Hello everyone, hope you are doing well and that you are enjoying the story so far.
Good reading.
The sun was rising on the horizon when Damian and his companions, accompanied by the three children of Little Lamplight, arrived at the caves. They had rested for a few hours before leaving for Vault 87 and the caves. On the way, the three children had talked a lot with Hood, and Penny seemed to have become Dogmeat's new best friend.
MacCready had arrived at the gates of Little Lamplight and greeted them with an aggressive look, visibly ready to send them a torrent of insults like the last time. His face had calmed for a moment before he took a more serious look when he saw Sammy, Squirrel, and Penny walking alongside the adults.
"All right you can enter. But I'm keeping an eye on you," he spat.
Damian had heard a generator start up and the metal panel blocking access to the rest of the cave had lifted, pulled by cables.
Lanterns and braziers had been installed to provide light throughout the cave.
Sammy, Squirrel and Penny thanked Damian and the others again before joining MacCready. Damian noted that MacCready seemed relieved to see his friends again, even though he tried to keep his tough guy look on his face.
No sooner had they entered that a very strange scene unfolded before their eyes. A teenager was standing in the middle of a group of children, wearing a birthday hat. After wishing him his birthday, the children asked the teenager in unison to leave the cave.
Damian glanced towards Cross and the others, but they were already standing further away, in front of a series of wooden signs. After a last glance at the teenager, who was obviously trying to extend his stay here, Damian joined the others.
"We don't have time to dealwith their stories anymore," Cross said authoritatively. "We have to locate an access to Vault 87."
"Well, I don't think they indicated it here," said Berry while reading the signs.
The signs pointed the way to the different places in the cave. A souvenir shop, a clinic, a school and a "Great Chamber".
"Hey, MacCready!"
Damian had just stopped the young boy coming down from the barricade. The young boy rolled his eyes and sighed before moving towards them.
"What now, mungo?" the boy spat.
"Vault 87, I mean, that bunker next to the caves. You said we could access it from Little Lamplight, right?"
"Yeah, I did."
"Well… Can you give us directions?" Damian asked.
MacCready seemed preoccupied. He looked briefly at the four adults before speaking.
"It's dangerous there, even for mungos. That's where the monsters live."
"The monsters? What kind of monsters?" Berry asked.
"The big ones, ugly and yellow. The ones that look like people but are all wrong."
Berry exchanged glances with the others. The outside of Vault 87 was guarded by the Super Mutants, but it seemed that they had also taken up residence inside and in part of the caves.
"How do we get to the Vault?" Damian asked again.
"You have to go through Murder Pass. It's dangerous, but it's the only way that works."
"What do you mean, 'the only that works'?" asked Berry.
"Well, there's another door to get to this Vault," MacCready explained. "But the computer's broken and it's been like that since before I was here. Even Joseph can't fix it."
"And, do you know where we can find this Joseph?" Damian asked.
"Do I look like a nanny to you?" MacCready said, returning to his usual insolent tone. "I don't know where he is. Near the door or in the Great Chamber, I don't know. If you want to see him, go ahead, but if you fuck up, I'll put a hole in you."
MacCready walked away grumbling.
"And that's why I hate children," said Berry.
The Lamplight caves were a huge place. A multitude of corridors, casings and large halls, probably stretching for several kilometers underground. Many passages had collapsed, and the children had somehow arranged the rest. They had converted the old huts for souvenirs shop or catering into a shop, clinic or school.
In one large room, the children had set up tables and benches and a wooden counter to turn the place into a canteen.
Damian was first fascinated by the way the children transformed the cave and built a hanging city with pontoons and walkways around a large stone pillar. Then he was struck by the fact that there weren't many children. He had counted only about ten, maybe fifteen, at the most. There were no adults living at Little Lamplight and the children seemed to have a real aversion to them.
"How do they keep their population so... Young? There are no adults here and..." Hood asked.
"Focus on the mission scribe Hood," Cross said.
The young scribe fell silent and continued to move forward. This was also a question that bothered Damian, but he had already planned to answer it later. They had set out to find the one called Joseph. The task was made difficult by the incredible size of the place, but also by the fact that the children were not very cooperative. Any attempt to communicate resulted in insults or the child would run away.
After a while, a child approached them. An African American, wearing a baseball jacket and torn cloth pants, he looked older than the other residents of Little Lamplight.
"I heard you were looking for me," said the boy.
"Is that you, Joseph?" Cross asked.
The boy nodded before continuing.
"Yes. First, I wanted to thank you for saving our friends from the Paradise Falls mungos. Thanks to you, my little sister, Penny, is safe."
Damian and the others smiled and nodded slightly.
"MacCready said you were asking around for me. That you want to go into that Vault?"
"Yes. We were told you knew how to do it," Hood said.
"Well, I know there's access to the Vault, but the computer controlling the door is locked, so I turned it off."
"Could you turn it back on for us?" Hood asked. "I'm pretty familiar with the Vault-Tec computers so I think I can help you."
"Yeah, sure. Just follow me."
Joseph led them through the Great Chamber of Little Lamplight, with its little wooden huts hanging around the stone pillar in the center of the cavity. They arrived in another section of the cave. An overturned wire fence lay on the floor, next to a wooden sign with the Vault-Tec logo, indicating to turn back. In a corner, a steel structure appeared in the darkness.
The structure was rusted and would eventually collapse. The staircase leading inside creaked under their weight. Inside, an old generator, typical of Vault-Tec fallout shelters, occupied the center of the structure. A steel door, stamped with the number "87", next to a terminal, allowed entry into the Vault.
Joseph approached the computer and turned it on. The dust-covered device hummed and the screen emitted a small green light.
"I don't think you'll be able to unlock it, or what you're going to use it for, but it's on," Joseph said.
"Thank you, Joseph," smiled Hood.
The boy left the steel structure and returned to the cave. Hood approached the computer and dusted off on the screen where a security message was displayed. She carefully read it and hummed.
"What's going on?" Cross asked.
Hood looked at her and the others, a slightly confused look on her face. Damian noticed that she did not seem sure about what to answer.
"It looks like the whole Vault is in lockdown for… Whatever reason. But the security of this Vault is far from standard."
"What do you mean?" Cross asked.
"Well, the level of encryption and locking on the terminal we have at the Citadel was high, same for the computer I hacked in Vernon Square. But… The security level on this computer is… Demented."
The Brotherhood members turned to Damian.
"An idea about why this security level is so high?" asked Cross.
"Well," said Damian after a brief silence. "They were supposed to get a G.E.C.K. in here, so I assume that's why the place is extremely secured. That's the only reason I see. Vault 101 had some high security protocol in their terminals and maintenance department, but nothing out of the ordinary. But as Vault 101 pariah, I was not told about everything."
Cross nodded before turning to Hood.
"Do your best," she said.
An hour had passed since they were at the door and that Hood was trying to hack and unlock the terminal. The young scribe was typing on the keyboard attached to the terminal, whispering to herself. Damian had sat against the cold metal wall.
He stared at the door with the number "87" and tried to imagine what he could find inside. The question that came up, and that Cross and the others must have asked themselves, was why the Super Mutants had moved into this Vault.
"Damn it!"
Hood uttered a curse that brought Damian back to reality. The young scribe raised her hands in the air and blew between her teeth in anger.
"What's going on?" asked Berry.
"The computer's gone into lockdown."
"What does that mean?" asked the Knight.
"It means I can't get anything out of it anymore. Vault-Tec's security protocols are very advanced, but here... Even the Citadel terminals were less secure.
Cross approached the gate and inspected it thoroughly.
"Can we open this door any other way?" she asked, turning to Damian.
"Without a control box, impossible," Damian said, shaking his head.
"We could blow the door," said Berry as he got up. "But if the Vault is swarming with Frankensteins, then destroying that door would condemn those children in the caves."
Cross folded and unfolded her fingers in the metal gauntlets of her power-armor.
"That boy, the one with the helmet and the rifle. He talked about another way into the Vault. Looks like it's the only other alternative we have left."
Berry and Hood nodded. Damian followed them as they went after MacCready. They found him in the room that had been converted into a canteen. Sitting on a bench petting one of the many dogs that lived with the children in the caves, his face took an annoyed expression as he saw the adults approaching.
"What now?" he spat, as insolent as usual.
"The door to the Vault doesn't work, but you said something about another way to get there," Cross said.
"Murder Pass. It's dangerous, even I avoid it."
"We have to go, it's very important," said Damian.
"Hey, if you want to die mungo, that's your problem," said MacCready.
The young boy put his helmet back on his head and got up, reluctantly, before going down a hallway, Damian and the others following him.
A large metal barricade blocked access to a portion of the cave. Two children stood guard, looking nervous. Damian recognized Sammy, and a little girl in a pink dress with a ribbon in her red hair. She glanced at Damian and the members of the Brotherhood with a haughty look and gave a murderous look at MacCready.
MacCready did not seem bothered by it and looked at the two children for a few second and looked over his shoulder towards Damian and the others.
"Open the door," he said.
Sammy and the little girl looked at each other for a moment before activating two levers. A counterweight, made of a large stone in a net of ropes, came down, and a thick metal panel rose, revealing a gut sinking deeper into the ground.
"Thank you," Damian said, turning to MacCready.
The boy just grumbled something. Cross checked her laser pistol and grabbed her huge sledgehammer on her back. Out of the corner of his eye, Damian saw Hood shudder. Berry also seemed a little uncomfortable. He had the feeling that the Knight must envy Cross, who was wearing a power armor, while he was wearing a simple outfit, making him look like a mercenary or an inhabitant of the Wasteland.
Damian took one last look at the barricade. The look in the eyes of MacCready and the children made him shudder. He felt as if the children were watching a group of convicts going to the gallows with no hope of escape.
The group entered and heard the barricade close behind them.
After a few yards, the hose widened a little and they arrived at a crossing to the right where sandbags had been piled up. Dogmeat, who was walking alongside Damian, began to growl.
Cross waved to Berry. The latter nodded and silently approached the crossing. He glanced into the tunnel and, while looking inside, made several hand gestures to Cross.
"What's going on?" Damian whispered.
"Super Mutants. Two of them. Heavily armed," Cross translated.
Damian saw Berry set his laser rifle to maximum power. Cross grabbed her laser pistol and approached Berry. They exchanged glances and, like one man, they stood up from behind their shelter and opened fire. A shout told Damian that one of the mutants had just been hit. He advanced towards the sandbags.
The body of the Super Mutant laid on a small wooden bridge suspended over a hollow in the rock. On the other side, another Mutant was trying to hide from the heavy fire it was taking. Damian heard a scream, then silence. He looked over the sandbag wall.
The two mutants were dead, their skin around the laser hits burned off. Below the bridge was another part of the cave, a small wooden structure on stilts. Part of it had collapsed and in the rocky ground, the Super Mutants had installed their strange decorative metal piles.
On the other side of the bridge, an opening, leading to a tunnel out of sight of the small group, and a series of wooden planks and panels, led to the cave below.
"Hood, you stay back with Franklin. Berry, you follow me," said the Star Paladin Cross.
She stepped out onto the bridge. Her heavy power armor making the damaged wooden planks creak and Damian could hear the ropes stretching under the tension.
"RPG!"
A whistle reached Damian's ears and then a loud bang. A heat trail passed right by Cross. Shards of stones flew from the cave wall and Damian felt his whole body vibrate. The bridge swayed and the Star Paladin fell heavily from the bridge.
Berry fired several shots at the wooden structure. Out of the corner of his eye, Damian saw Cross, standing up, her power armor having absorbed the shock of the fall. He raised his weapon and lined up his shots with those of the Knight. The wooden panels that served as walls to the stilted huts shattered and small pieces fell to the ground.
Cross rushed in the huts and climbed in, using the wooden panels serving as staircases. Berry and Damian stopped shooting. The next moment a huge yellow mass went through one of the walls and crashed down, leaving a thick trail of blood and viscera in its wake.
"Let's go," Berry said after reloading his rifle.
He rushed to the bridge, followed by Damian and the young scribe.
The tunnel on the other side of the bridge was a dead end. The huts seemed to have been there for a long time. The few pieces of furniture present were overturned or destroyed. On mattresses on the floor, or wedged under a shelf, small skeletons, human. Damian realized with horror that they were children skeletons and that many of their bones were broken or crushed. The little corpses watched them walk through their old homes, with their empty orbits.
Cross stood at the entrance of another tunnel. She was taking fire from a small group of Super Mutants. Damian noticed a black viscous liquid escaping from the top of her huge metal club. On the left, a cavity, reinforced by sandbags, where a mutant was taking cover. At the end of the tunnel, two more of these abominations were shooting at the Star Paladin.
A bullet ricocheted off the shoulder pad of her power armor and lodged in the ceiling, dropping small pieces of stone. The shooting lasted only a few moments. The Super Mutant's weapon in the cavity jammed and he left his cover, charging the small group of humans to engage hand-to-hand combat. Caught between the imprecise fire of his fellow mutants and the coordinated laser discharges of the Knight and Cross, he was hit in several places and fell to the ground in a final gurgling sound.
The other two mutants joined him a few seconds later when Damian touched the grenade that one of the monsters was about to throw.
"If they keep using explosives, they'll bury us alive," Berry said, dusting off his jacket and putting a new microfusion cell in his weapon.
They advanced in the cave for several minutes. The place where the mutant had taken shelter earlier was actually a tunnel, leading deeper underground. Cross, enclosed in her imposing power armor, had in places difficulty to walk and her shoulders or elbows scraped the stone walls.
After a few minutes, Damian illuminated large steel pylons with his Pip-Boy light. The tunnel divided in two. The left part ended in a dead end and was for some unknown reason protected by a booby-trap, the front part of a brahmin attached to a chain and connected to a trigger wire.
The second tunnel opened onto a large room. A broken fence, had been installed there, probably to delimit the part of the caves allowed to tourists from the one reserved for Vault-Tec.
"Looks like we found the Vault," said Berry.
They crossed the fence when the sound of a wire breaking resounded, followed by that of a small metal object falling to the ground. The next moment, an explosion shook the ground.
Damian opened his eyes. Dogmeat was above him and licked his face cheerfully. He stood up coughing and spat out the dust he had in his mouth. His ears were buzzing, and every part of his body seemed to have been trampled on. He looked around and saw a leg a next to him. The limb was severed at the tibia. The buzzing stopped and he looked around. Cross got up with difficulty. Part of her armor was damaged and showed signs of shrapnel impact. Hood was crouching near Berry.
Lying a few meters from Damian, the Knight was staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open. His chest was torn open and his lower body mutilated. His left leg was missing, torn off at the tibia and his right foot was missing.
The young scribe's lips were moving but no sound seemed to come out. She was gently shaking the Knight's body and managed to whisper his name. Cross approached the corpse and, with a quick gesture, tore off Berry's identification plates and slipped them into a satchel on her belt.
"Let's get going," she said in a monotone way.
"But... What... We can't...," stammered Hood looking at her.
The Star Paladin grabbed the young scribe's arm and shook her violently. Damian thought she was going to rip her arm off with her power armor.
"Scribe Hood, we're in a combat zone. You've been trained for this kind of situation. Knight Berry is dead. We have to leave him there and continue the mission. That is an order."
Hood may have been a scribe attached to Rothchild and spent most of her time between computers, research reports and books, but she was still a full member of the Brotherhood and had to follow orders.
Damian wanted to take a few moments to give Hood time to deal with the death of his companion. He, too, felt affected, but Cross put the mission ahead of everything else. He found the Star Paladin's decision strange, as he hardly imagined any soldier willing to leave the bodies of their own on a battlefield, but he did not say anything, thinking that they would take Berry's body back with them once they retrieved the G.E.C.K., that if they made it in and out of Vault 87 alive.
"Berry knew the risks," Cross continued in a more compassionate tone. "We must complete our mission or his death will have been in vain."
Hood wanted to protest. She closed her eyes and nodded slowly. Damian wanted to comfort her, guessing that her relationship with the Knight was maybe more than a brother/sister in arms relation, but he knew from experience that nothing could soothe the pain she was enduring.
Regretfully, Hood took her eyes off Berry's body and got up. The tunnels meandered for several meters. The ground had been laid out and they were walking on cobblestones. They hadn't encountered Super Mutants since Berry's death.
Dogmeat walked ahead, sniffing the ground and the air. From the booby-trapped tunnel, everyone paid close attention to the ground looking for a trigger wire or even a mine buried under a small pile of rocks.
Damian wondered who had set a trap in these caves. The Super Mutants had proved to be smart enough to use computers or to set up ambushes, as he had seen in his rescue of the inhabitants of Big Town or in Reilly's story. But it was unlikely that these monstrous giants had set the traps in this location. The other explanation was that the inhabitants of Little Lamplight had set these traps to delay the Super Mutants who had swept into their caves and that by bad luck, none of these abominations had triggered the traps before.
The cave was gradually shrinking, and the stone had given way to steel walls. A sliding door of Vault-Tec manufacturing was facing them. Cross pressed the switch and the door slid in a metallic squeak.
A room full of rusted old metal desks, destroyed computers and metal crates containing various electronic devices that were no longer in use laid behind the door.
Damian noticed a circular plate on the floor near one of the two pillars supporting the room. The mechanism was connected to a string of grenades suspended from the ceiling by a small cable. The trap was childishly simple, and he had no problem disarming it and retrieved the grenades and put them in his bag.
"Franklin," said Cross as she approached him. You are the only one of us who has ever been in a Vault. Can you give us a description of the place?"
Damian thought for a moment. He knew Vault 101 like the back of his hand, from the living quarters to the common areas to the maintenance rooms. However, there was no indication that Vault 87 would be organized in the same way as Vault 101 and that it would be facility like Vault 112.
"If we assume that Vault-Tec built all its Vault in the same way, then..."
The door to the room where they were standing opened. A Super Mutant, bigger and uglier than the others, stood in the opening. It uttered a roar and brandished a laser rifle. Damian dove behind one of the pillars. Cross knocked over one of the computer banks and took cover behind it. The mutant fired.
Dogmeat jumped towards the Super Mutant and passed between its legs. The dog turned around and stuck its fangs into the Mutant's calf. The Mutant wobbled a little and shook its leg to free itself. He raised its head and saw Cross. Her heavy steel club sliced through the air and crashed into the Super Mutant's belly. The Mutant coughed up blood and collapsed to the ground in a scream of pain. Cross dropped her giant sledgehammer on the Super Mutant's skull. Stuck between the ground and the huge club, the Super Mutant's head burst into a crack of bone, spilling pieces of flesh and brains on the ground.
Damian bent down from behind his cover. Cross wiped the end of her melee weapon against the Super Mutant's loincloth. Dogmeat carefully sniffed the corpse. Damian turned his head and saw Hood leaning against a pillar. Her pants were torn, and she clenched her jaw with a grimace.
The laser beam had hit her leg and burned it to the third degree between the knee and the ankle. She tried to stand up, and she uttered a small hiccup of pain. The injury seemed to cause her great pain.
Damian helped her to sit on one of the desks and carefully inspected her leg. He had seen this kind of injury before on one of his maintenance coworkers in the Vault and still remembered the screams he heard when the man had burned his hand with a blowtorch.
In Hood's case, the young scribe needed a doctor and had to avoid using her leg at all costs.
Cross approached after securing the tunnel where the Super Mutant had come from. She looked at Hood's wound and sighed. Berry was dead and Hood was out. At this rate, this whole mission would end in their deaths.
"You have to take her back to the Citadel," Damian said, looking for a Stimpak in his satchel so he could ease Hood's pain a little.
"No, I'm fine," the young scribe managed to articulate with a forced smile.
"You have a third-degree burn on the leg, that means that your skin, the tissue and the endings of the entire burned area are destroyed. The Stimpak will give you relief for a while, but it won't save your leg."
Hood closed her eyes and held back an expression of pain when Damian injected the Stimpak into her thigh.
"You need to take back to the Citadel or to Little Lamplight to be examined," Damian repeated, turning his head towards Cross.
He helped Hood to his feet.
"I'll go on my own," he said, letting Cross take the young scribe.
"No, way. I'm not letting you go alone in there," objected the Star Paladin. "It's..."
"Dogmeat, come."
Damian snapped his fingers and the dog followed him. He disappeared into the tunnel that led to Vault 87. After a few meters, he came to a metal door. He glanced towards Dogmeat who sniffed at the door before sitting down. Damian took a deep breath and entered, his mind focused on the search for the G.E.C.K. and whatever horrors he would find inside.
Hope you enjoyed.
