The next few weeks, everyone learned a lot. The first day, it was all about pointing to unfamiliar plants and asking, 'What is that? What part do you eat? How do you cook it? How do you grow it?', and listening to Raina's explanations.
After that, it was about the work. It was October and at the end of the growing season, when you wouldn't think it was a good time to plant things, but apparently that was the perfect time to transplant because then the plants would suffer less shock, or something. Preston wasn't clear on the details. Plus there were roofs to patch so they didn't leak, beds to be built, mattresses to be stuffed, chicken coops and rabbit hutches to be constructed, and all of this before the frost set in.
Yet no one really complained, not even Marcy Long, because for one thing, they were too exhausted, and for another, when someone gives you the deed to your very own gold mine, hands you a pickaxe and starts helping you dig, it would be churlish and ungrateful. Raina worked alongside them with the same ardor she put into her own land, steadfast and cheerful.
Certain people soon settled naturally into particular jobs. Preston went out and found a friendly Brahmin roaming free, led it back, and taught it to accept a harness, rooting up stumps and pulling a plow. Sturges was good at repairs and construction. Mama Murphy immediately took on the care of the chickens and rabbits, keeping track of which hens laid the most and biggest eggs. Those hens got a rooster, so the next generation of chicks would also lay well. The mediocre performers were kept on for egg production, and the culls wound up in the pot. Most of the males were made into capons, and Preston kind of shut his ears when that process was explained, as it involved…well, no man liked to think of that happening to another male creature, whatever the species. The Longs worked the land, as simple as that.
And yet it was not enough. There were people out there in danger, in want of the clean water and good food they enjoyed, and the last Minuteman could not rest easy in his bed knowing that…
On the Prydwen, Paladin Danse was performing armor maintenance when a breathless young Squire dashed up, saluted, and delivered the message, "SirPaladinDanseSir! YouaretoassembleyoursquadintheaftforaspecialbriefingwithSeniorScribeNeriahpriortodeploymentSir!"
Danse chuckled. "Take a deep breath and try that one again, soldier."
The youngster obeyed. "Sir, Paladin Danse, Sir! You are to assemble your squad in the aft for a special briefing by Senior Scribe Neriah prior to deployment, Sir!"
"Thank you. When is this supposed to take place?"
"Oh! Right now, Sir!"
"Message received." In very short order, he and the rest of Recon Squad Gladius: Knight-Sergeant Dawes, Knights Rhys, Worwick, Keane, and Brach plus Senior Scribe Haylen, were assembled in the Field Research Station. Elder Maxon was overseeing from an upper catwalk; when Danse made eye contact with him and saluted, he nodded in acknowledgement.
Danse turned his full attention to Senior Scribe Neriah, who was standing next to a scribe in a wheelchair. The man looked somewhat familiar, but as he was swathed in bandages and had plaster casts on half his body, it was hard to tell.
"Good afternoon," Neriah began. "Many of you know Scribe Faris. He is, thus far, the only member of Recon Squad Artemis to be recovered alive, subsequent to his hacking into the Revere Satellite Array and successfully transmitting a distress signal to us here. While extracting him, we made an important discovery. Demonstrating will be more effective than explaining. Scribe-technicians, please bring in the specimen."
Three techs brought out a feral ghoul; its pungent odor hit his nose a moment before that, a combination of unwashed bodies, rotting meat and sewage. It was restrained with three collars attached to poles around its neck, each managed by a tech.
"Paladin Danse," Neriah stated. He turned his attention back to her. She was holding a syringer. "Please take this weapon and shoot the specimen. Aim carefully and shoot nothing but the specimen. I know most of the Brotherhood dismiss syringers as no more than popguns, but the ammo in this is no joke."
"Roger that," he replied, taking the syringer. He aimed and fired, striking the ghoul above the heart.
The effect was immediate: the feral jerked, then swayed on its feet. If not for the three techs holding it upright, it would have fallen. Then it went into a seizure, and bloody froth bubbled out of every visible orifice, before a final gout of blood welled up out of its mouth, and it went limp. Limp and dead, inside of ten seconds.
"What was that? A disease?," he asked. Ghouls were notoriously tough to kill, as the radiation which made them what they were also granted them an unnatural vigor. They were immune to most contagions and resisted even huge doses of chems.
"No. A poison. Scribe Faris, please relate your account of what happened at the Array."
A poison? A poison which could kill a ghoul with one hit would be a tremendous asset to the Brotherhood's mission.
"By the time we neared the Array, the squad was reduced to only Paladin Brandis and me. At the time, I had been shot in the leg and was bleeding. Walking would have accelerated the blood loss, so the Paladin helped me to shelter and went back to try and rescue Knight Astlin. Unfortunately, the Array was being used by supermutants as a camp. They found me and took me to the Array, planning on eating me."
The scribe produced a rictus grin. "Except they disagreed on whether to eat me fresh or age my body for a few days. I was up in one of their shacks, thinking I was about to see what my own intestines look like, when the mutants squabbling over me got distracted. Someone else had showed up."
Faris paused. "I didn't get a good look at them, I was at the wrong angle for that. Whoever it was, they were dressed like a typical scavenger. Medium height, maybe a little taller. Medium build, not fat or thin. Complexion—neither very dark or very pale. Medium. Not a ghoul, though. The cheek I saw was smooth and beardless, so it was either a woman or a very young man. They were armed with a syringer, and they had a shovel on their back."
"A shovel?" Senior Scribe Haylen asked.
"Yes, ma'am. A shovel. They also had a dog with them. Not a stray mutt, either. I called to them for help, but what with me being faint with blood loss and the mutants being so loud, they didn't hear me. Anyhow, they started taking out the supermutants, one by one, with the syringer. They worked from cover—they had very good stealth moves—and went through the camp, picking them off. There was one standing over me, and I saw when it got hit with the dart. What happened to it was exactly what happened to the ghoul just now. It was a one hit kill."
That started a murmur throughout Recon Squad Gladius. A mini nuke might kill a supermutant with one hit, if you were lucky. It also added to the radiation in your immediate vicinity, which meant you picked up some of it. A reliable one hit kill when fighting supermutants would be even more valuable than one for ghouls.
Faris continued, "Once they were out of sight, I lay there listening to the camp getting quieter and quieter. I tried calling out to them, but by then I'm thinking they were out of earshot. If the camp didn't stink so much, maybe the dog could have smelled me. I crawled over to the mutant that was standing over me on the off chance it had something on it I could use, and it happened to have a stimpak. When I was feeling strong enough, I went down and managed to boost my distress call to the last working transmitter. The rescue unit came and got me. That's all. As far as what happened to Brandis and Astlin, I have no knowledge of them."
Senior Scribe Neriah took over again. "The rescue unit went through the camp and recovered both expended darts from the bodies and a few unexpended darts where the shooter missed. They were brought to me for analysis. What I found out is…unprecedented."
"Why?" Danse asked.
"Because it isn't a chem. It's organic. Not only is it organic, it's plant based. It's a blend of ricin, which is responsible for the bleeding, nicotine—the same nicotine which is found in tobacco—which in addition to its own toxicity, accelerates the effect of the ricin, and anabasine, which is related to nicotine and induces asystole, which is to say, it simply stops the heart completely. All these substances were not only pure, they were highly concentrated. More to the point, ricin comes from the castor bean plant, which was once widely cultivated as a decorative garden plant, despite being the most poisonous plant in the world. Anabasine is from the tree tobacco plant. Both are supposed to be extinct in the United States. They're not native to the Commonwealth and would die out if someone introduced them in the wild."
She paused. "Probably. Climate change may have altered the area enough to where they would survive. For two hundred years, there has been no evidence of either of these plants, and now we find a compound with both of them together. This is a compound which would have to have been made by someone with a sophisticated knowledge of plant toxicology and considerable laboratory skills. This is not something someone could stumble over while whipping up a batch of homebrew Psycho."
"Is it from the Institute?" Danse asked immediately.
"Possible, but I doubt it," Neriah replied. "A close examination of the darts themselves indicates they were hand-tooled and crafted individually. The Institute would have uniform, machine made darts."
"So in addition to your original orders," Elder Maxon spoke for the first time, "you are to seek out the shooter who unknowingly saved Faris, and if they are not the one who made those darts, then through them, track down the one who is making them.
"You are to recruit them into the Brotherhood. Someone who can formulate a compound which takes out a supermutant with one dose is someone we need working for us. We want their goodwill as well, so you are authorized to offer them the position of senior botany scribe here on the Prydwen, a thousand cap signing bonus, and a place for their family in the civilian quarters of our home base. If they don't have a family, then emphasis that there are plenty of attractive, unattached people in the Brotherhood. If that's not what they want, find out what is, and offer it to them. Get them to sign on, then bring them, all their materials, and their equipment here.
"Provided, of course, they're not actually a ghoul, synth or other undesirable. Then you're to recover and commandeer their formulas, the plants and the equipment they use to make the darts before neutralizing them. This is a high priority order."
"Understood, sir." Danse snapped him a crisp salute.
"Why does he want their goodwill as well?" asked Rhys later.
"Because this is someone who can formulate a compound which takes out a supermutant with one dose," Haylen said. "You really don't want someone that good with poisons to have any ill will towards you."
In Diamond City, Nick Valentine, who never ate, drank or slept, since he was, after all, a second generation synth, opted to pull out a very old file and look at it again. He didn't really need to, since he was not capable of forgetting, but he liked to. It felt right somehow. The file itself went back before his time, or before his involvement with it, at any rate.
It began with a missing person report. Four days before the Big One, Doctor Theodosia Queen, PhD in Agroecology, was reported missing by her friends and colleagues. (He'd had to look up what 'agroecology' was. It turned out to be the study of how agriculture fit into the environment.)
She had had a very bad month. First her grandmother had passed away from natural causes and then her parents and her brother died in an accident on the freeway. Just the sort of thing that sometimes happened, no big drama around it, unless it was your family. Then you would be devastated, if you loved them at all.
He looked at the photograph of Doctor Queen. After two hundred and ten years, it was discolored and dog eared, but it still showed the face of a young woman who looked uncomfortably intelligent, but like she had a sense of humor about it. An unkind person would have said she was horse-faced, but Nick thought her bone structure was rather elegant. He wondered briefly about what particular flavor of humanity she was, since her skin tone was noncommittal. Eurasian, maybe?
Anyway, she had gone missing right before the bombs fell, and afterward there were bigger problems than one lost PhD.
The next file was from fifty years later. This photograph had the look of all post-war photos: it was streaky and foggy from ambient radiation, and it showed a young woman who was not at her best, since she had been killed and partially eaten by mirelurks. The medical examiner's report was less than complete. She was between the ages of eighteen to thirty, based on her wisdom teeth and her appearance, well-nourished, unusual in an era where most people were half-starved all the time, her hands were calloused and her musculature showed that she did a lot of manual labor. But her face was so similar to Theodosia Queen's that they might have been twins, if twins were born fifty years apart.
She had been wearing a Vault suit when she died, but one with a symbol rather than a number. The symbol was a seedling sprouting against the silhouette of a sun. There was no record of any Vault which used that instead of a number. No one ever came forward to identify or claim her.
The third case file came some thirty years after that. This was the first one where Nick was actually involved. A young woman was found dead in the street outside Diamond City. She had died of strangulation, but her body showed that she had been tortured and raped for weeks or months before that. He tracked her back to a brothel in the area, and learned she had been found wandering the wastes by raiders, who used her until they tired of her and sold her to the brothel keepers.
According to the other unfortunate young women kept as slaves there, she had said her name was Elizabeth, and when she came in, she had been wearing the remains of a Vault suit with a symbol of a seedling against the sun on the back, rather than a number. She had talked about her sisters, and cried a lot. No photograph this time, just an artist's rendition of her face, and she looked as much like Theodosia Queen as the one killed by mirelurks. No one ever came forward to claim or identify her, either.
A hundred years went by after that before the same face showed up again. This time the young woman was found in a supermutant's meat bag among several other bodies. No clothing of hers was ever found, but Nick would have bet money that she had been wearing a Vault suit with a symbol on the back rather than a number as well. Again, no one had ever some forward to claim or identify her.
Nick closed the file again, tapping the edge of it against his lips, thoughtfully. There were three possibilities. One, Theodosia Queen had somehow ended up in a Vault without many other people in it, and the young women were her descendants. Consanguinity had led to them looking almost exactly alike.
Second, they were synths. That one he dismissed, as the one who wound up feeding mirelurks would be a second-gen synth like himself, not flesh and blood like the newest models. The examiner could not have missed that.
Third, they were clones of Doctor Queen. Cloning was quite possible; in Vault City they used cloning to make replacement organs and limbs, and in Vault 108, some scientists had reportedly cloned some guy named 'Gary' over and over again, until there were fifty-four of them. No one knew exactly why they did it. They just did it, maybe just to see if it could be done. The early Garys were all right, but the more of them there were, the more hostile they were to everyone who wasn't a Gary, until they were full-blown homicidal. After a while, there wasn't anyone left in 108 except for Garys, and the only thing they ever said was 'Gary'. As a method of reproduction, cloning was held to be a failure.
But what if the method wasn't the failure, but how clones were treated? Give them all the same name and treat them as disposable units, and they turned hostile. If they had their own names and were treated like people, maybe they'd turn out okay. Theodosia Queen was a brilliant biologist, by all accounts. She had the know-how. If she hadn't anyone to have a family with, maybe she'd come up with another way to have one.
Nick Valentine put the file away. Maybe there were other Queens out there. Maybe there had been some who he'd never heard of. He just hoped that if there were, they had better luck than those he had learned about.
A/N: Happy New Year, everyone! Keen observers will notice I made a change to when Recon Team Artemis went missing. It happened very recently, rather than several years ago.
Some of my guest reviews aren't showing up when I click on reviews, but I still get them via email. So: Yes. The Brotherhood of Steel does want Raina and her plants, but they don't yet know the extent of the resources she has at her disposal. The Institute isn't aware yet, but they will be before too much longer. Raina will come into conflict with them both, and I'm not telling any more than that because spoilers. Her sense of ethics is too opposite both of theirs to coexist.
Thank you, Bearybeary and my other Guest! Thank you, jukehero461, br2nd66, and Amethiste!