Tanya Von Degurechaff. Outside Project Purity.
The island as it turned out was a money-pit. The brainchild of a group of Rivet city scientists attempting to scale up a water purifier that could filter an entire water reserve. A wonderful idea using technology that was novel even for this world that had only ever worked in small scale experiments.
I was not a scientist, far from it. But I could identify pie in the sky idealism when it reared its ugly head, it was a constant that scientists and great thinkers would come up with some megaproject or Wunderwaffe that would solve all the world's problems. For only the low price of an inordinate amount of time, resources and money. While a functional solution to a problem that was far cheaper was simply ignored because it never seemed to have charismatic champions for its implementation. For the amount of resources Rivet city and the Brotherhood dumped into this rust heap they could have likely funded a lot of small-scale purifiers that could have done a lot of good in the wasteland even if that lake remained a radioactive eyesore.
I rubbed my arm and wiggled my fingers a little bit to fight away the ache. It was not bad enough to justify magic but it was annoying enough to be very distracting. I had not done any more damage to it but it was clear I needed a few more days to recover.
Proctor Stevenson had contacted the Citadel and apparently the bunker on the western side of the river would soon be occupied. I supposed that was a better outcome then just leaving this place empty but it did irk me to leave a perfectly defendable island I had just taken for the mutants to settle back in. Regardless we simply settled on marking the minefield with signs and moving north in the morning. Most of the day was left for people to recover from the fight and to bury the dead.
Stevenson was happy to join us with two knights as protection while Harkness and several of the traders decided to head back to Rivet city feeling like they had done enough. Harkness himself was confident that there were no hard points along the river like the island, but with warbands roaming about DC with near impunity I doubted that. Now and then gunfire broke out in the ruins, more then it normally did anyway. Giving stark warnings to the battles between the Brotherhood, scavengers and mutants all settling into place.
Until the entire city was scoured clean one block at a time trader bands like this would become the norm for travel. It was inefficient and expensive, both things that would turn a weak economy into abject poverty, someone had to do something. I never considered myself a do-gooder, mostly because do-gooders are the sort to do terrible things and justify it with some convoluted nonsense. No, I was purely sensible, even if I hated violence in this case it was needed to maintain any sort of quality of life in the general area.
The next morning came and my little runaway had not crawled back on her knees to return my equipment and terminate the contract on an amicable note so I resolved to put a bounty on her. The bounty would be for her alive of course, I was not interested in a twisted parody of frontier justice. Even without any system to enforce law and order people had to take it upon themselves to act in a civilised manner.
I would have her return the things she took from me and pay me back for the money invested into her and she would go free. I was not being petty I was simply abiding by the contract we had both agreed to. Allowing someone to steal from you would simply encourage others to do so and once they had a taste for that sort of thing, they would do it to others.
One of my other employees had approached me wanting to terminate his contract and I was quite happy to oblige him. I even allowed him to keep some of the ammo and food as well as the down payment since he did contribute to fighting the super mutants. I did not have to do that as per the contract but if my other employees thought that I would deal with them fairly they would be more likely to work with me and that sort of thing would create a pleasant workplace environment for everyone.
It also allowed me to make a note to remove the ability to withdraw from the contract while still deployed, losing manpower while in a deadly environment was unacceptable and reflected poorly on my planning for this entire expedition. Honestly so much had been happening and I was clearly not dedicating enough time and energy to thinking things though. When I got back to my factory I would no doubt have a lot of work to get through and I would endeavour to secure my position.
The road north took us along the Potomac and to my surprise we did not find many mutants blocking the road. No doubt they had rushed deeper into the city ruins rather than maintain a wider blockade for merchant caravans.
The actions of the mutants were an enigma, they were thought to be utterly stupid and violent with little thought given to why they acted that way. The Brotherhood considered them to be an experiment to produce super soldiers that failed and needed to be cleaned up. That did seem to align with the tactical awareness and unreasonable resistance to damage they displayed.
Still, it was aggravating that there was an almost casual disregard for the idea that the Mutants were in fact effective tactical thinkers. When I fielded the concept the brotherhood knights seemed almost disgusted to even consider that they were more than simple-minded abominations.
Underestimating enemies in any way was utterly ridiculous but try telling these blasted wastelanders that!
I ordered a stop before nightfall and we made ourselves comfortable in an office building that had long been stripped bare by scavengers. With so many of us it was easy to organise watch shifts and settle in to sleep.
Mister Burke, Rivet City.
The bleeding man struggled in his arms and gurgled out muffled words. It was a surprising amount of trouble considering he had already shot the man. Two rounds to the back before Mister Burke had pulled him into a chokehold to deal with things quietly. Even so he struggled with all his might even if such strength was quickly fading.
It was a pity that this one was so lively, Burke always liked to look them in the eyes but it was better to be safe than sorry. It was hardly his fault he was forced to do this and he quickly dragged the gurgling man into an open room out from the corridor.
The room looked to be used as a refuse dump for recyclables and scrap metal and Burke quickly pulled the man's pants off before dumping him under a damaged filing cabinet. With his improvised rag he set about cleaning up what blood he could quickly before closing up the room and leaving the pilfered clothing with the body.
Honestly, what were the chances that he would run into an ex-slaver who wanted to be a hero? The man had accosted him in the hallway and promised to 'deal with him' if Burke did not leave the ship immediately. Obviously, that was a mistake on his part.
It was always amusing how effective a wide smile followed by quickly drawing a concealed pistol was. They always looked you in the eyes and never watched your hands until it was too late. Despite enjoyable distractions like this he had unfortunately failed to track down his secondary target. The young woman having left the city before he arrived.
Still, he had made contact with James Wolfgang and had offered the man a contract to carry supplies to Alexandria, said supplies being crates of tins filled with sand. If he did not take the bait and travel south into a raider encampment it would make things a bit awkward. Caravaners stuck together like glue making assassinations difficult inside settlements.
Burke retired to his rented room to change out of his soiled suit and into a clean one. Long term contracts like this required several changes of clothes and could end rather anticlimactically. He resolved to get this done and move on after the girl. If she was not interested in his offer, he could take her off the board. Something to look forward to as it had been ages since he had the chance to murder a child.
Viktoriya Ivanovna Serebryakov, Mothership Zeta.
The guts of the ship were a twisting maze filled with endless resistance and uncoordinated ambushes. Despite it being almost a full day since the escape no meaningful attempt had been made to dislodge the escapees, it was almost as if the command structure of the mothership had fled to the upper section of the ship and had left the aliens remaining in the lower half to fend for themselves.
"Okay, sorry about those two, it's hard to see things from here, anyway you need to take the door on your left, that will take you to a small big glowy room that is connected to the super laser death ray." The trio moved in formation as Sally spoke over some sort of ship wide radio system. How the girl understood how to use the Alien equipment was less important right now then that she could.
Viktoriya moved at the front her mind focused on a directional shield while Toshiro and Linda kept behind her with the Alien rifle weapons at the ready. The pair of them had proven to be excellent shots despite the former having no experience with firearms. At least Visha did not think he did but then she might be wrong about when guns were invented, she was never all that diligent of a student of history. The pair of them dismantled enemy positions while they were focused on sending bolts of energy at the potent shield Viktoriya could maintain.
Sometimes they came across an Alien who had a shimmering field of light around its body that turned away projectiles. Toshiro would quickly draw his sword and end Aliens like that before they would become a problem. The designer of the energy shield had not taken into consideration a steel blade apparently.
They arrived at the smaller glowy room. It was a chamber around fifty meters across and half again as tall with a large bulbus tube in the middle of the room that pulsed with a bright white light. It was like a smaller model of the huge one Sally had taken them too and was currently being used as a base of sorts for them to strike out into the rest of the ship.
Visha understood them to be a sort of engine for parts of the ship with the big one being the main engine for the ship itself. Destroy this one and the gun would no longer fire and Earth was safe. Honestly the idea was grand, too grand for her. Linda had a sparkle in her eyes whenever she spoke about the defence of Earth itself from the alien menace and Visha felt more pulled along by the momentum of Sally and Linda in this whole mess.
God only knows how Toshiro felt, the few words she had learned of his language had not been enough to explain anything about what they were doing yet the man kept at their side. Trusting that they were doing what was right.
The three of them got to work after the spattering of defenders were dead. Each moving to one of the consoles in the room and pressing the buttons in the order Sally had instructed and then quickly backing away as alarms bleared out and the huge white light in the middle began to pulse far more rapidly.
"Okay you got it! Uh, you should get out of there quickly this power thingy is against the side of the hull…" They did not need to be told twice, the three of them darted out of the room not a second too late as the door shut behind them then deformed as the entire ship rumbled from an explosion that sent them all to the ground in a heap.
"Could have told us it was going to blow up that quickly Sally!" Linda shouted at nothing in particular.
"Sorry! Ummm, right well you should get back up here quickly. We still have to get to the bridge. I found the spacesuit guy I was talking about but… He won't be able to help us, but the suit still works! I think!"
Visha shook her head but Sally's guidance and leadership had been invaluable on the ship so far. If working with the Maj- Lieutenant Colonel, it was hard keeping track of the promotions sometimes. It was that good leadership could come from anywhere it was just a case of identifying it and trusting it.
Mary Sioux, Adams Airforce Base.
The crawler itself was only part of the base established in the vastly oversized airport. Decaying hangers and terminal buildings were connected together by a tall fence that would shoot bolts of lightning at anything that got too close. Mary had watched as more than one curious scavenger had approached the Enclave base only to be killed by the deadly fence.
At the north side were several hangers that were being used for storage and as workshops for materials scavenged by the small engineer team working on fixing the colossal tracked crawler. The first time Mary had wandered over to take a look the warehouse had made the Enclave suddenly stop the friendly act they had been pulling and restricted her movement to 'free time' just two hours in the afternoon and she was to be accompanied by an escort.
They had come up with excuses about it being for her own protection and had given her a radio as if that made up for anything. Still, it was nice to listen to the music and news. Every day clarified her purpose and strengthened her resolve. Plans on how to escape filled her mind and flittered away just as quickly. Grand schemes to disable defences or alarms slipping through the cracks of the Enclave were unravelled when Mary considered that she had none of the skills required to pull something like that off.
She was being indecisive again, procrastinating. A righteous task is to be done, not debated endlessly. She waited in her room racking her brain for the correct formula that had been so simple with an operation orb around her neck. What had once been second nature to her was now well beyond her grasp and she struggled to remember the bootcamp instruction and the later guidance from the Drakes.
The Albish were the most talented mages in the world, that was indisputable. Even with orbs that should have been impossible the Empire would struggle to combat a true Albish Archmage. In comparison American formula was ridged and stilted. The little island struggled to produce aerial mages but the ones they did have were taught how to weave spells interlaced with each other. It was described to her as a song that sprung from one note to the next allowing a sequence of spells created with such grace that it almost resembled multi core casting.
It still had not been enough when the greatest Albish Archmage had fought against the Devil. The little monster had some wellspring of hellish power that was utterly unearned. That was why she had been granted the power she had. God wanted her to settle the score.
And she had fai-
NO!
No more despair, she forced herself to cast her mind back to the formula and away from the welling despair deep inside of herself. She was NOT beyond redemption she just had to do gods work whatever that might be.
Mary had never managed even the simplest combinations of interlaced spells, the Albish would force themselves to use underpowered training cores and spend months weaving one spell into the next until they could manage it perfectly and quite frankly Mary did not have the patience for it. Nor did many of the volunteers she had worked with.
Right now however, she did not have any computation device at all, without some way to reduce the strain of casting she was barely going to manage much more than an internal reinforcement spell. There was a knock at her door followed by a click of it unlocking and Mary muttered a curse. She thought she had more time but a look at the digital clock beside her bed had shown that she had been working the formula though in her mind for almost five hours now.
It was still pathetically weak and unstable but she had no choice. She opened the door trying to move as little as possible as she felt the uneven distribution of her reinforcement strain her bones and muscles in a way that made her eyes water. At the door an Enclave officer gave her a smile that did not reach his eyes and offered a tray of lukewarm food only for his eyes to widen in surprise as Mary threw a wide punch at his face.
Her heart thundered and she felt her stomach churn as the hall was suddenly filled with blood and bits of meat. The man crumpling as he died instantly all the while Mary stared at her hand in horror. She never liked getting too close to the results of her magic and all she could see was the tooth lodged into her knuckle.
"What the fuck!?" A soldier outside of his power armour but still wearing the rubber underclothes fumbled with a pistol at his side as Mary blinked away the horror of what she had just done and threw her hand forward using the last vestiges of power to slip into the familiar formula of her next spell.
It was weak, a halted bastardization of an interlaced casting but the hall was bathed in a purple light. A moment later Mary felt a wave of fatigue and the solider fell to the ground twitching as a neat hole the size of a dime had bore its way through his head.
She had just…
She quickly dragged both men into her room and began stripping down the soldier. A plan forming in her mind as she became very glad that the dead man had been on the rather short side. This was how it should be done. Working out a complex escape route was pointless and would simply allow more evil to prosper as she did nothing. She should do what she always did.
She would take the simplest path, that was what she was taught in bootcamp. Keep every plan simple, yes that was exactly the thing the Devil never did. She had always been tricksy, dancing around in combat and drawing things out as long as she could. That was the way of the Devil, God and His servants had no need of such underhanded tactics, she simply had to act, one move onto the next.
It all finally clicked into her mind, the interlacing of the Albish, the training at bootcamp, her instinctive actions when she sought to rid the world of the Devil and now how she should escape the Enclave. She had to push forward, continue pushing forward even when met with resistance. Moving away from the path of God for even a moment led to ruin.
She would take the righteous path and simply wade though evil.
She threw off her clothes and donned the rubber suit of the dead man and quickly grabbed the wrist band that the power armour using Enclave universally had. She knew where they kept the suits, a smile graced her face as she strode out of her room for the last time. She offered a prayer that He would give her another chance and prevent a general alarm being raised across the crawler before she reached her destination.
Tanya Von Degurechaff. Canterbury Commons.
The mob I was at the head of trudged into Canterbury Commons in a disgracefully disorganised fashion. The journey had not been all that exciting besides some raiders and mutants spotted in the far distance that quickly ran away from the large caravan of traders and my employees. My little runaway still out there somewhere.
The town looked quite a bit livelier than before. I was happy to see that the storefront I had paid for was stocked with electric bikes and a power cell charging station I had asked Scott Wollinski to work on. I was eager to see how profitable selling electricity was here and if it would justify running a cable all the way from the reactor at the factory up to the town.
"Is this it? Its impressive that you have managed to produce so many bikes with equipment like this." Stevenson said looking into the storefront. At the tools used for general maintenance on the walls. Half the shop was dedicated to servicing bikes as I had no doubt that parts would fail and bringing damaged bikes all the way to the factory itself would be a waste of time.
"Thank you, but this is just the store used to sell them. We will head to the factory when I am done here." He raised an eyebrow at that but nodded his head as the two Knights walked around my store like the owned the place scaring off my customers and making my staff look over at me for help. I have them a comforting smile and looked over at the mercenaries I had employed for the journey here.
They were standing around in a loose semi-circle like they were not quite sure what they were meant to be doing right now. I took the chance to step up onto an empty box so the lot of them at least had to look forward rather than looking down at me.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, you have all performed admirably in difficult circumstances. It is regrettable that not everyone who signed the contracts is here with us today and we should spare a moment of thought to our comrades who fell fighting the Super Mutant menace." I let my eyes wander over at the crowd as it grew beyond just the people I had hired and needed to pay. I had hoped to keep this as a private affair but it was never a good idea to delay paying mercenaries.
"Some would say that you are only here for the reward, that somehow this is selfish, but I do not think that is the case. There is honour and pride to be taken in promising you will do a job and doing it well. Should that not be rewarded? The people of the Capital Wasteland find themselves under siege by a rabid horde of bloodthirsty mutants and you swore you would do your part to fight back! That is exactly what you did!" Coming up with a speech like this on the spot was a bad idea, I wanted to hype up continued employment with me in such a way as to keep the wages low but my words had gotten away from me.
"For your excellence in performing your duties I would like to offer you not only the money you rightly earned but a new contract. The Capital Wasteland is in need of soldiers, people who know how to fight and are well equipped to deal with the dangers of the wastes. Men and Women who can fight back against Raiders and Slavers and Mutants. Making the entire Wasteland a better place and earning a good wage while doing it!" They started cheering, not only my employees but the random traders and civilians who had wandered over to see what the fuss was about.
They were actually cheering for one of the least focused and vague pitch I had ever made.
Well, actually the second.
Wait, was I the one not understanding what was going on here? I looked out at the bright smiling faces as the people in the crowd excitedly spoke to each other and shook my head.
No, it was the wastelanders that were wrong.
I stepped off of the box and led my men into the store picking up the caps that had not been transferred to the factory today and counting out the agreed wages. After everyone was paid, I asked who was interested in the new contract working in my security company. I was swarmed with several dozen people all clamouring for the job on top of every single mercenary who had been paid. There were also more than a few people asking about working in the factory and promising they had technical skills and I agreed to give them a chance.
The most vocal person in the room was Reilly who had practically demanded I produce a contract I had not even written yet. Proctor Stevenson watched with his guard as I prepared to make my way to the factory careful to pick up more food and water rations at the market first. He looked almost shellshocked as he trailed behind the crowd with his escort.
I don't know what he saw but all I knew was that this many people would require a mountain of paperwork and weeks of organisation before I could even begin training them. I would have to be gentile with this lot, I had to remember that they were not mages and I actually wanted as many of them as I could get.
I would have to filter out the weak links however. Perhaps Reilly would have advice for training regimens I could put them through…