Initiate.
Chapter Two: Baptism by Fire
Everything was gone. Where everything once was, there was nothing.
Nothing but silence.
Abel turned his head in each direction to morosely survey the land before him, struggling to take in the lack of... things... that he saw before him. The dirt of the mountain upon which his feet rested was dry and cracked, and the trees that had once lushly covered the Shenandoah Valley in green were petrified in stony black, and far sparser than he could remember them ever being in the past. There was no sign of grass, nor of the wildlife that had once made this part of the nation one of the last reservations for rural, forested life. Further into the valley, a still smoldering crater was the only remnant of the town that he had once called home. Each side of the crater had a deeply cracked bit of road leading into nowhere, for most of the only highway in the area had been covered with dirt and the debris of the nuclear explosions long ago.
A deathly wind whispered into the audio receptors on his helmet; it was the only sound he could hear aside from his own breathing. The temperature gauge on his helmet showed that, for a day in the middle of August, the area was certainly colder than it should have been. Nuclear winter, though not causing a literal winter environment this far south of New York, had lowered the temperature of mid-August Virginia to just over seventy degrees for the entirety of the summer. The wind would make it feel like it was less than sixty for the current day.
"A dead shame, sir. At least we can be sure that we gave as good as we got," he heard CAIN's voice crackle through the headset. He couldn't manage to open his mouth to reply in the negative nor the affirmative, and so he settled for switching the topic before his emotions could overtake him. His mind cracked back into the place that it had often been when he was a soldier, keeping him firmly on the task of assessing the situation.
"CAIN, see what you can do about finding out the radiation levels for the surrounding area, then pull up a map leading to D.C. that avoids the most irradiated. You might protect me from radiation, and I might have survived a massive dose of it more than two centuries ago, but it's best not to take any chances," he eventually decided on his reply. Rapidly, the box that had contained the information on his environment's temperature lit up with quickly scrolling statuses, listing distances and locations along with the relative radiation levels of those areas. It went by far too speedily for him to read it all, but he caught a glimpse of something that caused him to immediately jerk his eyes straight ahead and start walking north.
Location: Town, destroyed | RAD: 2,667 per second | Lethal
The entrance to the Rockland Tunnels still existed, at least, though the doors were less than in operable condition. Abel ended up prying one of the blue obstacles open with the extra strength of his power armor, walking quietly down the half-destroyed tunnels, surprised to see absolutely no signs of life whatsoever, as the tunnels traveled quite a bit underground and he thought that he might at least see some insects moving about even after the extent of the nuclear bombings. Instead, there was absolutely no movement aside from the occasional flutter of a bit of cloth or a poster hanging by the skin of its teeth to a board. The creaking sounds of a pipeline sounded on occasion from overhead, but elsewise, the only sounds that Abel could hear were his footsteps, the servos on his armor, and his own breathing. CAIN remained silent. Despite having only rudimentary programming to understand emotions, even the simple AI could understand the devastation that plagued Abel's mind.
Eventually, however, Abel came to a huge, blown-out area of what used to be an overground part of the car tunnels, oddly surrounded by rocks. In the distance, there was what looked to be a group of satellite relay stations, coalesced into three conjoined complexes. The cement walls looked thicker somehow than he remembered the relay stations ever having been in the past, and the data on CAIN's map did not at all show a relay station existing halfway through the Rockland area. He walked only a few hundred yards closer before he saw movement.
Three humanoid shapes in what appeared to be heavily modified sets of power armor stood around a bluish glowing transmitter with arcing energy spewing off of it every few seconds. They carried crude looking rifles with green-tipped barrels. These rifles were strikingly similar to the plasma weapons that had seen some limited use in the military in his time, but they looked to have been modified. The plasma rifles of his time had been largely ineffectual in combat against anything wearing any form of armor, and that was mainly because sending a super-heated ball of hydrogen at a target and then making said ball stay together without burning itself out in the air or spreading its impact too widely against solid armors was virtually impossible by the standards of the 2077 U.S. Armed Forces. These rifles, however, had a barrel that glowed a sickly yet vibrant green more easily and with less unstable power arcing. Abel narrowed his eyes.
His first contact with humans after a nuclear war that presumably wiped out any remnants of the civilized world and they were better armed than he was. He didn't like that one bit.
Abel walked cautiously forward, his laser rifle in a resting position in front of him as he decided to try his luck with his first encounter. The best case scenario was that they turned out to be friendly and to speak English, both of which he hoped for, but one more so than the other. The worst case scenario was that they were hostile and they either spoke a different language or didn't speak at all. If that were the case, he would not only be outnumbered by a well armed opponent, but he wouldn't be able to understand them if he caught anything they said.
He was unfortunate.
One of the men noticed him as he approached and then seemed to snap his head to look at his companions before they all three ran to take cover behind a nearby barricade, peeking with their rifles shouldered at him. Abel had only a moment to react as he heard one of them loudly shout "FIRE!" and then saw three sickeningly green bolts of superhot plasma accelerating towards him at a speed that reached about twice what he remembered from the plasma weapons of his own time.
He barely managed to work the servos of his armor into dodging in between two bolts of green, the third bolt flying wide of him and striking the entrance to the tunnels. Immediately, he brought his own rifle up to his shoulder and made a mad sprint towards the nearest piece of cover, firing three shots from his rifle at a time. He was in an open field, and so the nearest bit of cover was on the other side of the clearing, towards the entrance of the tunnels leading from it to the southern D.C. area.
The three men in strange power armor followed him with bolts of plasma, thankfully falling short of him as his own suit worked much faster than it seemed they were capable of tracing with the surprising but still slow projectiles from their rifles. One of Abel's shots landed home on the forehead of the helmet of the man closest to him, who flinched as his head heated fractionally and the systems in his suit helmet momentarily overheated. He noticed that the flinching soldier reached up and fumbled with his helmet's locking system as his comrades attempted suppressing fire on his still sprinting form. Finally, just as the ex-Colonel reached cover, he saw the hostile manage to reboot his suit's systems and restart his firing pattern.
An alarm started ringing right then. The man who had fumbled with his suit's systems had also managed to activate communications in some way with whoever it was he was in a group with, and Able just managed to bring his rifle up in time to send a laser through the eye-socket of a helmet that was emerging from the doorway he was taking cover next to. As the man inside the power armor fell backward, he heard a clang and a voice that could only mean that the man he had just killed had backup, but they had apparently decided to take up a waiting position inside the doorway to avoid ending up like their friend. Trapped between an open field and an ambush, Abel did the only thing he could think of doing.
He sprinted through the doorway, left shoulder first, surprisingly managing to avoid tripping over the body of his fallen enemy and taking the remaining enemy off-guard as their first set of plasma bolts streaked over his shoulder and either impacted the doorway or flew into the open air behind him. Using the advantage that he hoped he would get from the slow fire-rate of plasma weapons, he barreled into the first man he saw at full speed, completely breaking a poor soul wearing only what looked to be a strange officer's uniform and using a plasma pistol.
He carried that poor soul with him for the next few feet before slamming him up against the wall in front of him with a deafening crunch, spinning around faster than most would think possible in power armor and putting a blast into the rebreather of one of the armored men at the doorway, one of three that he counted. That man felt his filter sear inside of the mask of his helmet and began to cough as his lungs were immediately filled with melted plastics, then he collapsed into a fit of asphyxiation. His fireteam managed to loose another volley of two rounds at the overly confused but adrenaline-fueled devil amongst them, one shot being fired prematurely and hitting wide, the other burning the paint on its target's right bicep but not managing much else as most of the energy failed to make contact.
Abel swung his rifle and fired a shot that glanced off of the left pauldron of his closest target, the followup hitting the side of his target's head, and the third impacting the same spot again, finally giving him results. The second shot to the head was enough to get through his opponent's helmet and he found his enemy falling dead as if he'd been shot in the side of the head by a sniper. While his third kill of the day fell, he sidestepped in anticipation of another shot from his last remaining foe.
He twisted his rifle toward his last target and felt white-hot pain as his right hand was impacted by a glance from the plasma bolt he had just tried to dodge at close range, which had ultimately cost him as he had moved too quickly and let his target catch up enough for the hostile to fire a shot relatively accurately.
Ignoring the pain of what felt like a rocket fuel fire, he thanked his lucky stars when his rifle appeared undamaged by the heat and fired as he slammed multiple shots into the last target, firing into the faceplate of his target's helmet three times, then four, then five, then six...
He let loose every last shot in his microfusion cell, losing count at twelve, only stopping after he had pulled the trigger at least a few dozen times without any light emerging from the end of his rifle.
The enemy combatant's helmet was a jet-black blast mark with a white-hot and smoking circle of metal where his rounds had all found their mark after he had killed the man. Blood oozed from underneath the helmet and covered the neck area as the melted remains of the man's head seeped out.
Abel ignored the gruesome scene he had just caused, oblivious to CAIN's shout of "HOT DAMN!" to kneel down and examine one of the bodies' armors. On one pauldron of each, he found the letter 'E' with stars circling it, and he saw an insulting mockery of the United States flag with an 'E' where the center star had been on the backs of the suits. The body of the officer had a holotag, one that he gladly took and read.
Name, rank, and unit: Lieutenant Chesterfield, 2nd East Coast Infantry Division
Branch: Enclave Army
Commissioned: 2nd of July, 2075
Age: 27
E Imperium Unum
He growled as he read a mangling of one of his nation's mottoes, his attention snapping back to the area around him as he heard servos moving outside, slowly approaching the door. Without a second thought, he had the sense to grab one of the plasma rifles and then he bolted in the opposite direction, thankful that it appeared that the group that he had killed appeared to have just been an alerted patrol rather than a part of a larger group. There were a few fortifications that he sprinted past on his way out, but they appeared to only be in the first stages of being prepared, and so he continued onward, unhindered as he emerged into the opposite end of the car tunnels.
Into a new and deadly world.