The concealed door slid open to reveal a dark haired young man who stood frozen, caught with an inhaler of Jet on his lips, mid huff. "I—uh—It's not what it looks like, I swear!"
"Bobby De Luca!" Dr. Penske scolded. "Well if it isn't what it looks like, then you'd better have the best explanation in the world because it looks to me like you're huffing chems! How long have you known this door was here?"
"Whoa, a secret passage? This I've gotta see," Her grandson tried to wiggle his way past the grown ups, but she caught him by the back of his vault suit.
"Oh, no you don't!" his grandmother scolded. "At least not until Security has been through and cleared it as safe. Run and tell the Head of Security that we need at least two of their people, then get Overseer McNamara. After that, I seem to remember you have some homework that needs doing."
"Awww, but I want to explore!" he pouted.
"And so you shall, but not until it is safe. Run along now!" his grandmother sped him along with a light swat upside his head. Then she turned back to the guilty De Luca. "All right, now you can explain yourself. How long have you known, and how far does it go?"
"Uh. A few…weeks, I guess?" De Luca tried to tuck his Jet away unobtrusively, but Dr. Penske held out her hand, giving him a look which suggested she would flay him if he didn't give it up. "I didn't get any further than this room. That other door is locked and nothing I did could get it to open."
Raina stepped in. "That's because this door will not unlock unless the first door is locked. If you never locked the door you came in by, this door would never unlock. Remember what I said about my vault's emphasis on decontamination? We had airlocks like this between sectors, and see?" She pointed up. "Those are nozzles for spraying disinfectant. I doubt the mechanisms still work, because the disinfectant ate through the tubing in ours inside of fifty years, but this area was meant to prevent the spread of hazardous biologicals."
Dr. Penske started and stared. "Hazardous biologicals? What was going on in there?"
"I dunno," Nick said, "but a lot of the vaults were…Well, they had functions and purposes beyond saving lives, or so I've heard."
"I find this quite disturbing," Dr. Penske said.
It took a few minutes for Security to arrive and a few more after that for the Overseer to get there. "A second, secret vault," Gwen McNamara said, looking through the safety glass into the murky half-light. "If we could open it up and go in there, it would double our living space. Even if it proves unlivable, there's so much we could salvage in the way of parts and equipment. It would make all of our lives so much easier."
She looked at Raina and her companions. "You've done a lot for us already, what with the seeds. I know it's an imposition, but none of us have any experience with this sort of set up. You know the fail-safes and you know how to run the autoclave settings. If there is a biohazard in there, your presence on the security team could mean the difference between surviving or dying for them. Please. We won't be ungrateful."
Raina looked to Nick, who sighed. "Some days we have more chances to do good than others," he said, " and this is one of them. I'd say leave King behind, since I doubt they have a dog's haz-mat suit."
The team which went into the secret vault consisted of Nick, Raina, Edwards, the security guard who nearly denied them entry, two of his people, Bobby De Luca, who wanted to avoid punishment for his chem use, his sister Lucy, and Dr. Penske. All except Nick, who couldn't catch any diseases anyway, were wearing appropriate protective gear. Unfortunately, once the first door was locked and the second one opened, the stench immediately told Raina that the hazmat suits would be useless.
"What is that smell?" Edwards asked.
"What smell?" Bobby De Luca replied.
"If you hadn't burned out your nose huffing Jet you might be able to smell it," Dr. Penske jabbed. "However, I'm not familiar with this particular reek either—although I'm sure I've smelled it before."
"It's mole-rats. A lot of mole-rats. Live mole-rats, dead and decaying mole-rats, and mole-rat feces and urine," Raina told them. "When I first set up my steading, I had an infestation on my land, and I got to know that stench very well."
"That would be it, then" Dr. Penske nodded. "I dissected one once or twice some years ago. I understand on the surface, people are so desperate for calories and proteins that they have to eat them."
"Not me," Raina told her. "I would have to go several days without food before I would consider eating a mole-rat. Half the cases of food poisoning we get in my settlement are from eating mole-rat meat. Was there ever an earthquake or something of the sort which cracked open the vault? The reason I ask is that the mole-rats either got in from outside, or they were here all along. They can't tunnel through several inches of steel and reinforced concrete, so if the vault's integrity was never breached, then they must have been brought in."
"Never. We're tectonically stable." Dr. Penske answered.
Raina nodded thoughtfully. "Then they were brought in, probably for laboratory use. Clearly no humans have lived here for some time, decades at least, so no one has been feeding them. I've known them to gnaw their way through paper, plastic, and even tin cans when they're hungry enough, but after two hundred years, what they've probably been eating is—each other. That means they've been getting fiercer, hungrier and more competitive with every generation."
Tina De Luca said, "You're kidding, right? You're not kidding? I think I'm going to be sick."
"Try not to be, not inside your hazmat suit anyway," Dr. Penske advised her. "Dr. Queen, what do we need to know about them before we go in any further?"
"For all intents and purposes, they're blind, but they have very sensitive hearing. Same thing goes for their sense of smell. They like to tunnel underneath prey and burst out of the ground at the worst possible place. If they're very close, don't try to shoot them; just hit them as hard as you can with whatever you can. Singly, they're not much of a threat, but if you disturb a colony, especially when there are several broodmothers in it, they're going to swarm you. They carry disease, and they can shred hazmat suits. I'm sorry, but you did ask." Raina apologized.
"Oh, hell no. I'm out of here," Bobby De Luca said, but Dr. Penske blocked his way.
"If you're out of here now, you're out of here for good. You and your sister both," the woman stated.
"Bobby, don't be even more of an idiot," his sister warned him. "You got us into this mess. Maybe it would be better if we left the vault, but I don't want to get kicked out."
"I-oh, all right. What are we going to do?" the overgrown man-child asked.
"Since we don't know what's in there, we're going to go forward one room at a time. Once we're through collecting anything useful that could be damaged by the heat, Doctor Queen is going to seal that area behind us and run the autoclave setting, sterilizing everything else. We're looking for documents, books, holotapes, computer terminals, and so forth," Dr. Penske told the group.
Raina took over, "'Autoclave' means the room in question will go up to five hundred degrees for one hour. The doors will lock and they won't open again until the interior temperature is one hundred degrees or less. If this vault is laid out anything like the way mine is, most of the time we'll be able to work around, but in a few spots we won't be able to retreat until the setting runs its cycle."
"Right! I hope everyone brought extra water and emergency rations, like I suggested? Okay, let's go." Dr. Penske, being the ranking resident of Vault 81, was in charge.
The first sector smelled of mole rats, but they saw no external signs of them. With the three security guards from the vault and Nick on the alert for any rodents, the rest of them team disconnected the terminals and moved them and other salvage to the generator room, then went forward to the next section while Raina ran the protocols for the autoclave. Once the room was undergoing sterilization, they moved on to the next section, and repeated the process. For the most part, the rooms were practically untouched. If they had been used, it had never been by many people.
As they went on, there began to be signs of mole rats, as evidenced by gnaw marks on some of the cardboard boxes and bits of shredded paper. The smell got worse, and when they descended the stairs, they discovered why.
"Okay, why is there, like three feet of dirt down here?" Bobby De Luca asked as his boots sank into it.
Raina told him, "At as guess, it's two hundred years worth of decomposed mole-rat defecation."
"Wha-Oh, God!" The chem addict tried to jump back up the stairwell.
"Don't shout or make sudden moves, you'll just-." It was too late. Raina saw the ripple of movement under the surface of the dirt, and whipped out 'Righteous Authority'. When the mole rat burst to the surface, she gave it two blasts, incinerating it. It was only the first of half a dozen, as mole rats erupted from the 'dirt' on all sides. By Raina's standards, it wasn't that bad an attack. She and King had handled worse on a Sunday afternoon, but there would be more of them. Probably a lot more.
"See what just happened? We must be as quiet as we can and walk softly. Avoid the dirt as much as you can, and stick to metal walkways and concrete floors."
As they progressed through the area as carefully as they could, they passed several functioning terminals which were broadcasting conversations from the other half of the vault. All manner of private things could be overheard, from the most ordinary chats about lunch and the day's lessons in the schoolroom, all the way to a couple of teenagers making out and a fight between husband and wife.
"What the hell are these? Listening posts?" Edwards exploded.
"Like I said, the vaults often had more than one purpose. I don't think you have to worry, though. Look there," Nick pointed out the undisturbed dust around the next such terminal. "It doesn't look like anyone's been anywhere near it in decades." He went to the nearest and tapped a few keys. "Umm-Raina, you and the doc might wanna to have a look at this."
"What have you found?" Dr. Penske asked.
They pieced it it together as they went from terminal to terminal, and it was grim. "We were intended to be test subjects," Dr. Penske said. Her voice and face were blank, and she looked much older all of a sudden.
"Intended to be. Something happened to change that, though," Raina pointed out.
"That isn't much consolation. All my life, all our lives for the last two hundred and ten years, were based on a lie perpetrated by Vault-tec."
"No, they weren't," Nick surprised everyone by interjecting. "Look at this here. If you read between the lines, the first Overseer, Olivette, deliberately sabotaged the mechanisms for transmitting disease to the residential side. If you want to focus on the bigwigs on whatever committee planned the vault, you can, but it strikes me that the heroism of a single individual up close, somebody who risked everything to do the right thing, ought to count for more. All your lives were built on that single act."
"I-Yes, Mr. Valentine. You're right." What ought to have been an affirming moment was interrupted by Security.
"Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?" one of them shouted. Everyone looked and saw the guard pointing a weapon at Bobby De Luca.
"What am I doing?" The young man laughed nervously, trying to scoff off the accusation. "I'm not doing anything. Just, you know, helping salvage stuff."
"Bullshit. I saw you unzip your suit and tuck something inside."
"What?" C'mon, I wouldn't do that. You're seeing things." De Luca laughed again.
"What's going on?" Dr. Penske asked. "Never mind, I think I can guess. This is a medical research facility, and no doubt there are chem boxes lying about here and there. Hand them over, Bobby."
"Hand what over?" While he and the doctor were talking, his sister had come up behind them.
"Give them up, Bobby," she told him. "Already today you've nearly gotten us kicked out of the only place we ever lived. Now you're screwing up our last chance. If you don't give up everything you pocketed, then from now on, you're not my brother anymore."
He stared at her, thrusting his jaw forward like a child about to cry. "Fine." He unzipped his hazmat suit and hauled out syringes, blister packs and bottles by the handful. He'd even squirreled away meds like stimpaks and Radaway. It made a sizeable pile on a small table before he was done.
"Thank you," Dr. Penske said, terse and taut.
"Right," De Luca mumbled. Turning away, he stomped down the walkway. The group was currently on the upper level of an atrium. Below them on the main floor was nothing but dirt left behind by untold generations of mole rats. A lot of it was decomposing feces, but there was also a great deal of rubbish mixed in with it, old nesting material, paper by the ton, old furniture. On the level where they were investigating, there was less feces but more rubbish.
In his petulance and anger, Bobby De Luca picked up a metal bucket and hurled it against a support pillar. It rang like a gong, reverberating through the entire atrium. Below them, the earth quivered like gelatin, and then erupted in squeaking, shrieking, screeching mole rats. Even for mole rats, they were huge, and some of them glowed the sickly green of radioactivity. Others had open sores or cancerous masses on their skin.
"Shit!" Edwards cursed, unloading a clip of bullets into the seething horde of rats. His subordinates did the same. Raina jammed another set of fusion cells into 'Righteous Authority' and followed suit.
Meanwhile, Nick Valentine was working away at the terminal beside a sealed sector. "Over here," he yelled out over the din of mole rats and gunfire. In a mad scramble, the group crammed itself into the hallway he had unlocked, and the few mole rats that had slipped in with them were easily dealt with, clubbed or kicked to death. "Can you run the autoclave setting in the atrium from here?" he asked.
"Yes, but it'll mean we're trapped in here until the cycle is finished," Raina replied.
"Do it," Dr. Penske urged her.
She did. Ugly as the mole-rats were, it was still no pleasure to see them writhe and die in the roasting heat, so she turned away once the sequence was entered, to discover that Dr. Penke and Nick were looking at a Mr. Handy-no, from the voice, a Ms. Nanny,-in a chamber off the short hallway where they'd taken refuge.
"Are you Vault-Tec security? Please, tell me you are. I have waited so very long for a representative of Vault-Tec to come and release me." The robot said in a charmingly accented voice.
"No, I'm sorry. I'm from the other side of this vault, Vault 81," Dr. Penske's brow furrowed.
"Then I cannot speak to you any further, as it is expressly forbidden that I should interact with anyone from the residential side of the vault." The Ms. Nanny turned all her eye-stalks away and went to the other side of the room.
Nick, in the meantime, was examining three lockers off to the side in the hallway. Someone had lined them up very neatly, labeled them and put vases of dried flowers around them.
"Dr. Kenneth Collins, Dr. James Flint, and Monsieur Matthew Burrows," he read, and opened the first locker. There was a skeleton in a lab coat lying inside, arranged with its hands crossed over its chest.
"Oh, please, do not disturb them!" the Ms. Nanny cried out, swooping over to Nick's side of the window. "They were my friends. I could not bury Doctor Collins or Doctor Flint according to their beliefs, but I cremated Monsieur Burrows as he wanted. If I could only leave this room, I would put his ashes in his locker alongside the others-but unless a representative of Vault-Tech releases me from my duties, I cannot."
"How did they die?" the detective asked.
"Of natural causes, all of them, Monsieur."
It seemed to Raina that the Ms. Nanny not only wanted out, she was doing everything she could to communicate how to let her out, without actually saying so. She probably had programming which forbid her from saying so directly. She went over to the window. "I am Doctor Raina Queen. And you are?"
"I am a Contagions Vulnerability Robotic Infirmary Engineer, more familiarly known as 'Curie'. I am honored to make your acquaintance. Are you in any capacity affiliated with Vault-Tec?"
"I am in charge of all the remaining Vault-Tec representatives in the Commonwealth," Raina told the bot. It was true in its way, because Murray, the only living person who had worked for Vault-Tec, was her employee. "I release you from your duties."
"Oh, thank you, Madame!" Curie immediately unlocked the door from her side. "I am so very happy to leave this room at last, and even happier to meet you. From my terminal here I can monitor activities on the residential side of the vault, so I heard what you said about your mission. Your plans for phytoremediation are so very intriguing and exciting!"
From that moment, Raina had known they would be friends. Anyone who found phytoremediation, the use of plants to clean up radiation, as exciting and intriguing as Raina did herself, was bound to be a friend of hers. In fact, Curie was very like a sister to her at this point.
However, she wasn't going to accompany them on this trip. Someone had to look after the Courier, and as Curie had pointed out, she was the logical one. A lot of good had come of that trip to Vault 81, what with one thing and another, but Raina had to wonder what would become of some of the people they'd met there.
Nick brought her back to the here-and-now by saying, "Cap for your thoughts?"
"About how we met Curie, which got me to thinking about Bobby De Luca and chem use, which reminds me that I would like to visit Goodneighbor again. I told Daisy I would, but with one thing and another, I haven't yet. You once said the mayor there has his heart in the right place. If you still think so, I have a business proposition I would like to make to him."
"What kind of business is it?" Nick asked, and the three of them continued on their way to the General Robotics Galleria.