It had been a week since the reclamation of Dry Rock Gulch. Piper and Rachel had needed to rest and recuperate following Piper's unfortunate incident with bloodworm venom. During that time, Rachel had taken the time to repair and upgrade her Silver Shroud armour, sewing up any minor tears in the coat's outer surface and replacing any damaged interior armour with whatever materials she could find – she'd probably have to visit Kent in Goodneighbor for a comprehensive refit eventually, of course, but this was the best she could manage for now. Rachel had also taken the time to have Colter's body removed from his wrecked suit of power armour and the shattered pieces moved to her quarters where she could work on them. The ramshackle suit was stood in the corner of the restaurant, parked securely in a repair station and surrounded by tools and salvage. Rachel had welded several long, sharp shards of metal onto each of the suit's forearms in anticipation of an up-close fight in the Galactic Zone, and had studiously scrubbed away the sizeable kill-tally which Colter had scrawled on the carapace section. She really did not want to be reminded of his lengthy butcher's record when she already had one of her own.

Now Rachel was sat on one of the booths in the Fizztop Grille, absently tapping her fingers on the tabletop as she examined one of the park flyers that had been strewn all over the restaurant's flat surfaces when she and Piper had arrived in their new accommodation, its edges frayed and torn, childish pencil scribbles covering the simple puzzles on its otherwise plain white back. She briefly and involuntarily wondered if Shaun would have liked those kinds of things if she had ever been able to bring him here before the war, instantly cursing herself for allowing her mind to wander off in that direction. She set the flyer down and selected a cigar from the box next to it, snipping the cigar's ends off with her clippers before placing it between her lips and lighting it with a single match. Puffing on it a couple of times to get the smoke flowing, she inclined her head back a little and exhaled a small stream of it into the air, watching its grey curls trickle lazily upwards towards the dangling light fixture above her.

"Do you two want to be alone?"

Rachel balanced the cigar on the edge of the ashtray to her left and gave Piper a sideways look. "Very funny," she said. "I'm just getting into character – Gage just told me Nisha's on her way up here. He thinks she's getting impatient about the Disciples not getting their due yet, and I want to be ready for her."

"Well, since you already got started, I might as well join in," Piper said, picking up the box of cigars and lighting one of her own. "The big bad Overboss needs her right-hand woman, right?"

"My thoughts exactly," Rachel said, as the elevator door opened with a soft pinging sound. Out of it stepped Nisha, flanked by her henchmen Savoy and Dixie. All of them were still wearing their bizarre headgear and bladed armour, which immediately set Rachel's teeth on edge. She already didn't trust any of them, and their turning up apparently dressed for a fight definitely wasn't doing anything to change that. She decided to exert a little pressure on them in order to make sure they knew who was really in charge. "Take those helmets off," she snapped sharply. "From now on, nobody covers their face when they talk to me."

Dixie and Savoy started to protest before Nisha hushed them with a wave of her hand. "As you wish, Overboss," she said, reaching up to remove her headgear and tucking it in the crook of her arm. Rachel swore she could see tiny pinpricks of blood bloom on Nisha's exposed skin as she did so, as if even just the merest touch of the helmet's edges could bleed someone out – but if they did, she showed no sign of being bothered by it. Nisha gestured at Savoy and Dixie to follow suit, which they did reluctantly while muttering lurid curses under their breath. When their heads were all bare, Rachel could see that they all had waxy black war-paint smeared around their eyes, presumably to make themselves appear more intimidating even when they were out of what she supposed they considered their uniforms. "So," Nisha continued, "when do we strike the Galactic Zone? My Disciples are getting restless. I don't know how much longer they can be kept in check."

"Well, you can rest easy," Rachel replied, blowing out a plume of smoke. "We can head out there as soon as you get your crew together."

"That's exactly what I wanted to hear," Nisha purred, sounding satisfied. It was probably the most congenial Rachel had heard her sound since arriving in Nuka-World, which was oddly encouraging. "That place will be one big robot graveyard by the time we're finished with it." She smiled cruelly. "I can't wait to see the look on that big ape Mason's face when he finds out he was at the back of the queue."

"Don't think that far ahead right now," Rachel said flatly. "The Galactic Zone needs to be pacified first before you start thinking of ways to piss off the Pack."

Nisha laughed, a shrill, cut-glass shriek. "'Pacified'?" she said with a hysterical snort. "You have no idea how the Disciples work, do you?"

"None," Rachel said, "but I guess you're going to show me soon, right?"

"Of course," Nisha said, another thin smile briefly crossing her lips. "You should be looking forward to it. We Disciples may not look it, but we're quite… poetic, in our own way. You'll see that for yourself soon, I'm sure."

If you say so, Rachel thought, before saying "I'm sure I will." She gestured to the elevator with the hand holding her cigar. "You can leave now."

"As you wish." Nisha's expression didn't change as she placed her helmet back on her head, followed suit by Savoy and Dixie. "You're in for a treat, you know. Soon you'll see why the Disciples are the only gang you'll ever need."

"I'll be the judge of that."

"I'm sure you will," Nisha said, echoing Rachel's previous statement. "Until then, Overboss." She inclined herself at the waist, spreading her hands out to either side before she turned on her heel and stalked back toward the elevator. Rachel felt a shiver of relief slither down her spine as the door hissed closed and the elevator car began descending noisily back down to the ground. She set her cigar down in its ashtray, leaned back in her seat and ran her hands over her face. Nisha was clearly going to be harder to win over than she had originally thought, regardless of whether or not she got any territory. Standing up, she marched resolutely towards the hunched-over suit of power armour, spun the release wheel on its back and stepped into it. The crude heads-up display flashed into existence as the seals closed, with crooked, flickering glyphs just about indicating the armour's condition and the status of its fusion core. As it did so a message flashed up in the corner of the cracked, dirty visor.

++ALL SYSTEMS GO, BOSS. READY TO KILL++

At least it's on-brand, Rachel thought sourly.

"Expecting a serious fight?" Piper asked, shaking her out of her reverie.

"Yes," Rachel replied. "The Galactic Zone is full of fully-armed and battle-ready robots and turrets. No sense in not taking precautions. And at least when I'm in this thing Nisha and the rest of those Disciple lunatics won't be able to stab me in the back, right?" She smiled before she realised Piper couldn't see her behind her helmet or the large carapace built around the armour's torso. She muttered a curse under her breath before continuing "All I'm saying is you should be fine as long as you stand behind me."

"Not funny, Blue," Piper retorted. "We're going to the market once you're done here and you're buying me the heaviest armour they have, no matter how much it costs."

"That's fair," Rachel said. "Nothing but the best for you." She gave Piper a thumbs-up with one of her armoured gauntlets, hoping that that would be enough to keep her on Piper's good side for now. "Let's go shopping…"

Rachel flexed the metal fingers of her armoured suit as she and a throng of Disciples approached the entrance to the Galactic Zone. Beside her, she could hear Piper obsessively ejecting and reloading the magazine of her pistol, and she hoped that her wife's nerves were holding a little better now that she was in possession of the heaviest armoured coat and headgear that Rachel had been able to find for her, which was specifically geared towards absorbing or deflecting laser and plasma fire. She had chosen such a garment because she knew the robots in the Galactic Zone were more likely to be armed with energy weapons than ballistic ones – they were supposed to be robots from the future, after all.

The thought of taking on a horde of futuristic robot warriors made her chuckle despite herself. When she was a little girl reading cheesy sci-fi comics, she had often dreamed about the years still to come and what wonders they would bring, but she had never expected to see them in reality.

Funny how things work out, she thought, a bleak smile briefly crossing her lips as she recognised the irony of the situation. As the squad of gang members crossed the threshold of the park, there was no warm welcome as there had been in Dry Rock Gulch, just a bulky, lumbering Nukatron robot stomping towards them menacingly while droning a warning to keep away from the entrance. Back when the park had been just a park, Nukatrons had acted as mobile refreshment units, cheerfully dispensing chilled bottles of Nuka-Cola to thirsty patrons, but now this robot had apparently become nothing less than a soldier on patrol.

Rachel's suspicions were proven correct when the robot opened fire with glowing blue bolts of energy which arced upwards and slammed into the ground with pulverising force. It took a moment for her to realise that the projectiles the robot was firing were actually torrents of liquid – volatile, brutally-destructive liquid which sent out shockwaves that she could feel even through her armour's crude shielding. She also realised that she would have a better chance of evading the robot's attack if she could outflank it, and the best way for her to do that was to be faster.

"Stay back!" she yelled at the throng of Disciples behind her. "I'll draw its fire!"

Triggering the release switch in the left gauntlet of her armour, she hopped out of its protective shell, picked up the gauss rifle she had been carrying and dashed to the robot's left side, loosing off a couple of wild, carelessly-aimed shots which pinged harmlessly off its thick carapace. Clumsily, it tried to track her with a creeping barrage of explosive blasts but she was moving too quickly for it to keep up. Jinking from side to side to confuse its targeting system, she closed the distance between her and the robot so that she was within its firing arc. If it tried to hit her again it would destroy them both, and she was sure that RobCo would have built in failsafe protocols to prevent it damaging itself – Protectron chassises were not cheap or simple to construct, after all. As she got close to the robot she grabbed her Pip-Boy's connector lead and jammed it into the interface port on the robot's torso, swiftly deactivating the machine and causing it to slump forwards, its arms powering down and hanging limply by its sides. As her heartbeat slowed and the adrenaline rush ended, she plugged her Pip-Boy in again and overrode the robot's command protocols. If it was going to fight for anyone, she decided it was going to fight for her. When she had finished uploading the appropriate command prompts, the robot jerked upright with a start, its weapons systems cycling into an active state once again. Rachel cocked her head in surprise as she smelled a familiar scent in the vapour coming off the nozzles. It was instantly recognisable as the cheery, summery aroma of Piper's favourite flavour of soda, Nuka-Cherry.

What the hell is in that stuff?

She made a mental note to tell Piper to lay off drinking any more Nuka-Cola products as quickly as possible. If that soda could be weaponised into something as lethal as this robot's primary armaments, there had to be something seriously wrong with it. She shook her head and headed back to her armour, climbing inside it and watching her visor display light up again. "Increase speaker volume twenty percent," she said hesitantly, not knowing if this crude suit of armour had the same specific subsystems as her standard Brotherhood battle-plate. After a moment, a short message flashed up on her visor display.

++YOU GOT IT, BOSS. TURNING IT UP NOW++

Shifting in place so that she was facing the mob of Disciples, she called out "Everybody move up here!", causing the ramshackle invasion force to begin converging on her. As soon as they began approaching, she dialled her speaker volume down again and waited for Piper to arrive at her side, idly flicking her rifle's safety catch on and off for a moment or two.

When the gang members had all joined the two of them, she ushered the Nukatron ahead of the group, its weapons up and ready to open fire. A few of the Disciples protested, obviously eager to get into any kind of fight they could, but she silenced them by firing a single shot from her rifle into the air before telling them sternly that a heavily-armed robot would be nothing but a help to their assault. One Disciple was clearly muttering something under her breath as she turned away from her and began stalking towards the park, so she stomped forward and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, her suit's metal fingers bending the woman's bones almost to breaking point. "I don't like it when people talk about me like that," she hissed as she lifted the unfortunate raider up and turned her towards her. "If you have something to say, say it to my face."

The woman's expression was partially hidden by her metal mask and hood, but her lower lip had begun quivering in fear. "I – Overboss, I wasn't –"

"You weren't what?" Rachel said, hefting the raider closer to her armoured carapace's viewing port, her grip clenching just a little tighter. The woman gasped in pain, wriggling weakly in Rachel's grasp as she did so.

"I wasn't disrespecting you –"

"Certainly looked like you were," Rachel snapped coldly. "One chance. Don't do it again." She opened her fist without another word, letting the raider fall heavily to the ground as she began stomping towards the entrance to the park. As the woman scrambled away clutching at her neck, Piper looked up at Rachel, an expression of concern on her face.

"Laying it on a little thick there, don't you think?" she said, sounding a little rattled.

"Maybe," Rachel said, crunching the knuckles of one armoured fist into the palm of the other. "Maybe not thick enough."

From what Rachel had been able to recall about the Star Control area of the Galactic Zone, the place was the central hub of the entire exhibit, and she felt an involuntary moment of satisfaction to discover that her memory had been correct. The huge computer in the glass-enclosed structure at the area's core was providing instructions to the whole mass of robots milling around the many rides and attractions, but unfortunately was also missing multiple key components that would allow her to shut them all down and pacify the area in one fell swoop, as well as give her access to the pristine suit of X-01 armour in the chamber's central display, which left her with two options: either conduct a detailed scavenger hunt throughout the park, or simply destroy every robot that crossed her path. She supposed she could use her Pip-Boy to reprogram a few to help her out, but there would still be a huge amount of scrap to be cleared away by the time this was all over.

Not that that would be her problem, of course – once the Disciples had made the place their own, she would make sure that they knew it was their responsibility to keep it at least passably functional. There were a few rides here that she had missed out on the last time she had been here, and she did not like the idea of dying because one of them had been sabotaged for the fun of it.

That was a concern she would attend to later, though. Right now she had more pressing concerns, as a swarm of Mr Frothy robots began buzzing towards her. It was unnerving to hear them all sneering threats in the same cordial tones used by Codsworth and most other Mr Handys, but she was forced to push that feeling aside and fire a short volley of Gauss rounds into the robot at the head of the swarm, shredding its armour and sending it spinning haphazardly to the floor, its rotor arms flailing and twitching before it detonated in a spray of razor-sharp shrapnel. Two of the other robots were caught in the blast and were thrown hard into a wall, their angry proclamations vanishing abruptly in strangled squawks of static. Stowing her rifle across the back of her armour, she grabbed one of the robots' still-flailing metal arms, tore it free from its moorings and brandished it like a club. She had a feeling this park would require a lot of close-quarters action, so she wanted to be ready.

Glancing around her, she saw that the closest attraction was the Starlight Interstellar Theater, its sign broken and dulled like the one at the entrance to the park. A few of the letters had partially broken free of their moorings and were hanging from them forlornly, shifting gently in the slight breeze. It was a pretty sad state of affairs for a place which had provided Nate and Rachel with so many happy memories. The films themselves had predictably been pretty terrible, but in the end, the fact that they had experienced them together was the only thing that mattered, and she found herself wondering for a second what Piper would have made of them. She resolved to come back after the zone had been pacified, carry out any necessary repairs on the theatre's projector, and then sit her wife down in front of a showing of Captain Cosmos And The Spider-Wolves From Venus. She had always loved that movie, even if Nate had outright hated it – she found that the ridiculous plot and absurdly cheap props and effects had a charm all their own, which she found hard to explain to others without them inevitably giving her a look of utter confusion. At least Piper had grown up in a world of absurdity and had demonstrated a much higher tolerance for the strange and unusual, but Rachel had to wonder where she would finally draw the line.

"Blue?" Piper said, making Rachel twitch out of her thoughts, the servos of her armour hissing at the sudden movement. "You okay?"

Rachel took a moment to consider that, before she replied "I'm fine." She hefted the severed appendage in her right fist and spun it a couple of times experimentally, before marching towards the theatre's doorway. "Let's do this."

There were robots all around her, her helmet's visor display flashing up multiple targets on all sides. Rachel lashed out at the closest Mr Frothy, punching a hole in the machine's boxy torso and crunching its processing core in her metal fist. Pivoting on one foot, she swung the robot's still-twitching form into the path of an incoming eyebot, smashing it to scrap, only to have her torso plating crumpled by a flurry of blows from a Nukatron droid, the heavy carapace sloughing off and laying bare her suit's vulnerable inner shell.

A message flashed up on her visor. ++TOO MANY BAD GUYS, BOSS++ it read, almost comically. ++TIME TO PARTY++

For a moment, Rachel wondered what the suit meant before she felt a swift, almost imperceptible jab in the side of her neck, the puncture immediately starting to burn and her vision beginning to turn red at the edges. She felt her heart begin pounding agonisingly quickly in her chest, the tortured thump of it echoing in her ears, and felt a searing energy coursing through her veins even as her lungs seemed to empty completely in the blink of an eye. Wrenching her helmet off just to get some fresh air, she smashed it into the featureless face of the lithe, agile Nukatron which had attacked her, shattering the machine's deadly head-laser in the process and destroying a good chunk of its central processor. The robot managed to squawk out a single distress call before collapsing backwards, and Rachel felt a bellow of triumph shredding its way out of her throat unbidden, the red haze at the edges of her vision becoming more and more intense as the moments passed.

As it relentlessly battered down her resistance, she realised what was happening to her. It was a huge dose of Psycho…

… and it felt good.

The last thing she saw before she completely lost control was the look of sheer horror on Piper's face at what she was becoming.