Hello everyone, hope you are doing well and that coronavirus is not making you too worry. Perfect time to stay at home and play video games, watch TV and writing/reading Fallout stories. Please enjoy this chapter.
The boiler room was a veritable maze of corridors. Damian had felt like he had been walking for hours and he probably would have been lost long ago if Sally had not been a great guide to him. The little girl known the way through the ship extremely well, as she had explained it to Damian and Somah. She would point him in the right direction and warn him about the alien patrols. In the vents where she was, she could access the electrical panels on some of the doors and thus allow Damian to hide from larger groups of aliens.
The heat in the boiler room was, not surprisingly, stifling. Damian wiped the sweat from his forehead and face. He had never been so hot, even when the air conditioning system in the Vault had broken down on his 17th birthday. In addition to the alien patrols, he had to avoid the steam from certain pipes. He also had to move forward slightly bent over. These corridors weren't meant for humans to wander freely, but for aliens, who were smaller.
He heard Sally's voice warning him of a group of aliens. Damian stood in the recess of a closed door and observed between two steam pipes a group of seven aliens a little further away. The aliens were at a fork in the corridor and it seemed that they were not willing to move.
"It looks like they're standing guard," Sally whispered. "And that's the only way to continue to the engine room. I'm sorry, but I can't help you."
Damian continued to observe the aliens for a few moments when a thought popped into his head. He aimed his rifle and placed one of the pipes on the wall in his sight. He pulled the trigger and the 5.56 cartridge went into the pipe on the wall, releasing a thick stream of burning steam that enveloped three of the aliens. The aliens squealed and whistled in pain. One of the aliens cut off the steam by turning a crank. The three aliens were dead and the remaining four were looking for the source of the fire. Damian eliminated the four aliens and after waiting a brief moment to make sure all were dead, he left his cover and continued to move forward.
"You're so strong," said Sally with admiration. "Like Captain Cosmos."
Damian couldn't help smiling. He walked past the bodies of the aliens and crouched down next to one of them. His skin and clothes were covered with burns from the steam, and the alien was holding what looked like a long gray gun in his hand. The barrel was made in one piece and ended in a sort of funnel, and there were bands of blue light on the top of the gun. Damian picked up the gun. It was very light but not made to be handled by a human being.
He heard a squeak beside him and dropped the alien rifle and pointed his assault rifle at the noise. Right next to him was a small control room and lying underneath a control console, an alien was huddled up. His head was buried under one of his arms while the other was raised towards Damian.
"No, don't shoot!"
Damian looked up briefly at the pipe were Sally's voice was coming.
"These aliens won't hurt you. They're harmless."
The alien was trembling. Damian had time to observe it. Until now, he hadn't had a good look at the aliens' physical appearance, except for their large heads and small limbs with hands ending in three suction cup tentacles. Their heads were devoid of ears and noses. Instead, small slits where the nostrils and ears should be. Likewise, they had no lips or teeth and their tongue was the same shade of green as their skin. Their eyes were round and completely black and it was impossible to know exactly which direction they were looking in.
Generally speaking, the aliens looked a lot like the ones in the pre-war comic books or science-fiction movies Damian had seen in the Vault. This alien there, wearing a red suit and black boots, looked at Damian trembling, protecting his face behind his arms.
"Leave them alone," Sally said insistently.
Damian lowered his rifle and the alien's face showed what Damian interpreted as surprise and relief. Damian walked away. After a few meters he arrived in another room, a very large one. Huge pipes ran from the floor up to the ceiling and then in different directions and disappeared into the walls. Damian walked through it, inspecting every nook and cranny, on the lookout.
The boiler room seemed to be endless. There were always alien patrols and it was getting harder and harder to avoid them. Damian noticed that some of them, were wrapped in what looked like a shiny veil making their bodies seemed to be distorted. The aliens were also accompanied by large brown robots, floating a few centimeters off the ground. Their base and body were triangular, and their heads, oriented perpendicular to the rest, were oval. They had a single yellow eye and were equipped with two long mechanical arms ending in a clamp.
"It sounds like they're really mad at us," says Sally. "It's the first time I've seen these robots and they're scary."
At the corner of a corridor, Damian heard Sally's voice informing him that she would have to take another path.
"Why?" Damian whispered, raising his head to the pipes above his head.
"The pipe goes to the right and the corridor goes straight on. If you continue that way, you should come to large rooms with lots of pipes and at the end there will be the engine room."
Damian kept going and arrived in a small control room. There were two doors in front of him and a corridor to the left. The corridor led to a staircase and then to another door. Damian opened the door and found himself face to face with one of those big brown robots. The machine grabbed Damian with its claws and started to lift him off the floor and tighten its claws. Damian managed to free his hand. He hit the robot's eye with his fist and the machine let go of him and moved backwards.
The young man picked up his assault rifle and fired several rounds into the robot's head. The shots attracted all the aliens in the area. Damian could hear the soles of their boots sliding on the metal floor. He got ready, taking cover against a console. The aliens came through a small door and Damian pulled the trigger on his gun and emptied his magazine in their direction.
He reloaded and jumped out of his cover. All the aliens were dead and lying on the ground. Damian let out a sigh and looked around. The room was just as Sally had described it. Large pipes meandered through the middle and small alcoves led to smaller control rooms.
Damian continued through the maze of corridors and control rooms. The surrounding heat coupled with having to avoid alien discharges and being constantly on the lookout was becoming truly unbearable.
After passing through another room filled with steam pipes and descending a staircase, Damian heard a little scream and felt something fall on him.
"Ouch..."
Sally moaned as she massaged her lower back. She lowered her head and startled. She had fallen out of the vent pipe and had landed right on Damian. The young man was lying on his stomach and was growling.
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Damian!"
"Don't worry," Damian growled.
Sally stepped aside to let Damian get up.
"Where are we now?" Damian asked, rubbing the back of his head that had hit the ground.
"We shouldn't be too far from the engine room anymore. It's at the end of this corridor. But we have to be careful. Last time there were those weird cannons in the ceiling."
Damian looked down the corridor.
"Okay, stay here, I'll go and make sure it's safe."
"Wait, Mr. Damian."
Sally reached into her jacket pocket and gave Damian a small fluorescent blue bottle.
"What's that?" Damian asked, taking the bottle and twisting it between her fingers.
"It's a gel that aliens use for their wounds. It heals almost instantly, but you have to be careful. Last time, it gave me a headache. This is for you."
Damian uncorked the bottle. He poured some of the contents onto his index finger. A viscous, sticky liquid of a bright blue color. The thing was cold to the touch and smelled quite strong. He put the rest of the bottle in one of his saddlebags. If this substance could heal him, then he could save the small stock of Stimpaks he had with him for later, although he suspected that the gel might have side effects on non-external organisms, other than a headache.
The corridor led to a walkway that overlooked a set of pipes that ran in all directions. At the end of the walkway, Damian saw a doorway, marked by a hologram, a three-dimensional hexagon, crossed from top to bottom by four parallel lines and surrounded by circles of varying sizes. On the ceiling near the door, Damian noticed a turret. Its design was much the same as those he had encountered in the metro on Earth.
The turret turned towards him and Damian hid behind a pipe. The turret stood still for a moment before returning to its original position. Damian got down on one knee, aimed his weapon and fired. Sparks flew out of the turret and it fell slightly from the ceiling, revealing a set of electrical cables.
The way was clear, and Damian called Sally so she could join him and they entered the engine room.
The door led to a staircase and then to a small hallway where two doors faced each other. Sally walked past Damian and went down the right-hand door. He arrived in a small observation room with a second staircase on his left. In front of him was a large bay window and on the other side, Space.
Damian approached the window, fascinated. A black layer covered everything and on top of it, millions of small dots of varying degrees of light. On the right, Damian saw the sun which looked so different from how it looked from Earth.
"Come, follow me," said Sally, who had already climbed the stairs.
Damian took his eyes off the glass window and joined her. The upstairs must have been a storage room for the aliens, judging by the large number of chairs, tables, boxes and strange objects that piled up in the corners. Sally was standing in front of a metal ring in the floor. A small semi-circular railing surrounded the base and next to it was a control console.
Sally pressed several buttons, excitedly. She frowned and pressed the buttons again.
"Something wrong?" Damian asked.
"They cut it off. I wanted to show you the top of the ship, but it's impossible if it's off."
"What is it?"
"It's like an elevator, except it doesn't just go up and down. And then it tingles when you use it. There's the same thing in Captain Cosmos. He uses it to teleport himself and Jangles."
They heard the door on the floor below them whistle and Damian pointed his gun at the staircase. Somah climbed the stairs and stopped when she saw Damian and Sally.
"You made it," Damian said as he lowered his rifle.
"Yes, I wanted to follow you, but the little bastards cut me off several times. I heard a few shots in the boiler room and I headed towards the shooting, thinking it was you and I got here. I'm glad you're safe, too."
She approached them and looked around.
"What is this place?"
"This is an observation deck," Sally answered, visibly proud to know something that the adults did not know. "The aliens also use it to stock material. There's weird stuff in some of these crates, but there's also stuff from Earth and lots of Buttercup toys."
The little girl seemed disappointed that she couldn't use the teleporter. Suddenly her face lit up with a broad smile and she began to run to another room.
"Sally, where are you going?" asked Somah.
"Come on! I know another way to get to the top of the ship!"
Damian and Somah exchanged intrigued glances and followed the little girl. She led them into a huge room. In the center, a gigantic glass sphere, containing a pipe several centimeters in diameter, surrounded by metal, slowly turning on itself.
"What's that thing?" Somah asked, looking at the machine.
"I think it's the heart of the ship. The main power source that runs everything," explained the little girl.
"Then we have an advantage over them," Somah smiled. "As long as we occupy this place, we have the right of life and death on their ship."
"Yes, but if we destroy the power core, we risk blowing up everything and ourselves with it," Damian objected. "And I doubt that we'll be able to repel them, just by the two of us. On the other hand, if the place is so important, they'll try to dislodge us without risking destroying everything."
As Damian started to mumble to himself about how to organize a defensive position, they walked by the slowly buzzing energy core. Damian had always found Vault-Tec's technology to be the pinnacle of perfection, especially after what he had seen in the Capital Wasteland, but compared to alien technologies, Vault 101 was relegated to the status of a Stone Age cavern.
Sally led them through the great hall to a much smaller room. It was colder there, and Damian noticed the same kind of white mist he had seen near the cell generator. In the middle of the room was a large console with what looked like a pump, letting out this white mist. Four pods with blue glass were facing each other.
Damian approached and saw that inside there was a man.
"What the hell is that? said Somah in a stunned voice.
Damian looked over his shoulder and saw that the woman was standing in front of another of these pods. Inside was another man, wearing a strange black suit and a helmet. The man facing Damian had a small moustache and a goatee. He was wearing a cowboy outfit. At first, Damian thought it was a Regulator, but it held, seemed... Genuine. He and the man in the strange armor had frost on their face and clothes, as if they were frozen.
"It's cool, isn't it?" Sally exclaimed.
She placed herself in the middle of the room.
"This one looks like a cowboy, like in the books and this one behind is even cooler, he looks like he's wearing some kind of armor. But the coolest is this one."
Sally walked to the pod next to Damian. Inside, Damian recognized the suit of an astronaut.
"Who are these people Sally?" Somah asked.
"I don't know... I know that aliens have lots of boxes like those ones and when they put people in them, it's very cold and they fall asleep for a long time."
"Cryonics," Damian whispered.
"Yeah, that's the word!" cried Sally. "I saw my daddy read a newspaper about it once."
Sally's face saddened. Damian easily guessed what fate the aliens had befallen him and the little girl's mother.
"But, how is this going to help us get upstairs?" asked Damian.
"Well, thanks to the astronaut."
Sally looked at Damian, surprised he didn't understand.
"If we're going to escape the ship, we're going to have to go out into Space and we're going to need him and his spacesuit. Since the elevators don't work anymore, we're going to need the astronaut's suit."
Damian wasn't convinced but he didn't have much choice. Sally knew the ship better than he did and if he wanted to return to Earth one day, he was going to have to trust her.
"Okay, Sally, let's wake these people up and go talk to that astronaut."
The little girl gave him a big smile that Damian couldn't help but smile back. One by one, Damian activated the cryo-chambers.
The first to be released was the man in black armor. He staggered out of the pod and looked around. He was of Asian descent and Damian finally remembered where he had seen that armor. The man looked at Damian and Somah and was startled.
"Nani? Onushi wa nanimono? Koko wa dokoda?"
"Ah great, he doesn't speak our language," Somah sighed.
The man spoke again but no one understood what he was saying.
"It won't be easy to communicate with him," Damian whispered. "He's a Japanese samurai and I don't think he speaks or understands English."
"Maybe we should put it back in the fridge? That way he won't have to bother us with his gibberish," said Somah.
The man spoke in a tone that suggested he was upset. Damian tried to calm him down by raising his hands.
"Calm down, we won't hurt you."
The man looked at Damian, his face impassive. Damian put his hand to his chest and said his name. He did it again, feeling deeply stupid and feeling that he was offending his interlocutor more than anything else. The man, his face still expressionless, finally uttered a word that Damian interpreted as his name.
"Toshiro... Well, we'll try to cooperate as best as we can," Damian said with a smile.
The man was always impassive. He walked away, leaving Damian alone.
"Nice to meet you too," said the young man to himself.
Damian walked towards Somah who was helping to break out a second captive. The latter, a man, had blond hair falling on his shoulders. He wore white battle armor and gray fatigues. Looking at him, Damian recognized the US Army winter uniform from the Battle of Anchorage.
"Private Tercorian," read Damian on the breastplate of the soldier's armor.
The man looked around and when he saw Damian, Somah and Toshiro, he began to panic.
"Huh? What's the hell? Who are you?"
"Calm down, you..."
Damian didn't have time to finish his sentence when the man cut him off.
"I remember, the aliens, the interrogations..."
He looked at Damian and Somah before continuing.
"Private Elliott Tercorien, US Army medic, serial number 3477809. I'm not telling you aliens anything."
"Do we really look like aliens to you?" Somah asked. "Looks like pre-war army medics weren't that great."
"What makes me think you're not human-looking aliens or that they're controlling your mind?" asked the soldier.
"Elliott, do you really think we'd have gotten you out of your cryogenic tank if we were aliens?"
The soldier seemed pensive for a few moments.
"I... I guess not," he said, he was unconvinced.
"Well, why don't you go sit over there and cool off a little bit."
Somah helped him walk and sat in a chair. Damian looked for Toshiro and saw him on his knees, fists clenched and eyes closed in a corner of the room. He turned to another pod and saw Sally standing in front of it.
"I can't wait to have a conversation with this astronaut. I wonder what time he is from and if he knows Captain Cosmos.
"Let's ask him for help first," said Damian.
The cryo-chamber opened slowly and the astronaut collapsed on himself. Damian knelt beside him and took off his helmet. Inside was a skeleton. Sally let out a little scream, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. Somah, who had just finished getting the cowboy out of his pod, joined Damian.
"Well, it looks like our friend had a freezer breakdown," she said bitterly.
"Poor astronaut," sighed Sally.
She looked at Damian, then at the spacesuit then to Damian again.
"What?" asked Damian who did not like the look of the young girl.
"You're going to have to take his suit and get out yourself."
"Huh?"
Damian dropped the skeleton and looked at Sally and Somah.
"Wait, Sally, I've never been to space, it must be very complicated and..."
"It's the only way we can get the hell out of here, and I don't see one of them doing it."
Somah pointed to the three men sitting behind them.
"For me, that's also out of the question. This suit is much too small for me," Somah added.
Damian looked at them again. He sighed and nodded.
"Well, it looks like I don't have much choice. Do you really trust me on this?"
"We're stuck here until further notice, so yes. Besides, you seem like a decent guy, you're not going to abandon us, and you don't want to die here until you see our beloved Wasteland again.
"You're as strong as Captain Cosmos, Mr. Damian. You're the only one who can do it, but it's going to be complicated."
Damian sighed. He ran his hand through his hair. These people trusted him, and their successful escape and survival depended on him.
"We should fortify this place first, so they don't come and dislodge us with laser guns, and I suggest we rest for a while. These people probably need to get their heads together and get over their cryo-sleep and doing anything in this condition won't help.
Somah nodded. Damian got up and they helped Eliot, the samurai and the cowboy walk to the observation deck, wondering if they would ever be able to leave this place and go back to Earth alive.
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed and until next time.
