her nose between finger and thumb. "I wish he was here now, you know? I could definitely use the insight."

"Blue," Piper said, her tone becoming unusually stern. "Blue, look at me." She waited a moment before Rachel met her gaze, and then continued "You remember back at the Nucleus, when you told me you needed me to be strong for you? Well, this is me asking you to be strong for me. Don't you dare doubt yourself, you hear me? These people need you to lead them. I need you to lead them. Don't let me down." She stepped back a couple of paces, snapped crisply to attention and thumped her closed fist against her chest. "Ad victoriam, Sentinel."

That made Rachel smile, just a little. She returned the salute, her mood lifted at least a couple of notches – small notches, to be sure, but notches nonetheless. "Ad victoriam, civilian," she said. "Have I told you I love you today?"

Piper closed the gap between the two of them again and delicately pressed her lips to Rachel's for a moment. "Not nearly enough, soldier." She shifted herself inside Rachel's embrace a little more, her hand tracing Rachel's jaw, making Rachel lean into the touch ever so slightly. "Promise me you'll take what I said seriously, okay?"

"I promise," Rachel murmured in Piper's ear before she disengaged herself from her fiancee's arms and re-entered her armour, the suit's interlocking plates hissing contentedly as their environmental seals clicked back into place. Through her helmet's speakers she said "I'm going to go park this somewhere safe before I help make sure that grave is dug quickly." She owed Brother Thomas that much, at least.

"Knight Rhys, take point. Paladin Brandis, bring up the rear. Everyone else, keep your guns up and stay alert."

Those had been Rachel's first orders when her makeshift little army had finally moved away from the Far Harbor stockade. She had led her disciples and soldiers carefully past Beaver Creek Lanes, threading them southwards towards the Old Pond House at the southernmost tip of the island's main inland body of water. She had hoped that that would be far enough away from Acadia that her knights wouldn't raise any concerns about the synths still living there, but those hopes were dashed when Knight Rhys suddenly stopped in his tracks, balled his left hand up in a fist and held it up to indicate everyone should stop, before he began slapping his armoured palm against the side of his helmet. It was almost as if something had crawled in through one of its interface ports and taken up residence in his ear.

"Is there a problem, knight?" she'd asked as she moved up beside him.

"No, ma'am," he replied, before he banged his gauntlet against his helmet again, a frustrated grunt clawing its way out of his helmet's vocaliser. "Yes. Maybe."

"Be specific, knight," Rachel told him. "I don't need speculation, I need facts. What is it you can hear?"

Rhys tapped his temple. "I don't know exactly what it is, ma'am, but I think I can make out voices over my helmet's radio. I can't tell what they're saying, not word for word, but those are definitely voices."

Damn it, DiMA, not now, Rachel thought, frustrated, as random, indistinct scraps of words started to filter sporadically through her own helmet's audio systems. The crazy old robot must have been broadcasting radio signals again. Perhaps he was trying to recruit more synth refugees to Acadia, or perhaps he was trying specifically to get into contact with Kasumi Nakano again, but the radio waves he was creating were more of a danger now than they had ever been when Kasumi had been duped into visiting his refuge. "It's most likely nothing, knight," she lied. "Old automated distress signals bounce around this fog like pinballs all the time. Don't concern yourself with them. We have more important things to worry about right now than ghosts in the mist."

"But ma'am –"

"Are you questioning my orders, knight?" Rachel snarled, the corner of her mouth creasing upwards into an annoyed grimace under her helmet's faceplate as she rounded on Rhys and jabbed her finger right into the centre of his torso armour. "I said not to concern yourself with them. That wasn't a suggestion. Drop this, now. Is that understood?"

"I –" Rhys began, before he caught himself mid-sentence and said "Yes, ma'am."

"Good," Rachel said, before she grasped his suit's shoulder pauldron. "Look, soldier, if you feel those signals really need investigation, submit a report to me the next time we're on the Prydwen. I'll take it to Elder Maxson or Proctor Quinlan and we can decide how to proceed from there." She wasn't naive enough to expect he would actually let the matter go entirely – Rhys was Rhys, after all – but perhaps she could lay a few tripwires to hinder him for a while. She took a small degree of solace in the fact that it was unlikely that either Quinlan or Maxson would deem random voices in a remote island's fog to be worthy of further investigation, but also made a mental note to contact DiMA and warn him to stop sending out radio signals for a while just in case. As much as she despised that ragged bucket of bolts for his repeated duplicity and casual manipulation, the synths in his dubious care certainly didn't deserve to be culled thanks to an error in judgement.

Just another thing to worry about, she thought. Wonderful.

The Nucleus was close, just over the next hill. Rachel could see the foul green vapours that the base continuously belched out rising in plumes across the sky, and glowing radioactive markers had been hammered into the ground by the Children of Atom in order to indicate their ownership of the base. For a moment, even through her Sentinel-pattern battle-plate, Rachel thought she could feel pulses of atomic energy coming off the layers of sickly green paint on the intricately-carved stones, but she instead put it down to the apprehension she felt at leading such a tenuously-cohesive force into an unknown situation. Had she been leading one or the other by themselves she would have felt much more secure, but the two groups were driven by such disparate ideologies that she didn't know if she could keep them together under fire. She felt a shiver sparking down her spine at the notion of her soldiers breaking ranks, and was tempted to remove her helmet and wipe her face clean but she knew it was too much of a risk at this point – for all she knew, Tektus could have positioned snipers around the base ready to pick off any attackers, and she didn't want to tempt fate any more than she had already. Her suit's internal ventilation systems would have to suffice for now.

She sighed, and then motioned for Paladin Brandis and Zealots Ware and Theil to join her at the top of the hill.

"So how do you want to play this, Sentinel?" Brandis asked in his usual leathery, battle-hardened tone. "A full-frontal assault against a fortified position like that would be suicide."

"Yes, it would," Rachel began, "which is why we're not going to do it. Ware and Theil, you know the terrain around here better than me, so I need you and half of your men to circle around and find an insertion point behind that firing line. Lay down some suppressing fire on any sentries if you can, but don't put yourselves or your men at risk more than you have to. Brandis, while the Children are distracted, I want you and three other heavy-weapons knights to advance from the side. With the high ground you might be able to pick off a few more of the guards out front. They might have set those DIY ghouls loose by now, so keep your eyes open and your guns up, and make sure to ask Vasquez for some stimpaks before you move out, just in case. The rest of your knights and my disciples are with Piper, Sister Emily and me. We'll cause a distraction from the left – a few grenades should do it – and then thin them out from maximum safe distance. Hopefully we can scatter them long enough to breach the entrance. Are we good to go?"

"Yes, Sentinel," Brandis said. "We'll get it done."

"Agreed," Ware echoed. "We won't let you down, Emissary."

"Good," Rachel said, taking a deep breath. "Ad victoriam, in Atom's name. Move out."

Here goes nothing…