Halfway up the stairs, Farnan found a first aid box with a stimpack and two bottles of water. Helping himself to the contents, he closed the box and took it off the wall, dropping it to show he had already emptied it. As the box clattered down the stairs, Nadine shouted "can't you do anything quietly" to which he responded, shouting at the top of his lungs "THIS IS MY INSIDE VOICE." When he reached the top of the stairs, he could see that much of the roof was indeed missing. Entering the hallway, he walked over to some rusted metal shelves, opening the toolboxes on them and finding a fission battery and a sensor module. Not sure what I'm going to do with these yet, but I'm sure they'll come in handy he thought, slipping them into the large pocket of his pack after wrapping the battery in some sheets of paper he found on a desk. After doing a double take, he noticed the fading red Top Secret stamp at the top right corner of the page. He unwrapped the bundle and started to read. Hexadecimal sequences were arranged in neat rows, and a picture of a Delta IX nuclear missile surrounded by the words Strategic Air Command was centered at the top. Red lines were drawn through all but two of the entries. If this is what I think it is, I'll never let her live down MY great discovery. She thinks a couple of laser pistols on a securitron are a lot of firepower, I wonder what her face will look like when I show her the codes to level a province he thought as he carefully folded the extremely aged paper into one of his storage compartments. Reflexively he dropped into a crouch behind the desk as he heard a faint whooshing noise and the sound of mechanical arms moving in the next room, crunching on the bones of the former occupant. Well, shit thought Farnan as he dropped the battery and unslung his rifle. "Ready to die for your country, you commie son of a bitch" called out a mechanical, military sounding voice, as the whooshing and mechanical thrust compensator noise slowly moved closer. Nadine frowned at the terminal. She had opened it up, and run it through every subroutine she could think of to get it to cry uncle, but all she was able to get out of the computer was a try again screen, a threat to lock up, and a firewall you could fit Texas behind. "Mother Fucker" she shouted, throwing up her hands in disgust and closing the terminal. Apparently whoever had set up this network knew a trick or two she didn't, which was possible since they were around to chat with Robco, while she was born two hundred plus years after everyone associated with them was dead. The high level of security did raise the question what was hiding on this network that was so valuable on a munitions disposal base. Destruction of nonfunctional or obsolete ammunition wasn't exactly a national secret. She swept everything but the computer terminal off the desk with her left arm, satisfying her frustration with the destruction of the nearly intact, orderly organization of the top surface of the desk. Those things survived a nuclear war but I still got them she thought as she sat in the chair and put her head down. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the bottom of the pencil holder, which had the word 'knockers' crudely scratched onto it. "Leave it to the army to invent a top rate security system and some private writes down the password on a pencil can. And of all the things to use as a password." She quickly restarted the terminal, typed in the password, and pressed enter. An almost happy soundidng beep accompanied hard drive noises as the terminal finished it's boot sequence. It presented her with it's main menu. There were three options to choose from, including personnel files, a map of the base (which she downloaded to her pip boy), and a top secret file marked Strategic Air Command. Overcome with curiosity, she clicked on the SAC option and was taken to another page, which included a link to the base's Delta IX Missile Command Console! Two of the most powerful engines of destruction created in human history were shown to still be in their silos, awaiting command activation codes, the rest having been launched during the two fateful hours of the great war of mankind's suicide. Wait until Jason finds out that I have two working nuclear missiles once I figure out the command codes she mused, a grin slowly creeping over her face as she envisioned the raw destructive fury that waited a mere tap of a button. Sure it would take a while to hack, but they didn't seem to be going anywhere for a while. She (mostly) fought down the cartoon villain grin and hand-wringing that comes with realization of posession of the ultimate weapon.
Farnan crept slowly towards the hallway, careful not to make a sound. Stealth cost him speed, however, and he was rapidly running out of time before he would have to make a run for it. "I can't wait to find you Commie, so I can kill you as a personal favor to Uncle Sam" the mechanical drill sargeant voice called out, jetting around trying to get a fix on Farnan's Position. He continued towards the door, but as he was working his was around the corner of the doorframe to the hall he came in from so he could go further into the building to draw it away from Nadine, he crunched over a piece of fallen plaster. "Shit" he hissed out between his teeth. He took off at a run further into the building. Ducking into another room that branched off the hallway, Farnan spied several ammunition boxes on a set of metal shelves. Next to those were two fragmentation grenades. Two odd looking gray cylinders with a purple dome on one end and a rotary switch on the other grabbed his attention as well. 'EMP-do not use near computer equipment or power armor' was stamped along the side of the cylinder. Thank my lucky stars Farnan thought, looking over the loot. Those will do nicely to help me sort out my current dilemma. Something about this situation didn't smell right. Gas! Jason stepped up to a hole in the wall where he could see down into the next lower level, and saw that even after all these years there was still a gas pipe that had broken loose during the war with a fuel supply that hadn't been exhausted yet. Surveying the opening, it was about a ten foot drop onto some relatively flat concrete, something a roll would help absorb the shock of. It definitely wouldn't be terminal, but it would still hurt like hell. "Hey shithead" he yelled out to the robot "I'm over here." He then swung out over the edge through the hole in the destroyed wall, and let himself drop.
Nadine finished pulling yet another wire out of the back of a destroyed desktop computer, completing her list of scavengable parts she would need for the protectron hack. Luckily Robco standardized all of it's data interfaces, and through looting of most of the terminals had come up with enough compatible plugs, jacks, and data port interfaces to make it possible to talk with the robot's AI. She had started work on a virus that would wipe all the attack commands off of it's memory banks, but in the process of writing it changed course, shaking her head at the simplicity of the more profitable course of action. She changed the identifying information for the owners of the robot from the U.S. Army to her and Jason, thus leaving it's capabilities intact and avoiding the possibility of doing any irreparable damage that there were no longer replacement operating system holotapes or repair centers to fix. That just left replacing the right arm, which was completely destroyed and would need a new sensor module, fission battery, and focusing rig for it's laser pistol. The Wattz 1000 in it's head was totally lost, and would require a suitable replacement. Still, smaller weapons were better than none at all, and as long as they didn't run into anything that a laser pistol or assault rifle couldn't handle they would be alright. There probably weren't any surface dwelling survivors anyways, so their survival and rebuilding of humanity was going to need all the robotic help it could get. "It does figure that I made all those snappy comebacks to people in the vault that it wasn't like I was the last woman on earth and he was the last man" she said to no one in particular, looking down and sighing as she turned back to the open access panel of the protectron. I hope Jason hurries up with that food and water, she thought, as her stomach did another repetition of the now familiar growl that it used to protest it's lack of contents.
Jason hit the ground running, hurrying to an overturned desk located across the room and diving behind it, curling up and making sure all his extremities were behind the barrier that the wooden surface of the desk could provide. A green ball with too many hands and glowing yellow 'eyes' floated over to the edge of the hole in the wall, it's engine holding it just over the spot he had left one of the frag grenades, and less than 6 inches from the exposed pipe still issuing forth the explosive gas that would spell it's doom. Please don't be a dud, please don't be a dud he thought, crossing his fingers as he raised his head above the surface of the desk for a fraction of a second, before ducking back down and stuffing his fingers in his ears. "I've got you now" the machine called out in a much deeper, differently dubbed vocalization. A bolt of green plasma soared across the gap and vaporised a hole in the wall above him, just as the grenade went off. The robot had just enough time to turn around and shout "what" as it caught the force of the natural gas powered explosion. A fiery burst expanded outward from the pipe and enveloped the robot, ripping through it like a sledgehammer going through a wet paper bag. The severed flamethrower fuel tanks caught fire, rolling away and spilling a trail of flames that marked their passage. Fragments from the grenade and Mr. Gutsy thudded into the wood of the desk at irregular intervals. Despite it's age, the desktop held up impressively well, Farnan thought. He opened the drawers, and found some more papers, mostly administrative junk, a locked steel box with rounded corners and a scene from a tropical island machined into the front, and a laser pistol. The ammo level lights didn't even come on, indicating the energy cells within had long since died, but the weapon might be serviceable if replacements could be found. He put the weapon into a storage compartment on his belt. Farnan waited until a count of five after all the bits and pieces stopped raining down from the explosion to emerge from his temporary shelter and see what he had accomplished. The walls of the room he found himself in were scorched, and there was a crack leading outward from the source of the explosion. He watched as pieces of the walls on the upper level started to move, cracking and splintering, until they started to collapse all around him. Nadine finished with the protectron AI, and as she was removing the cable leads she felt before she heard the explosion further inside the building. "Jasonnnn" she shouted, flicking the Protectron's power switch. "Startup...complete, loading primary AI...complete. Attempting connection to U.S. Army servers...ERROR. Attempting connection to public servers...ERROR. Upon noticing Nadine, it said "Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear. Identify yourself." "My name is Nadine Torelli, your new owner." "State the reason this unit has been discharged from Active Duty." "Because the world is over. Nuclear war has destroyed both the United States and China, and there no longer is a U.S. Army" "Probability of the U.S. being destroyed, zero percent. Your statements are in ERROR. You are under arrest. Further attempts at resistance..." Nadine flipped the power switch even faster this time, being more familiar with the holes in the robot's defensive capabilities posed by not being able to orient itself towards an opponent to it's rear in time to defend it's controls. We'll get no help from this hunk of junk she thought, sprinting by the once again inert form shouting "I'm coming Jason!"