The Good Fight
"You've read Lord of the Flies, sir?"
"I have, but your analogy will not hold. These children will have guidance. They will have discipline. And they have one thing no ordinary children have, not even the SPARTAN-II candidates. Motivation."
—SCPO Franklin Mendez and Lt. Kurt Ambrose.
". . . God knows life in the vault isn't perfect, but at least you'll be safe. Just knowing that will be enough to keep me going."
—James
Word count: 8067
3:25 pm August 31, 2277, Galaxy News Radio
Shiloh was bruised, covered in super mutant viscera, coming down from an adrenaline rush with all the twitchiness and anxiety that came with it, and she had seen her life flash before her eyes at least three times in the past hour . . . but she was where she had set out to be and alive to be annoyed, so Shiloh decided she had no grounds to complain.
Might have to burn these clothes though, she thought as she laid down the Fat Man and wiped a hand across her helmet's visor to clear it. That reduced it from opaque-red to translucent-and-streaked-with-red, so she flipped it up instead and followed the Brotherhood of Steel members into GNR.
She took in the interior as the survivors extricated themselves from their armor. The lobby was dimly lit with emergency lighting and split in half by the same sandbag walls and razor wire as the steps outside. Behind that were numerous shelf units laden with ammunition boxes and medical kits as well as a set of stairs on each side leading up to the second floor's inner balcony. She could hear faint, pained moans from the wounded Brotherhood soldiers on the upper levels.
She'd have to check them out. Gunshots weren't something she had much experience with—Vault 101 wasn't usually violent and Megatonheld an uneasy detente with the River Barons in Springvale since the gang had been mauled in a failed bid to seize the town several months ago—but Doc Church had made sure she knew the procedure and she still had some Pre-War quality meds she grabbed from the Vault clinic during her escape. Three Dog could wait.
She checked the medical kits—the Brotherhood used a sorting system that was just as obtuse as Vault-Tec's, except she hadn't been basically raised with this one—until she found one with what she'd most likely need, then took the stairs two at a time guided by the sounds of pain, and found the Brotherhood troops in short order. There were twelve that she could see, surrounded by shell casings, spent fusion cells, and used chem injectors—some perfectly safe and what she expected, others things that the Brotherhood of Steel probably didn't approve of. Two were dead, because for as long as the mutants had been attacking and as much firepower as they'd put out, someone was bound to get unlucky eventually, and three were walking wounded trying to tend to the other seven while having only two functional arms between them. Those that could, looked at her in surprise as she walked through the doorway.
She stripped out of the vault suit with the speed and ease of having been the only choice of clothes she'd ever had, because she couldn't wash up, there wasn't anything to throw over it, and like hell was she going to risk dropping radioactive super mutant guts into an open wound. So it was surgery in her underwear, then; at least the Brotherhood had some gloves.
A couple of the wounded were well enough to give her appreciative whistles. She'd let it slide this time.
"Alright," Shiloh said as she slid the gloves on with a snap, "triage time. Who's got it worse?"
[LOCAL TIME/DATE UNAVAILABLE] 0037 HOURS, JUNE 23, 2554, (MILITARY CALENDAR)\ [ERROR: LOCATION UNKNOWN]\ SPARTAN-B292 Mission Clock +17:37:23
Timebomb, they decided, could wait. The broken clavicles were nonfatal as a rule; the seven bullets he'd caught, while initially alarming, miraculously missed his organs and arteries entirely—both in the initial vectors and by a general failure to fragment or tumble on penetration. Their tentative assessment for the poor ballistic performance was a defective powder load, but they weren't about to make any plans that hinged on that being true. They sterilized the gunshots with the bare minimum of Biofoam, redressed them with the cleanest bandages from the clinic's supplies (hardly ideal, but they might need their own to treat the captives they meant to rescue), and gave him a dose of polypseudomorphine to keep him under for a day. Then they left. Time was of the essence.
Following the locals' suggestions, they observed intermittent blood splatter on the road as they moved north, but there was no way to know if it was even human, let alone if it was related to their quarry . . . until they reached a camp several kilometers from Big Town. On the far bank of a sluggish, fetid river, in the shadows of a decaying bridge, sat a pair of ramshackle lean-tos, a small slapdash dock, a cold campfire, and three bodies. One floated face down in the water, gently pinned against the dock, his rust-flecked revolver lodged within reach between two planks. The second, once they pulled her from the collapsed shelf unit that covered her, had been split open from left shoulder to pelvis; a crude machete, its blade coated in some unknown, now-dry poison, lay nearby. The third, now swarmed by giant flies, was set alight, gunned down, and dismembered; none of his limbs were present. A scorched rifle similar to Dusty's lay a few meters away. All three wore the remnants of crude armor fashioned from scorpion carapace. They swept the site for matériel, taking the revolver, a sawed-off double barreled shotgun, and a dozen rounds for each fished from the mess by the second corpse.
A several kilometers-long detour east to a railyard produced only a hallway full of rusty bear traps and junk suspended from the ceiling. Noteworthy as a sign of habitation, but most likely not the kind that they were looking for.
It was in the ruins of a church that they first encountered the super mutants. They spotted it from the trainyard; tilting steeple and crumbling roof, back half blackened by fire and the rest bleached white by the sun, girders and tree trunks raised like pikes meant to ward off Scarabs. They smelled it on approach; the sickly-sweet stench of meat rotting in the heat, mixed with excrement and chemical fires. They heard the creatures as they moved to stack up against the doorway:
"Wish I had a NEW WEAPON. Something good to SMASH with. Wish I could hold one of those Behemoth clubs. SO BIG! SO MUCH CRUSH!"
Three; big, yellow-green, heavily muscled. One carried a sledgehammer, another a nail board. The last, wearing a rough-hewn set of metal armor complete with helmet, toted a rifle of unknown make. All were ripping chunks from a corpse dropped by a fire pit in the middle of the church floor. An older, dark-skinned man, tightly bound at his hands and feet, cowered in the far left corner.
Three hostiles, two of them. No flashbangs, no silencers or suppressors, no idea of enemy reinforcements.
Workable.
Cloaked, they moved as one, as silent and lethal as vipers. The rifleman and the hammer wielder dropped to the ground, never knowing of the threat at their backs, brain stems pierced by knives with more force behind them than any normal human could produce. The third scarcely began to reach for its club when a snap kick to the back of its knee sent it toppling into waiting arms. A swift, brutal wrench and it too went limp, neck twisted beyond its natural limits.
The captive gaped at them as they became visible, as they cleaned their knives, as they cut him free.
"You're not one of the victims we were sent to find," Tom said. "Do you know where else they take prisoners?"
The man hobbled over to the gap in the back wall and pointed to the northeast. He licked his lips. "The police station." He rasped.
"Go to Big Town," Tom ordered. "Tell them we sent you."
The man nodded dumbly, walked stiffly over to collect the discarded rifle, and staggered out of the ruin. They continued on.
The entrance to the Germantown Police Headquarters was sealed, rubble from its upper floors having made as effective a barrier as the reinforced concrete walls. Theyswept the rusted chain-link fences and sandbag walls of the relief post erected around the building, stalking and killing four more mutants and one of the other abominations Leathers had spoken of—she'd left out all the extra arms, none of which were in the right place. A door on the side was locked, breachable, but not silently. The station's back they found torn asunder, a path cleared of debris lead to a decrepit wooden door on the second floor. An obvious trap.
They cloaked. They sprung it. The door swung inward, deafening in the silence.
Crazed laughter and bellows of "FRESH MEAT!" almost drowned out the heavy footfalls that answered them. A mass of contacts appeared on their motion trackers, no longer shielded by thick walls.
So much for stealth.
Six mutants spilled around a corner down the hall.
Two thirty-millimeter fragmentation grenades detonated in their midst; their thick hides left them staggered, more disoriented than disabled. One bellowed in rage, even more eager for a fight.
They put two 7.62x51 millimeter armor piercing rounds through each of the creatures' skulls and ensured that they never had a chance to regain their bearings.
Mutant number seven barreled out of a room halfway down the hall, aimed low, and hosed the doorway with automatic fire. They were already back in cover. Mutant eight, a straggler from the pack, rounded the far corner, a bolt-action rifle clenched in meaty hands. Seven's gun clicked dry.
Seven died. Eight followed before the smart one even hit the floor.
They reloaded; swept up the hall, knives in hand to ensure that the monsters stayed down. No further contacts; they checked each room to be certain. A two-man pincer, far too late and far too small, stormed through the back door.
The mutants made a valiant effort to sweep the floor for them, but their lines of sight were too short, too easily broken. They separated—isolated—themselves of their own accord, and were in turn dispatched.
Any hostiles left in the building would have made a kill zone at the base of the only usable set of stairs by now. Without the floor plan, they wouldn't risk using their explosives to make another entrance to the level below. There was also the looming threat of mutant reinforcements. Their best option, it seemed, was to set a grenade trap at the top of the staircase and double back to the side door. It would, if nothing else, divide their foes' fire.
They ghosted back down the steps, over the rubble, and into the currently deserted camp. The door hung wide open, forgotten in the doomed flankers' haste. Above them, the plasma grenade detonated. They moved faster. One contact in the room to their left; a tentative, human "Hello? Is anyone there?" meant a surviving captive. They confirmed it as they passed the doorway: a woman, red jumpsuit, red bandana, dark skin, locked securely in a cell. She would have to wait though, because they hear three sets of heavy footsteps approaching.
The largest mutant they'd seen rounded the corner at the far end of the hall. Its skin stretched taut over muscles far thicker than those of its smaller fellows, its sneer more wrathful, it carried what looked like a human spin on the Brutes' signature melee weapon, the Gravity Hammer.
They split; Lucy broke right, into what was still recognizable as a locker room, while Tom dashed left, up a branching hallway. The sound of cracking drywall and a string of automatic fire told him which way the monster went.
He took concealment against a doorway halfway up the hall, the room beyond empty save for rusty tables, rotten desks, and a door directly across from him. Two blips became two mutants in ad-hoc armor, the first wielding a flamethrower, the other toting a different model of rifle. They stood close together, so much so that when his first burst of fire struck the point man's head and blasted out the back, the follower was left stumbling with an askew helmet and a corpse underfoot. The delay was fatal.
By then, Lucy's MA5K was silent, but the frustrated snarls and the crunch of metal on concrete remained alongside the yellow dot on his tracker. A new contact came into being on his HUD, racing up the stairs at the end of the corridor. Tom pivoted, a bare green head and torso rose into his view—and then fell back out of it in a spray of red. He returned the way he came to assist Lucy.
The monster had her on the defensive. It was too close for explosives, too massive to overcome by hand—she could best him in a spar more often than not, but this thing was the size of a Hunter—and judging by the rivulets of blood trailing down its head and chest, already shrugged off half a magazine from her carbine without suffering any ill effects. It couldn't catch her though: it was too slow, too clumsy; its hammer could only harm what it connected with; and Lucy was far too smart to be herded into a corner, despite its best efforts.
Tom shot it in the back of the head. The creature turned to him, utterly unbothered by what should have been the obliteration of its brain stem, growling obscenities.
Lucy stuck a plasma grenade between its shoulders. This provoked an annoyed, confused grunt. They ran.
Their foe roared. He heard one step, then another.
Boom.
The walls around him lit up a vicious blue-white and his shadow reached the end of the hall. When he turned around, most of the locker room's northern wall was ash with a set of shriveled, blackened legs at the near-molten center. Bits of scorched bone and flecks of superheated metal had sprayed outward; a particularly ghoulish shrapnel.
Covenant plasma grenades were treated as anti-armor weapons for a reason.
Lucy's bios were still green. Tom had to make a wide loop to get to her, one that took him by the stairs—they would have died if they tried that route—and by the time he got there she had her gear back in order. She raised her left hand, thumb across her palm, then made a fist. There really wasn't much he could add to that.
They strode side-by-side into the jail block and, rather than waste time tracking down the key to the cell door, simply seized the rusty bars and bent them out of the way. The young woman within clambered through and looked at the two of them, pleading.
"You have to get to the basement quickly, Shorty might still be alive!" she begged. "Then we need to get back to Big Town fast; I heard the muties talking about another raid tonight!"
"We've eliminated numerous super mutants so far, do you have an estimate of how many are in the area?" he asked.
The woman shook her head. "This isn't their base, just a stopover. They were talking about taking me home, wherever that is."
"I'll get your friend," Tom said, then tilted his head toward Lucy. "You go with her, salvage what you can. We're leveling this place when we leave. And take this," he passed her the revolver and bullets they'd recovered earlier, "just in case."
The basement took the mutants' depravities to new heights. The cloying tang of spoiled meat choked the air. What had been a firing range when the station was in human hands was now filled with mutilated corpses, sacks of viscera, and bloodstains; cockroaches the size of house cats scuttled amongst the rot. Fortunately, other than the insects, only the captive Shorty was still down there, his constant calls for help making him easy to find. It was a simple matter to cut him loose, hand him the sawed-off, and tell him to loot the place while C7 and T-C-C were applied to every load-bearing element in reach.
Five remote detonators, one can of foaming explosive, eighty centimeters of thermite-carbon-cord, and one shotgun lock picking later and they were all back on the ground floor. Shorty, having found a pair of canvas bags, several pistols, a sub machine gun, and an assortment of ammunition, radiated smugness. Lucy and Red gathered four rifles, the ammunition, two books of all things, and parts stripped from the flamethrower and half a dozen other guns. The Big Towners elected to put their original armaments away and instead carry the best-maintained carbines from the haul.
"Stay between us," Tom told them, and received no dissent. "We'll detonate the explosives once we're well clear of the building." Lucy's status light blinked green once.
They cleared the relief station without issue and were safely traversing the surrounding ruins when they triggered the ordnance. At the dull whump of controlled demolition, they all paused to turn and watch as the Germantown Police Headquarters collapsed in on itself. Their charges whistled appreciatively.
From there the group avoided the main road south back to Big Town, creeping from copses of sickly trees to rocky bluffs to heaps of ancient refuse as much as they could for the multi-kilometer trek. Red and Shorty slowed their progress, though not nearly as severely as the two Spartans had feared. The two followed directions well, such as when told to go prone and wait among the rebar and concrete of a crumbling monorail line when they spotted a group of super mutants.
The party was three in crude metal armor—one ax, one sledgehammer, and one of what Shorty confirmed to be a pipe rifle between them—with a pair of the disgusting aberrations Red called "centaurs" dragging themselves along slightly behind. The green ones matched pace with their ersatz hounds, plodding leisurely up the road as though they were the masters of the universe. The SPARTANs had initiative, elevation, range, and cover; it would be trivial to cut the patrol down where they stood. It would also be audible to anyone within at least ten kilometers. They lost twenty minutes as the things ambled past.
There were no further obstructions. The only other living things they encountered were the giant flies swarming the bodies by the river, too busy gorging on the carrion to bother them. The sun set by the time they arrived, a new moon rising to replace it, but as soon as Big Town's walls came into sight, Red and Shorty barreled past them with something close to relief on their faces. The two of them didn't like it, but wouldn't begrudge such a miraculous reunion; the resultant cheers were quite refreshing. They crossed the bridge to applause and proclamations of their heroism.
Dusty was still at his post, and Church milled about uncertainly—well away from the others—but Rags, Leathers, and Flash were clustered around Red and Shorty, alternating between enthusiastic hugs and joyous whoops.
Red, though, wasn't one to waste time: "I know you two have already risked your lives once today, and I hate to have to ask you to do it again . . . but the mutants will probably be here soon."
Her friends fell silent. Tom and Lucy watched the emotions that flitted across six faces; mostly resignation, some fear, no surprise.
"We'll handle it," Tom said quietly. "What do you have for us to work with?"
Red had the integrity to look sheepish. "What we brought back from the police station—"
Which was inferior to their own hardware.
"—a couple disabled robots in the junk pile—"
Which they didn't know the first thing about.
"—some Stimpaks—"
Which they had never heard of before now.
"—and us."
They had, optimistically, eight hours to prepare. They were experienced in training people from scratch, yes, but that wasn't possible in such a short time frame. At the very least, they would have to establish who could actually hit a target with the guns on hand; who could keep their cool under fire; situational awareness; threat assessments; basic small unit tactics. For a battle at night on top of it all. Their augmentations give them excellent low light vision, and the VISRs of modern helmets only compounded that. The Big Towners possessed neither.
On top of that, their equipment was generally ill-suited to stacking the deck. The explosives were too few in number to effectively mine the perimeter, and using them within the settlement would level or incinerate most of it. Their SPI wasn't MJOLNIR power armor; it wasn't meant for stand-up fights, and with just the two of them, they'd get bogged down quickly if the mutants arrived in the kind of numbers they'd already seen. The SPIs' optical and thermal camouflage was their greatest asset, though, and made splitting up substantially less of a risk. A more fluid defense might work.
"Is there anywhere you can hide?" Tom asked. "The clinic's basement, perhaps?"
"Yes," Red replied, "but if they find us . . ."
"We'll handle it," he repeated, then addressed the others. "Take what you need and hole up there until we tell you it's clear. We'll draw the mutants off or wipe them out."
"Right," Red sighed, "Pappy, help me with the medicine. Kimba, Dusty, sort the guns. Shorty, find Bittercup and get the food, caps, and salvage somewhere it'll survive; I don't want to lose everything if they try to burn the whole place down. Flash—"
"Um," the blond man interrupted, "actually, I'm gonna need someone to help move Timebomb."
"Timebomb's alive?!" Red and Shorty shouted simultaneously.
"That lucky bastard," Shorty half laughed.
"Guys," Red groused, "you know I'm the doctor, right? I need to know . . . never mind. How is he? Can he be moved?"
"Still out, but his breathing sounds alright," Flash answered.
"We disinfected and re-bandaged his wounds," Tom interjected, "then gave him a sedative that should keep him under for about another sixteen hours before we left to rescue the two of you. It's not ideal to move him, but in our semi-professional opinion, it would have been safe to do so then."
Red threw a calculating glance at them both. "You two are just full of surprises, aren't you? For mercs, you still haven't asked for payment and you keep taking on more work." She shook her head. "Change of plans Pappy, I'm with Flash."
"Yeah, yeah. I got it," Rags—Pappy—grumped from halfway to the clinic. "We'll get to linger a couple extra minutes when the clinic collapses on top of us all."
Tom shot back, "We're not getting paid if you're all dead."
"How ominously reassuring," Pappy retorted. "You really know how to put a fella at ease."
At this point Red spotted Church for the first time. "Who are you and what can you do?"
"Names Matthias, little lady. Merc with far less luck and hardass than your two. Know my way around a rifle and some first aid . . . can always be some more dumb muscle if you need that." He shrugged. "Consider my services on the house, seeing as I'd probably be chum or worse if not for those two."
Red was silent for a moment. "Help Pappy," she finally said, "then hole up with us."
"Roger," Matthias replied, throwing her a mock salute as he jogged off.
They watched the Big Towners disperse to make their preparations, then went their own way. There were plans to make.
10:34 pm, August 31, 2277, Galaxy News Radio
She was able to save the ten of them, in part thanks to the swift arrival of Vargas and who she now knew to be Sentinel Sarah Lyons. One man needed to have his left arm amputated at the shoulder, a woman lost her right leg above the knee, and she'd have never been able to handle those alone. They might even escape being permanently crippled if the Brotherhood had prostheses and the know-how to install them (she had neither). The rest avoided being so severely mutilated; just exhaustion, fractures, bullet holes, and shrapnel wounds aplenty. Pre-War Stimpaks were mass-produced miracle workers.
It took seven hours, and cost her a third of her Stimpaks, but a job well done was a job well done. The number of dead had still risen from seven to eleven—the minigun crews that had received a first hand demonstration of the effects of a mini-nuke—but there wasn't any point in her getting worked up over people who were dead before she left Megaton. And it would have been so much worse, for any group that wasn't the Brotherhood.
"The DJ's still up, right?" she asked no one in particular.
"Normally, yeah," one of the least injured, and thus not sedated, survivors replied. "For you specifically? Definitely. Go back to the lobby and take the door on the second level across from the entrance. We can hold down the fort here."
"Finley left you some usable clothes by the door," another chimed in.
"Thanks," she said, glad not to have to put the armored vault suit back on just yet. The clothes weren't much—a semi-clean combination of a white tank top and a pair of brown cargo pants—but at this point anything was an improvement.
She went back to the lobby where the uninjured Brotherhood members—sans Colvin, she was pretty sure she'd heard him tromping up to the roof at some point—had completed the macabre task of gathering their dead and moved on to cataloging what they could salvage from the battle.
Sentinel Lyons looked up at her as she entered. "Tell Three Dog that Vargas and I will be leaving later tonight to get the relay back up and running. And don't get yourself roped into it. You're good, but not the kind of good that'll survive a meat grinder like the Mall."
"I'll pass it on," Shiloh replied as she opened the proper door. She didn't know what getting to the National Mall would entail, but it was presumably much like the route to GNR. No point, then, in the Lyon's Pride wasting daylight in the metro system.
Past the doors was a flight of stairs leading to a room full of disassembled terminals and what she had to assume was broadcasting equipment, as well as a hole in the ceiling that might explain why power armor seemed to rarely leave the ground floor. A staircase directly across from the first led to a room full of operational hardware and two people playing cards. A man and a woman, both dark-skinned and black haired; the man paired a headwrap and glasses with a mustache and goatee and wore an oft-patched set of rugged travel wear; the woman had a similarly well-used tan hoodie, off-white pants, and the kind of sturdy boots that people out in the wastes would and did kill for. Both looked up as she approached, but the woman went back to contemplating her hand while the man laid his face down on the table and rose to greet her.
"The look on your face says it all," he began. "You're wondering who the heck this guy is and why you should care. Well, prepare to be enlightened." He spread his arms out. "I am Three Dog, jockey of discs and teller of truths. Lord and master over the finest radio station to grace the Wastes: Galaxy News Radio. And you, well . . . I know who you are. Heard about you leavin' that vault. Just like dear old Dad, hmm? Met him already . . ."
Looking behind him, Shiloh could see the woman rolling her eyes. Presumably working with Three Dog all day everyday caused his theatrics to lose their charm, but he hadn't asked her to rob and/or murder someone yet, so that put him well above Moriarty in her book. She hadn't harbored any expectations about the DJ, since GNR had been down by the time she'd reached Megaton and it would have taken a special kind of stupidity to have her Pip-Boy broadcasting on the way there, so finding out that he was actually the kind of ersatz spy-master she aspired to be was unexpected, if not surprising.
And her father had at least made it this far, though he almost certainly still had a two-week lead on her. That was good to know, rather than stumbling around completely in the dark.
"The pleasure's mine," she said politely, "and please, call me Shiloh . . . just don't spread it around, if you would. Sentinel Lyons said that she and Paladin Vargas will be heading out later tonight to get your station back up. And what makes you so certain that I'm looking for anyone, my father included?"
He chuckled. "Oh come on. You're a spitting image of the guy. He's been here before, and now you're here. Doesn't take a genius to figure it out. You want to find your dad, and it just so happens his location is known to yours truly. Normally, I'd make it a trade . . . but with what you've done for the boys and girls of the Brotherhood, I'll give you this for free."
Now she'd been told she looked like her father many times growing up in the vault, but she'd always attributed that more to politeness than sincerity (and by Moriarty, but she filed that under attempted extortion). She'd inherited his complexion, and a bit of facial structure, but her eyes and hair were definitively her mother's—and almost pure white hair on a child had always been the most striking of her features. She still wasn't quite sure she bought it.
"We are talking about the same man, right?" she asked.
"Dr. James Breen," Three Dog affirmed. "When your dad passed through here, he and I talked for a good long time. He's a real stand-up kind of guy. He said some scientific mumbo-jumbo which didn't make sense to me and mentioned something called 'Project Purity'. He also said something about going to visit a Doctor Li in Rivet City. Then, he left in a hurry. Looks like I've got my way of contributing to the Good Fight . . . and he's got his own."
Rivet City. As she suspected. She couldn't call the trip a pointless, inconvenient detour, if only because several of the Brotherhood soldiers would have died without her intervention, but her personal mission would not have suffered much had she followed her initial hunch. Might as well make the most of it.
She grabbed an empty office chair—more patches than original upholstery and its wheels so rusted they didn't even squeak—and set it at the card table. She settled into it as Three Dog returned to his seat and picked up his cards.
"You know my story," Shiloh queried the two, "what're yours?"
"Three Dog's seen it all," he said bitterly, barely taking his eyes off his cards. "The Capital Wasteland at its ugliest. People killed for scraps of food, wounded children wandering aimlessly. Some seriously fucked up shit. If it wasn't for the Good Fight, I think I would have gone crazy by now."
The woman chuckled and set down the three through six of hearts while tossing the five of diamonds into another pile. "Three Dog pulled me out of a tight spot with some Talons about six years back, and sticking with him seemed like the best idea at the time. Now I've got a roof over my head, a lotta guns between me and the rest of the world, and the often lonely men wielding those guns." She smirked. "Good times to be had all around."
"So," she began, addressing only Three Dog, "what do you mean by the 'Good Fight?' The Brotherhood and their conflict with the Super Mutants? Or more general wasteland survival?"
"Sorta," he replied as he drew a card. "Imagine a picture, okay? A picture of the Capital Wasteland. All that brick and rock. A whole lot of nothing, right? There's people out there trying to just barely make it by from day to day. Fighting to stay alive and make something of what they got. But then you've got all kinds of shit . . . slavers, Super Mutants, raiders . . . They all want a slice of the pie too and aim to take it by force."
"And not everyone has Megaton's walls or the Brotherhood's power armor to fight back with," she finished. "Where do you come in?"
"Close," he said as he laid out the seven of every suit and discarded the two of clubs, "even with those things most people can't fight back at all against those kinds of enemies. They just run away and hide or they stay and die. It just ain't right. So that's where I enter the picture. I fight the Good Fight with GNR as my gun. I tell the people where it's safest, where it's not; who's honest, who's a hustler; and sometimes when and where they can kick some raiders while they're down. As best I can, at least. . . you'd be surprised just how many little birdies sing in ole Three Dog's ear. The sound of truth goes out across the Capital Wasteland. Hell, someone's got to counter that bullshit on the Enclave station."
"Do you really need to stand against that last one?" Shiloh asked. "I doubt there's any substance to Eden; I've only met one person who buys into it, and even he had to admit that it's been the same canned platitudes for thirty years."
Three Dog shrugged as his partner drew a card. "I'm less worried about the Enclave showing up out of the blue than I am of those broadcasts convincing people to not support the Brotherhood, who are here and trying to make things better. They don't talk about it to me, but I know things have been touch and go for them since the Outcasts broke off."
"And keeping your security afloat doesn't hurt, either?" she mused.
"Pretty much," he said bluntly. "I have plenty of enemies that would love nothing more than to put a bullet between my eyes. The only thing keeping that from happening is Sarah Lyons and the Brotherhood of Steel. We've brokered a sweet deal. They keep me from taking a dirt nap, and I keep a strong roof over their head as well as the ability to chat with their guys as far west as the Lamplight Caverns—probably farther, they just haven't done that while we've been up and running." He looked up from the cards to her. "And you? Your part in the Good Fight going to be patchin' people up, or do you plan to do more?"
The four of clubs went into the discard pile.
Shiloh shrugged. She was a doctor by (incomplete) training, a scientist and engineer by hobby, and a fighter by necessity. She'd traded using the skills and resources she'd left Vault 101 with and put herself in a position that was substantially better than that of the average wastelander, but she never would have survived to GNR without the Brotherhood of Steel.
"Probably," she admitted. ". . . I mean, once I find my father I'm going to slap him for what happened during the vault lockdown, then I intend to see Project Purity or whatever he's after through to completion. He wouldn't have left for nothing, but I'm working off a handful of notes that only alluded to it, so I know about as much as you do. Of course, that's his brainchild, and I'm a late arrival to it. . . so I don't know if that counts. Though I think I'll leave the firefights to the Brotherhood of Steel."
"Don't blame you for that . . ." he said as he drew another card. He added it to the rest of his hand, smiled knowingly at his opponent, and laid all five of them down on the table. The eight through jack of spades.
The other woman groaned in defeat. "You win. Don't even need to bother counting up the points." She stood as Three Dog started gathering up the deck. "I'm going to bed now. See you whenever."
"Night Marge," he called after the departing woman, then looked to Shiloh curiously as he began to shuffle the deck. "You want to play?"
Shiloh brought her Pip-Boy up to check its clock—five after eleven—and shook her head. "I'll pass. I want to be on my way to Rivet City as soon as there's enough light to navigate the ruins."
"Alright," he acquiesced, "when you leave, backtrack until you're on the south bank of the Potomac again, and stay there 'til you reach the big bridge after the Anchorage Memorial. Don't bother with the ramp from the old road, the bridge collapsed on that end so it only leads to a Brotherhood lookout post. Stick to the shoreline—and watch out for mirelurks—'til you get to the supports; it's a good place to stay for the night if you don't want to cross. Now, Rivet City has mercs holding down the ruins along the north bank, but don't linger. I don't trust the Talons as far as I can throw one of the boys in power armor. It adds a lot of walking but, trust me, it's much safer."
She had, in fact, been planning to take the shorter path along the north bank. "Good to know," Shiloh said as she got up and returned her chair to its original spot, "I'll adjust my plans accordingly."
"Oh, and kid," he called to her before she'd made it to the steps, "you might want to take a shower. I think some of that mutie managed to seep through. They're behind the Brotherhood's barracks."
She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to look at the DJ. "You have showers here?" she asked, incredulous and overjoyed.
"Of course," he laughed. "You didn't think several dozen people would live here without plumbing, did you? It's a massive pain to keep the system goin', but it's definitely worth it."
The problem with having multiple people who made a habit of moving quietly is that they can lose track of one another. At least, Shiloh assumed that was why she was almost smacked in the face by the door to the showers when she reached out to open it. Coming out was Sentinel Lyons, hair dry and still in combat armor, but with the blood and grime from earlier washed off her hands and face.
Now that she wasn't preoccupied with patching people up, Shiloh could take a closer look at the other woman. Blonde hair pulled back in a messy bun similar to what her friend Amata favored, and currently surprised blue eyes set in a tanned face that lacked the gauntness of most Megaton residents—though now that she thought about it, the same had been true of most of the Brotherhood members she'd treated as well. The two of them were about the same height, but Lyons was broader at the shoulders and had substantially more muscle definition on her bare arms. She could probably demolish any two members of vault security in hand to hand.
"Sorry," the Sentinel said after a moment of awkward silence, "I didn't hear you coming."
Shiloh waved her off. "It's a habit. . . hard to eavesdrop on vault hooligans if they know I'm there." She held out a hand. "Shiloh Breen."
Lyons shook it and hummed an agreement. "I haven't thanked you for what you've done for the Brotherhood. We would have lost more of the garrison if you hadn't sought them out as quickly as you did, and you probably saved some lives—mine included—taking out that Behemoth. Officially, I can't pay you for that, but I don't think I'll have trouble getting donations to compensate you."
"Thank you," Shiloh said, then more softly, "I'm sorry about Reddin."
There were worse ways to die, but that metal-on-metal screech was going to stick with her for a long time.
"She died well," Lyons decreed somberly, possibly as much to convince herself as Shiloh. "In the end, that's all that really matters."
Shiloh tried to think of something to keep the conversation going, only to draw a mental blank. "I imagine you're leaving soon, Sentinel, so I wish you luck getting GNR back up. By the time you double back here, I'll probably be on my way to Rivet City."
"Luck runs out," Sentinel Lyons huffed reflexively, "skill doesn't. . . but thanks. You can call me Sarah, by the way—you've earned that much for feeding a Behemoth a mini nuke and you're not one of my subordinates." She paused. "You came through Farragut West, right?"
She nodded. "Three Dog told me to take the south bank."
"Good," Sarah said, sounding relieved. "Enjoy your shower then."
I intend to, she thought as the other woman stepped into the room beyond and closed the door behind her.
[LOCAL TIME/DATE UNAVAILABLE] 0944 HOURS, JUNE 23, (MILITARY CALENDAR)\[ERROR: LOCATION UNKNOWN] SPARTAN-B091 Mission Clock +1:02:44:32
It was entirely possible that there wouldn't be a raid. Between their butchers' work at Germantown and the super mutants' lack of any discernible communications equipment, those plans might well no longer exist. They didn't know that though, so it would be criminally irresponsible to act like it . . . or to give the Big Towners such easily dashed hopes.
The sky was clear, but the moon was a thin, faint crescent and so the stars provided most of the illumination. Big Town itself had little hard cover, no viable elevated positions, and limited lines of sight from within; plasma grenades might well burn it down and the other explosives were similarly out of the question. The west was dominated by short, barren hills dotted with rusted vehicles. To the south and east were nothing but kilometers of flat ground, rarely broken by sickly trees, low mounds of rock, or the remains of ancient buildings; the standing end of an overpass mocked them, tall enough to see but outside the reliable range of the SRS-99. The north was much the same until the stubborn plant life along the river. The raiding party would almost certainly come from that direction, but with just the two of them and so little intel, they couldn't risk leaving to stage an interception. A pincer, however, they could work with.
They traded their sniper rifle and grenade launcher before Lucy jogged over and rigged up a sniper's blind among the trees and brush. It was hardly ideal but, if the mutants continued to treat Big Town as a corral, she had an unobstructed view of the only entrance, wouldn't put her partner's best cover in her line of fire, and was far enough from the road that there would be ample time to react if any rearguard heard and tried to find her. Then she settled in to wait.
Against what they would have considered all reason, the mutants came. Six—Ax, Hammer, and Rifle from earlier in the lead; their new friends Double Barreled Shotgun, Rebar Club, and the almost meter-taller Minigun close behind—and three Centaurs from the north. The western hills produced only two, whom Tom tagged as low priority. She trained the scope between Minigun's shoulder blades, waited until he signaled to fire, and pulled the trigger.
Minigun didn't so much drop as explode in a squall of gore and loose rounds; Ax subsequently had the brief misfortune of finding its skull as the next obstruction to the bullet's path. Ax's carcass hadn't even hit the ground before she adjusted her aim to Rifle and repeated the process.
The survivors knew that they were under attack by then, but the reports of the SRS-99 drowned out Tom's dispatching of the western pair, so they would only know of the threat from the rear. Maybe because they were closer to the tree line she was hidden in than to Big Town, maybe because of single-mindedness, the three about-faced and charged back north, leaving the Centaurs behind as they covered the distance in great, loping strides.
Lucy placed the sniper rifle aside—there was no reason to expend any more of its limited ammunition—relocated, and set her carbine to semi-automatic. The MA5K was rated for five hundred meters, but she knew the gun better than she did most people; she steadied her aim on Shotgun as her HUD's rangefinder steadily ticked down: 750 meters. . . 700. . . 650. . . 600. She pulled the trigger and watched the mutant's jaw shatter. It staggered as she adjusted her aim; the next two rounds caught it between the eyes and it dropped. She shifted to Hammer and the double tap sent it sprawling heels over head. Club raised its cudgel above its head in defiant rage by the time she lined up on it; whatever oath or challenge it might have had for her unheard as she cut it down.
None of the mutants got within five hundred fifty meters—precise, efficient, as easy as breathing. She relocated again and waited twenty minutes for a follow up, but no reinforcements appeared.
She stripped the three bodies of the gear they'd no longer need as she walked back to Big Town. Tom had long since dealt with the Centaurs in two parts discreet knife work and one part ax, which he left embedded in that particular creature in favor of policing the firearms. They moved together in a silence that would have been companionable if they weren't cloaked and scanning for threats. The wasteland remained quiet and they crossed back into Big Town unopposed. It only took a couple minutes to stash the salvage in the house with "Town Hall" crudely carved into the door, and then they headed to the clinic. When she set out, the Big Towners and the errant mercenary had been tired and high strung, most of them stacked up on either side of the bottom of the basement steps to better hose down whatever opened the door at the top. Red, on the other hand, took some of the local stimulants and set about operating on Timebomb almost as soon as the wounded boy had been laid down; by now she was probably done. They stayed clear of the basement door—no point risking friendly fire.
Lucy whistled the familiar six-note-long all clear loudly enough to get the others' attention. Tom followed it up with, "The raiding party's been dealt with. You're safe, for now."
Matthias and Dusty emerged first, followed closely behind by Leathers—Kimba—who quickly closed the door.
"Everyone else is asleep," she whispered. "Matthias and I'll stand guard. You two should get some rest."
They could go far longer without sleep, but it would be nice to not have to.
Tom chuckled. "We'll take you up on that."
Kimba gave them a semi-sad smile, as she and Matthias walked out the clinic's front door. "There are beds in the Clubhouse and the Common House across from here, take your pick."
The SPARTANs followed the locals outside but went straight across the barren courtyard while they went north to the entrance. The Common House was packed with beds, be they bare mattresses or on frames with sheets, however most looked as though they had gone unoccupied for quite some time. The beds had been arranged to allow everyone within to quickly evacuate the building, though, which meant that they would have to rearrange almost everything to avoid being caught out in the open if a super mutant decided to smash through one of the doors. There wasn't much they could do about one coming through the walls, but after a certain point, caution became paranoia.
The Clubhouse was more to their liking. It had been half converted into a storeroom and as such, the wasteland facing door and windows had been boarded over far more heavily to keep the contents in and would-be thieves out. Several mattresses had been stored in the nonfunctional kitchen and a large, robust couch stood in what had probably been the living room. They unstacked two of the mattresses, laying their rucksacks and heavy weapons on the remainder, then moved the couch to partially block the kitchen entrance against someone approaching from the old front door.
Lucy lay down on the bed nearer to the door frame as if worst came to worst, she was a substantially smaller target than her partner, carbine close at hand and motion tracker set to an audible alarm. She watched Tom settle in on watch and drew no small amount of comfort from his familiar presence. Then she closed her eyes and tried to drift off to her first night of sleep in this bizarre new world.
