Tanya Von Degurechaff. Corvega Factory.
The Corvega factory was still there thankfully. With the rattling reactor in the basement my engineer assured me was safe as houses it was a legitimate worry that I would return to find a crater. Well, I thought it was legitimate, everyone else seemed to think an atomic reaction in the basement was NORMAL.
Well not normal, it was rare to find a micro reactor in good condition apparently. Even if by micro they meant bigger than a double decker bus. Still, everyone was ecstatic that something so dangerous was chugging away under their feet all day and night.
Assigning space for perspective employees to sleep so they could be ready for testing in the morning as a bit awkward and a lot of the people looking for work were put into old offices where they would have to sleep on the floor for now. Even with the Corvega compound I had a very limited living space and I did not want to throw up a scrap metal shack that was popular in the wastes.
I made sure my three Brotherhood guests had their own room as well as food and water allowing them to roam freely in all the buildings except my Research and Development building where I was storing the more expensive supplies and scrap and also housed my robotic security hub.
A lot had happened while I had been away and Scott had proven himself by actually writing the reports I had asked him to. He was not the most talented writer and it seemed that the factory computers could use a spellchecker but it was much better than I expected.
Sales were slowly going down even if the early frenzy had given me quite the treasury, new products were going to be needed soon to make up for the projected loss in profits for the bikes. However, I did not have enough long-term data to get a good idea of how many bikes I would be selling on average. It would be nice to have a more reliable customer but the only one in the region were very likely going to get offended if I demand payment. Still, I would do my best to court Stevenson in an attempt to sell to the Brotherhood.
Honestly the biggest problem was my access to markets, with the dangers of the roads and the chaos in the ruins of D.C I was not reaching every potential customer. My energy cell recharging station in Canterbury was earning me a nice chunk of caps and that was a market that seemed far more lucrative to me, it cost me almost nothing to produce and there would always be demand for electricity.
As far as I was aware the only other reactor that was active in the region was in Rivet city and there was an electricity ration. Finding someone who understood electrical transmission and having them run cables to Rivet city would allow me to sell to them and I could use a cable running to Canterbury as a testbed for the technology.
Of course, an infrastructure project like that would require some control over D.C. It all came back to forming White Silver Security as quickly as possible while maintaining quality and a good reputation. Running the numbers, I was going to be just about in the black so long as sales did not continue to decline. I would have to find another income stream or a new product without a cap investment while I developed the Security force.
The main Corvega production line repairs was going to take a few more weeks if everything went perfectly for Scott. Honestly without him this entire operation would have likely fallen apart looking though the shoddy reports from the rest of my employees. I would need to find the time to train my staff in how to navigate a workplace environment and how to write reports.
With my to-do list growing exponentially I made some notes and left the rest of reports for later. I still had to settle in the prospective applicants for the security company. Leaving them to mill about without knowing what they were doing would be pure negligence.
I had a little time to myself however so I made my way over to the Research and Development building to satisfy my curiosity. In one of the many storage rooms, I found the armour plate, it was a section designed to cover the abdomen while also allowing a degree of flexibility to lean forward somewhat.
The metal was cool to the touch and had a slight yellowish tint to it. There were several stamps punched into it but they were so old that it was impossible to read what the metal had been marked for. I took a screwdriver from the wall and ran it across the metal enhancing my strength considerably to carve a rut though the plate.
It was stronger by some degree then expected but not to an absurd degree. Taking the metal shavings into my hand I created an illusion of myself and threw the bits of metal at it watching as the magical construct distorted and faded from view almost instantly.
There was no mistaking it, this was Mithril. If this was the Empire that armour plate would represent a considerable amount of the strategic reserve of the magically resistant metal. For some reason this rare metal had simply been shaped into a power armour plate.
Mithril had many different utilities in the Empire and was one of the components inside of the Type 95 but I had no idea how it was used in that context. It was practically useless to me now considering I was very likely the only mage on the planet with other A class mages never understanding the potential they have.
It was oddly frustrating to have something so valuable be so useless, I had no reason to spread the knowledge of the metal to anyone considering it could make my life more difficult later and I had no idea how common it was. I could run into someone else using Mithril armour without knowing how effective it was.
I considered destroying the metal by melting it together with scrap until it was slag but I resigned myself to melt the plate into an ingot and store it somewhere. As risky as it was to keep something like this around for a mage it was just as unlikely that it would be knowingly used against me.
I let out a frustrated sigh and left the room closing it behind me only to run into Sam Yu, one of my lead technicians backing away to give me space.
"Ah, Boss there you are. Sorry to disturb you I was just wondering what you meant in the uh, the project?" Someone must have seen me entering this building, it was good that my employee was going out of his way for clarification if he did not understand his orders.
"Not a problem. What parts of the project need clarification?" He rubbed the back of his neck and looked sheepish.
"Well, you told me to lead a project to create a prototype wasteland conversion kit for Corvega family cars? I uh, what exactly are the things you expect me to do?" I might have expected a bit too much from untrained employees, even ones who were performing extremally well.
"When the factory floor is able to produce Corvega cars again they will need to be modified to function in Wasteland conditions, things like raising the suspension or putting more rugged tires on them. Your job is to lead a small team experimenting with the ways we can make an attractive product for the wasteland market. Most of this building is configured for prototyping and automobile modification."
"Oh, that is what you meant. No problem then boss I will get right on it." He gave me a smile as I nodded.
"Keep up the good work and if you need any more details of your duties as project lead please don't hesitate to ask." I turned on my heel and marched off preparing myself to deal with the mob that would become my security forces.
Mary Sioux, Adams Airforce Base.
The bodysuit fit almost perfectly after pulling on some of the straps and adjusting its fitting even if it was a little tight around the chest. One positive of wearing it was that no one gave her a second look as Mary approached the base of the crawler striding forward as if she was meant to be there.
It lasted all the way until she stepped out into a large armoury and one of the Enclave recognised her. The firefight was a messy affair with both Mary and the Enclave Officer drawing on the other and shooting wildly at the other.
The Enclave Officer went down first while Mary lurched forwards with several new bullet holes in her stomach. The two technicians that were in the room screamed out for help and Mary kept shooting until her stolen pistol was empty before throwing it to the ground and clutching her head trying to hold her fragmented thoughts together. Furious tears running down her cheeks as she stumbled to the first suit of power armour only for the lock at the back to beep but remain closed when she ran her pilfered ID band over it.
She stumbled over to the next suit spitting blood onto the obstinate lock while rushing to the next and the next. Eventually a suit opened up, the armour plates shifting with a quiet hum as the hunched over power armour welcomed her into the dark red interior like an invitation to hell.
She entered without a second thought, wincing as the suit moved to embrace her intimately, clicking and warming up as the suit came to life around its new master. She stumbled backwards and the suit followed her feeling like air and Mary crashed into a workbench sending thousands of screws, tools and components onto the metal grating below.
She stumbled forward taking deliberate steps as the suit was too quick, too strong to be controlled without a frustrating deliberation over every action. Lifting her arm put a dent into the wall, taking a step almost sent her sprawling.
She reached the wall and sent a dozen magazine fed short rifles to the ground before one fit into her oversized hand. She stumbled over to where loaded magazines were and picked one up only to jump as a section of her power armour opened up just large enough to slide the magazine into the internals.
A little number popped up in the corner of her eye and feeding more magazines into the slot made the number raise before the slot stopped opening up to accept new offerings so she pushed the last magazine into the rifle and pulled the action backwards only to let out a frustrated scream as the bolt smashed though the back of the short rifle sending bits of the weapon into a heap at her feet.
She threw the useless scrap away and threw savage punches into the assembled weapons again and again until she felt some degree of control return. She acquired one of the few short rifles that had survived and loaded it with more care. Bringing the weapon to her shoulder was almost impossible forcing Mary to hold it at an awkward angle to aim down the sights. She squeezed the trigger to test the weapon only for nothing to happen until she fumbled with the thing for a moment trying to find the safety.
The room was filled with a thud that was almost entirely quiet inside the suit, sounds entering by speakers in the helmet with some sounds being made quieter. Her experiments were punctuated with the door sliding open and several gunshots ricocheting off the power armour as she stumbled forwards to look at the doorway and sent a burst into the hall before marching forward shooting the retreating security as they called out to bring over someone in power armour.
Mary did not give them time to act she simply charged though the crawler shooting at anything that moved searching for the exit. Once she was outside it was a four-hundred-meter sprint to the arc fence that existed only to murder roving scavengers. Mary threw open the environmental seals on the exit and stumbled outside almost falling again as alarms blared all around her and it seemed that bullets and bolts of energy were directed at her from every direction.
She reloaded her rifle as she fought against the suit to move faster her heart thundering in her chest as she approached the fence.
There was a thundering crack as a bolt of energy impacted the ground in front of her and her mind flashed back to the time strapped down to a slab. Mary let out a squeal of anguish and threw herself away from the dreaded bolts of lightning her entire body revolting against feeling that pain again.
"GET HER! Don't let her get to the fence! We need her alive!" Mary threw her head back as a dozen figures in power armour sprinted towards her and let out a whimper and a prayer before she pushed herself onto her feet and moved towards the fence.
"Is she crazy! Stop her!"
This must be her atonement, her baptism back into His welcoming embrace. The first terrible step.
She stepped under the arc towers and screamed.
But faith propelled her forward where the evil stopped, afraid, unable to follow her path to God's light.
Viktoriya Ivanovna Serebryakov, Mothership Zeta.
Dressing in the clothes of a dead man felt wrong even after the time she had spent in the trenches scavenging for food and supplies from comrades who had gone on to a better place. Visha stood in the middle of the room while Sally and Linda dressed her in the suit that was meant to protect her from space.
Air became thinner the higher you went until there was hardly any air at all. Viktoriya understood that far better then most considering she had fought against the effects of poor air quality and the cold with a range of magical formula that never seemed to do the full job and always required tweaking.
She remembered the Lieutenant Colonel mentioning that eventually there was no air at all or even gravity in space. Visha felt a smile grace her face, she always knew things like that. If she was here then no doubt the Aliens would be defeated and earth would be safe by now.
But Earth did not have Tanya, it had Visha and she would have to do. It felt terrible honestly, Victoria could feel an impossible weight on her shoulders and her guts felt all twisted up. Was this what her Lieutenant Colonel always felt? The weight of the Empire, the world baring down on her?
She kinda wanted to throw up but she had a helmet on and she would rather not drown.
"Okay, there are four control modules that have been yanked out on the surface of the ship. Just bop them on the top and they should go back in and the teleporter to the bridge will start again. Then we can storm the bridge while you come back inside. Be careful because there are some angry guys out there who won't want you to do this." Sally gave Visha a thumbs up as Linda looked at the small girl.
"Okay kid you have to explain how you know all this stuff. It's getting scary."
"What do you mean Linda?" The blond girl said with a cute smile.
"You know what I me-." There was a hiss as Sally sealed up the suit and suddenly Visha understood what a balloon felt like.
"We need to hurry up and take control of the ship." Visha felt a hand on her shoulder as Toshiro gave her a nod and presented an alien rifle to her. The translation spell corruption had given her a very limited grasp of his language and she did not have the mental fortitude to recast it until it wore off but what little she did know she had struggled to use to explain the situation to him.
"Ganbare Viktoriya-san." He said wishing her good luck as the Imperial in the space suit marched into the airlock. Her three new friends and the humans still frozen onboard, the humans down on Earth. Everyone and everything were up to her.
The air in the room drained away and then so did the weight of the world. Visha let out a squeak as she bumped into the ceiling and fed a little bit of magic into her computation orb. She was pulled through the air with just the slightest touch of magic and suddenly her job did not seem so bad at all. She did not even need her flight equipment. Up here far above it all she could fly with just the orb.
She left the airlock darting past the aliens dotted about the outside of the ship intent on shooting her. The Lieutenant Colonel had always complained about mages not making use of the fact that a mage can pull themselves in any direction and did not need to fly like a bird or a plane. She had always taken pride in her flight and agility.
She would have loved this.
Visha sent bolts of alien energy into the scrambling defenders as she danced about the mothership. Bolts of deadly light flung at her almost looked to be flying about in slow motion as only the barest hint of magic was required to cast them aside or dodge. She let out a quiet giggle as she felt her blood begin to quicken from the sheer abundance of magic inside of her.
She almost forgot about the mission before little Sally reminded her to bop the modules. She gave her new cutest little commander a salute that she could not see and sent the but of her rifle though the glass helmet of an alien guarding one of the modules.
Then she gave the module a 'bop'.
She continued until Sally told her she had finished and looked out across the battlefield, rivers of blood flowing though the air as Aliens hung still where they had been killed. It was almost a shame that she had to go back inside.
She had just reached the airlock again when a trio of saucer shaped ships screamed past and sent superheated energy into the hull of Mothership Zeta, secondary explosions sent Visha spinning away into space for a moment before she recovered and looked out in horror as a second ship began to approach the ship with her new friends.
"Visha! We have control of the bridge but the other ship! We can't stop it we disabled the death ray!" even in the vacuum of space Viktoria could hear the bolt of killing intent that screamed out from the new ship and cut into the hull of Zeta.
"We are getting the shields back online but you need to do something!" That was far easier said then done. Visha had nothing that could carry the more impressive explosive or penetrating formula she could manage. The energy that the alien rifles shot out was impossible to enchant as it left the barrel. She looked down at herself only having her Lieutenant Colonel's rifle hanging off of her in reserve, her empty rifle.
A hand went to her side and Viktoria drew her bayonet. Knife fighting a spaceship seemed like a stupid idea. But what would Tanya do?
In an instant she was screaming though space with nothing to slow her down, magic fed into her computation orb as the young woman committed herself to her only option. Traveling faster than any mage had even dreamed of Humanity's last hope flew knife first as her mage shell was peppered with desperate fire from secondary weapons all along the Zetan battleship.
Tanya Von Degurechaff. Corvega Factory.
There were around forty people milling about in a clump just outside of the factory walls that I had paid to have repaired and dug out of the dust. Reilly and her squad were standing apart from the main group watching as I approached with Stevenson who seemed to be curious about what exactly I was planning to do with my Private Security Company.
Everyone here had passed the basic testing showing an acceptable level of fitness. A depressing amount of people had not but that could hardly be helped considering the poor diets and healthcare available to the general population.
"You! Name." I pointed to one of the taller men standing about who looked a bit timid and he quickly pointed at himself with his eyebrows raised before shouting out.
"Tim, uh, Tim Hunter."
"Cadet Hunter stand here." I pointed in front of me and he looked around before walking forward. "Heels together, arms by your sides, come on puff out your chest and look like you want to be here!" He quickly stood at something resembling attention and glanced down at me to see if he was doing it right. "EYES FORWARD!" He jolted back into a position and put his back up straighter.
"Good, Cadet Hunter here will be your guide today gentlemen. You will come here and stand one arm's length apart until there are ten people in the first row. One of you will stand at arm's length behind Cadet Hunter and then another row will form on you. We will continue until there are four rows of ten." I stared at the crowd who were looking at me with a blank look on their face while Stevenson was watching from a rock he had decided to sit on.
"Don't make me repeat myself! Get moving!" There was a messy flurry of activity but it seemed like such simple commands could be followed and I had an uneven parade formation with some of the people looking very confused. Reilly for her part looked put out that she was not in the front row.
"Well, you are not all completely worthless after all, or perhaps you are waiting to surprise me! Some of you think you know how to fight. Some of you consider yourself veterans or competent. Some of you think this is an easy meal ticket! You are all wrong." I began to pace in front of the formation so I could study every face.
"Over the next few weeks, I will be personally training each and every one of you. I will endeavour to transform you into a soldier. A task that will be far more difficult for some of you then others I am sure! You have expectations, you have ideas in your head about how this should work and what you should be doing. Forget them! You will learn the correct way of doing things under me!"
"Today we will be doing something so simple that not even any of you can fuck it up! We are going to learn how to stand at attention, learn how to stand at ease, how to march forward and back and then you will learn how and when to speak." Someone had the gall to stick a hand up.
"Speak." I glared at them as they smiled.
"Uh, I thought we were fighting super mutants? What does this stuff matter?"
"Name?"
"Oh Jessica Harvey."
"Well Cadet Harvey I am glad you asked, you see I was wondering if everyone had actually read the contract you signed and I am just ecstatic that you would come forward and admit your wilful ignorance to everyone here." I marched forward to the person in question thankful that she was in the first row and put a little magic into projecting my voice, not loud enough to even approach doing damage but enough to make her jump a bit.
"I am not hiring mutant hunters I am hiring soldiers! Your job is to become a disciplined and capable force who can perform a wide range of roles! That is why you are stood in formation! That is why you will learn to follow orders! That is what you are getting paid for and that is what the Capital Wasteland needs! Do you understand me Cadet?"
"Yes!" She looked unnerved as I glared up at her.
"Yes Commander!" It was simple enough for them all to remember and I would not need to explain myself or reinvent the wheel when it came to ranks.
"Y-yes Commander!"
"Good, any more questions? No? Let's move on then, now you will learn how to stand at ease! This position…" They were a bunch of uncoordinated sloppy idiots but after around five hours of shouting if the strain on my throat was anything to go by, they seemed to have gotten the basics down. I had no doubt that I would need to do this again regularly for any of it to stick but hopefully by the end of the week I would have four suitable officers. Reilly was clearly upset I had stuck her in with the others but if she had any hope of earning the respect of the others, she needed to go though the same things they did and demonstrate to them her merit.
I let them fall out and eat double rations for dinner to prepare them for tomorrow. I felt a grin on my face as they all cheered at the food arrayed before them and dug in. They were going to need the energy. I left them to it and went to check on the beds prepared, there was a motley mix of cots, mattresses and mats laid out in one of the cleared-out offices. Space had quickly become a premium and I needed new structures built to house all my workers. Still, I had prepared sleeping spaces for everyone tonight now I just had to get my handbook photocopied.
Having functional office equipment after so long was almost enough to make up for the harsh green CRT monitors. Tanya was distracted for a moment by what looked like a shooting star bright in the evening sky before she got back to work.