III
Plan — Militia — Critters — Ringo — Para Bellum — Boomers — Takeoff — Light Load — Merchants — Tracking Targets — Briefing — Manpack — Go Team! — ooxxoXOXx; or, Parting Words — Communication
Cara thought for a while, walking around Goodsprings aimlessly, sharpening one of his knives. He talked to Trudy, then Ringo about what had happened.
Joe Cobb and his gang of an unknown amount of other Powder Gangers were going to attack Goodsprings. It didn't seem like there was a way around an eventual gun-and-dynamite fight. Cara decided to ask around in Goodsprings and see if anybody would help; he thought they all might. Ringo said that he should go to Sunny first, so Cara went back outside and called Olivia over the radio again.
"Do you mind if I talk to Sunny? I—actually, could you just use your radio's speaker without the headset? I could hear you both that way. Over," Cara said.
"You might do that for us, too, Cara," Raúl said.
"Shut up, Raúl," Cara said. Joking.
"Yeah, sure," Olivia was saying over radio. "Just a second. Uh, break." It was several seconds. Background noise increased when she spoke again; Cara could tell that Olivia had her PIP-Boy's radio on, probably tuned to Mojave Music Radio. "It's a Sin" by the Pet Shop Boys was playing. Cara liked that song. It beat "Johnny Guitar" again—Cara liked that song too but was kind of tired of it. "Okay, here we go," Olivia said. "What's up? Over."
"Hi guys! Over," Cara said.
"Hi Cara!" Sunny said. "Sticking around Goodsprings for awhile longer?"
"Say 'over' when you're done talking," Olivia said in the background.
"Over," Sunny said. "Question mark." The sound transmitting cut out after that.
Cara laughed, then replied: "I am indeed, Sunny, comma, full stop." Olivia and Sunny laughed but he didn't hear it. "There's a situation here with Ringo and the Powder Gangers. I kind of assume you already know all about that. Do you? Over."
"Yeah," Sunny said into the radio.
"Over," Olivia said and let go of the talk button.
Cara laughed at the way Olivia said it.
"Sorry," Sunny said to Olivia. Cara didn't hear it.
"Dammit, Sunny," Olivia managed to say before laughing. "It's fine."
"I'm gonna help Ringo take on Joe Cobb and his stupid gang," Cara said over radio. "Help defend him here, I mean. They're probably just going to attack. I might need your help, Sunny. Over."
"Say no—" Sunny began, then noticed that Olivia wasn't pushing down the radio's talk button, so Cara couldn't hear her, so she put her finger over Olivia's and pushed down. "Is it down now? Can he hear me?" she whispered, but over the radio Cara heard her too.
"Yeah," Olivia said. Cara could hear her grinning.
"Say no more, I'm in," Sunny said into the radio. Olivia was looking at her lips. "Over," Sunny added, and Olivia let go of the button.
"That was confusing for a second," Cara said back. He didn't hear the giggles. "You're in, Sunny? Just like that? Over."
"Just like that," Sunny said. "I have a feeling I'm going to end up fighting those guys one way or another, so I might as well get it over with. Joe Cobb talks about leaving us alone if we hand over Ringo, but I know his type. He and his friends will come after the town eventually."
Sunny said he should convince Trudy and some other people in town to help. He talked with her about that for a few minutes, thinking about what to do and how he should do it. She suggested he get dynamite from Easy Pete, which he was tempted to do, but he decided not to, mostly concerned that Goodspringers inexperienced in using explosives even if instructed well would accidentally kill each other and their livestock and damage buildings.
He also thought about seeing people trying to fight the gigantic FEV-mutated creatures of the wasteland, and seeing most of those people torn limb from limb.
Pondering it all, weighing options and considering tactics and sharpening a knife again, Cara went to his Black Hawk. He posted ED-E there to take advantage of the wiry eyebot's advanced sensors. If ED-E detected Joe Cobb and company coming it was to immediately come find Cara or Olivia and tell them. Well, tell Cara; whatever ED-E said wouldn't make sense to Olivia.
Cara was pretty sure the Powder Gangers would approach from the main road into town, from the south, heading northwest, their path going through the Black Hawk. The Powder Gangers were mostly based at the NCRCF in Jean, Nevada, an unincorporated town before the Great War bigger than Goodsprings, south and mostly east of Goodsprings on I-15. There was also a separate group of them living in Vault-Tec Vault 19, a good ways northeast of Goodsprings between it and Vegas.
Cara was thinking about advanced warning, the Boomers, and his small fleet of drones—at last count he had eight fully operational, and most of the parts for sixteen or so more of several different types of them, big and obvious or small and stealthy. Some of them had parts commonality, as the military liked to call it.
While Cara went around Goodsprings talking to and enlisting people, Olivia and Sunny cleared creeping wilderness from the town, such as giant purple lizards everyone called geckos, giant horseflies called bloatflies, giant American cockroaches everyone called radroaches, and giant praying mantises. Anything giant but normally mundane and tiny alongside humans, really. A few of them were wandering around inside the town. They also saw some normal flies and a dark snake and a normal little red scorpion, which they didn't need to kill to keep Goodsprings safe. Sunny was a ranger for the town. She made her living mostly by selling the hides of critters she killed, like the giant geckos. Olivia enjoyed switching between weapons, but mostly used her varmint rifle, the X-Bolt, for it all. On the giant mantises she used her sidearm the M9A3 and her Ka-Bar.
The Pistol, Semiautomatic, 9mm, M9, specifically the M9A3, was old US military issue, a normal civilian-available Beretta Model 92FS (M92FS; "F" for US government federal testing, "S" for a slide-mounted combined safety and de-cocking lever) ordered and built to military specifications. The Italian company Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta S.p.A.—Società per azioni, meaning public company—was a firearms manufacturer before the Great War founded 1526. Their M9A3 was a 9x19mm Parabellum National Guard weapon. Before the Great War by at least 20 years the active duty and especially forward-deployed military standard issue sidearms had been plasma or laser pistols, varying by branch, ballistic carbon-based firearms out of favor, for the few soldiers issued sidearms (mainly special forces and officers). Before that, the US armed forces had gone from the old standard M9 series they'd had since 1985 to the N80 and then N99, an ugly blocky Desert Eagle Mark I clone with excessive ornamentation that felt like shooting a brick.
Midway through varmint hunting, Olivia noticed she'd been drinking too much water and had to come back to town to pee, which she most definitely did not tell Cara about. She didn't want him to know that she even had such bodily functions as peeing and pooping and farting. Burping was safe because she'd accidentally let that slip once or twice and he hadn't cared, been somehow offended or made fun of her for it. She was vaguely aware that all such things might happen to him sometimes.
After Olivia used the saloon's only working bathroom, the women's, and washed her hands, she and Sunny checked in with Cara, or for Sunny mostly flirted with him. He flirted back, but Olivia could tell he was pretty into working out the whole Powder Gangers fight thing. She was interested too.
"I'm gonna see if there's anything far out on the north side of town," Sunny told Olivia and Cara, her eyes mostly on him. "If there are many of them I'll come get you, okay?" Cara was pretty sure she meant Olivia.
"Sounds good," Olivia said. She looked to Cara. "So you're gonna protect Goodsprings?"
He smiled. "Yeah."
"For me?" she asked.
He didn't laugh, but on the inside he thought that was absurd. He said, "No. Why? Do you want it to be for you? We can say it's for you."
Looking at him, Olivia smiled. A real smile, ear to ear and eye to eye, not just lips. Then she looked away. Then she looked back to him and said, "Do you mind if we go talk to Ringo?"
Cara liked that she assumed he'd go with her. He felt included. "Sure," he said.
A few seconds later, when Sunny was still in view and Cara wasn't looking at her ass, he saw her bringing something up to her mouth and didn't think anything of it. He was thinking about where he'd encountered the highest concentration of radscorpions. Olivia was checking out her own shadow, with her varmint rifle strapped across her back and her HK UMP40 up in her arms. She looked absurd. As fraught with danger and insecurity as the Mojave wasteland was, Cara knew that for this Olivia wouldn't need to have the sub-machinegun at the ready. At all. He didn't say so, though. Olivia liked her guns.
Mostly for that reason she'd attached a lot of accoutrements to the UMP40: a reflex sight—an EOTech Holographic Weapon Sight (HWS) Model 552—a vertical forward handgrip under the barrel, and on the right side a red visible laser sight, all three on the gun's Picatinny rails. It also came standard with a side-folding, locking metal stock.
Then Cara heard Sunny's voice in his earpiece saying, "Hey Cara. Who would win in a fight? You or Olivia? Over." He could hear her talking out loud, without the radio, too.
Without thinking about it Cara said back, "I would—"
Olivia looked at him like "Oh really?"
Cara looked to Olivia grinning and continued over the radio, "—I would, because I'd punch her in the ovaries. Over."
Olivia started laughing, hard. Sunny probably heard that without the radio. Sunny laughed too. Their laughing made Cara laugh.
"You gave her a radio?" Cara asked Olivia after the laughing stopped, as they walked.
"Yeah," Olivia said. "My backup."
Maybe a minute later when Olivia and Cara were almost at the Poseidon Oil gas station up the hill that Ringo was lying low in, they both heard Sunny's voice in their ears remotely again. Sunny said, "Hey Olivia? What's your favorite kind of horse? Over."
Cara was smiling. Olivia smiled back at him before answering, "I'd have to say a brown horse. Over." They laughed. So did Sunny. Olivia went on, "Actually, Sunny, we're about to talk to Ringo, so could you please not call us unless it's an emergency? Over."
"Okay. Over," Sunny said. She sounded perfectly chipper.
"Cool," Olivia said. "Over and out. That means you're all done talking. Um . . . out."
"See you later, buddy," Sunny said. "Over and out."
Ringo answered them at the gas station's door opening by pointing his Browning Hi-Power at Cara again, then at Olivia, from the hip. If he fired he'd likely miss, but Cara and Olivia both didn't like their chances. Cara didn't think much when it was pointed at him, but when Ringo pointed the gun from him to Olivia, Cara got a little angry about it.
"You better not fire that thing, you prick," Olivia said.
Cara could see why she would distinctly dislike having another of that same pistol pointed at her; two months ago she'd almost been killed by one shooting her in the head. Despite use of stimpacks she still had scars, but her hair had grown back in, luckily before she talked to Cara without having a helmet or a hat on to cover the bald spots. In his defense Cara had looked over Doctor Mitchell's work before and said he wouldn't have found it ugly, but Olivia didn't like her chances there either.
Having a gun pointed at her in general bothered her more than Cara. It would still hurt to get shot with, even if it was only a 9x19mm Parabellum. Cara used to know a guy who carried a 9x19mm pistol and shot a prisoner in the chest with it at point blank range, and the prisoner didn't even seem bothered by it; the prisoner had just looked down at the bleeding wound, then back up at the guy with a look like, "You shot me." So the guy shot the prisoner again, in the head, and soon switched to a .45 ACP pistol. The 9mm Parabellum was designed in 1901 by Georg Luger, its name actually two separate Latin words, para bellum, "for war" in English—from the phrase "Si vis pacem, para bellum;" "If you want peace, prepare for war;" which also happened to be the motto of the company Luger had worked for, Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken (DWM; "German Weapons and Munitions"). Olivia probably couldn't identify Ringo's pistol in the dark, but the point stood.
"She's with me, she's okay," Cara said, directing the muzzle of the sub-gun in Olivia's arms, pointed at about Ringo's balls-level, gently away from Ringo, though at the same time Cara felt his other hand itching to pull out his own sidearm and shoot Ringo. For whatever reason, Cara distinctly didn't want to acknowledge that as a member of the male human sex Ringo likely had testicles, just anatomically, but Cara still didn't want the guy to get shot in the balls he might or might not have; he didn't deserve that.
"Oh," Ringo said. "Sorry. You just caught me off-guard, is all."
"When are you on guard?" Cara said.
Ringo looked at Cara, then looked away sheepishly.
Cara wasn't wearing all of his gear and armor, but Olivia had on all of her gear but her backpack—she wore her IOTV and had a rifle on her back and was wielding at Ringo a big boxy powerful-looking sub-gun with complicated futuristic doohickeys sticking off of it in places. She'd be intimidating to lesser mortals, Cara thought.
"Either of you guys wanna play caravan?" Ringo asked them.
"No thanks," Olivia said, thumbing the UMP40's pictographic fire selector from fully-automatic back to safe, from red to white, and lowering the weapon. She liked money, but not caravan or gambling.
"Nah," Cara said.
"Ah, nuts," Ringo said, put out.
For a few minutes, Olivia asked pretty much the same questions Cara had before and got pretty much the same answers. That was probably a good thing, though, that Ringo's answers didn't change with a beautiful woman present. Then again, Ringo seemed more interested in Cara than Olivia; he had before, too.
As the talking about ambushed caravans and Powder Gangers wound down, Olivia and Cara both heard Sunny in their ears again; she said, "Hey Olivia? There are some radscorpions north of town. Wanna come along with me to clear them out? Over."
Cara looked to Olivia and said, "Do you wanna take that?"
"Yeah," Olivia said, stepping away to talk to Sunny.
"What are you guys talkin' about?" Ringo said.
"Radios," Cara said.
"What's that?" Ringo said.
"It's a ranged communication device," Cara said.
"No, I meant what was it about," Ringo said, but Cara wasn't convinced.
"Sunny Smiles just called her," Cara said.
"How many are there? Over," Olivia was saying to Sunny over radio.
"I saw at least three and one big one, but there might be more," Sunny said. "Over."
"I'll go get my big gun," Olivia said. "Could you meet me out by the helicopter? Over."
"Sure. Over," Sunny said.
"I guess we're pretty much done here," Cara said to Ringo.
"Okay. Over and out," Olivia said to Sunny.
"Did you want somethin' else?" Ringo asked Cara.
"No," Cara said. He looked to Olivia.
"She didn't say 'over and out,'" Olivia said to him, worried.
Cara shrugged.
He looked back to Ringo and said, "Yeah. See you later, Ringo."
Outside, Olivia, worried, called Sunny back over the radio, fearing that Sunny had charged into the midst of a herd of radscorpions or something, but she hadn't; she'd just forgot the formality of "and out."
"See? She's smarter than that," Cara said.
"Yeah, but you never know," Olivia said. "People act weird sometimes."
As they walked away to the helicopter, Olivia briefly considered asking Cara outright, "Wanna take me into one of these houses 'n' fuck me?" but she never said it. All she really did was check him out.
They headed for Cara's helicopter and met up with Sunny on the way. Cara had had all their followers wait for them by the general store and the saloon. Only Raúl was still outside; the others had gone into the saloon.
"I'm gonna use my Black Hawk's radio for a minute," Cara said.
"Your holster?" Olivia said. Cara shook his head, smiling. "What is that, again?"
"The helicopter. It's a Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk," Cara said.
"Whoops," Olivia said, embarrassed to have forgotten any military jargon.
"It has a lot of names," Cara said. "No worries." It didn't seem to make her feel better.
He changed the subject to the plan he was working on, which he knew would take her mind off of it and which he needed to catch her up on anyway.
He'd need the longer range of his helicopter's radios to talk to the Boomers. He'd given them a lot of radios, for internal communications as well as external with him, partly just to make sure that when he next flew in they wouldn't try to shoot him down again. Olivia thought his plan was awesome, crazy, perfect and loved it. He said he didn't appreciate the superlative. She said she meant it as a good thing. He said oh. In her opinion, Cara had just thought of the best, coolest, funniest possible way to deal with the Powder Gangers. Sunny didn't think any of it would work, not even the finding the radscorpions part, and she was still having trouble believing radios could work. Also she hadn't heard of the Boomers before.
As Olivia retrieved her Hécate 2 and ammo for it, Cara talked with her and Sunny about the plan.
Then he turned on the radios in his Black Hawk and hailed the Boomers, not expecting this to work out. He didn't even think they'd answer. But they did, and then it all did work out. When he told them he wanted to do a UAV exercise, they got excited. He said he didn't intend to use them to kill anything . . . but then, when he said he thought the Boomers should still load the two drones with 100-pound Air-to-Ground Missile (AGM)-114R Hellfire (from "helicopter-launched, fire-and-forget missile") IIs, they got even more excited. He worked out the basic plan with the Boomers on duty, and Sunny and Olivia.
The Boomers would need three people to run each drone. That worked out well too. Cara felt a little weird about it, despite nonviolent direct intentions, but some of the people on the drone crews would be ones Cara liked to call Boomer Tots: Boomer children. They weren't quite like normal children; they trained as pilots in the Boomers' virtual reality fighter jet training stations just as Boomer adults did, and were expected to pull their weight at Nellis, albeit a small one, like anybody else. It still felt kind of wrong to Cara though.
Not being present at the Nellis Air Force Base runway himself made Cara uneasy. He was almost sure that one of the drones' takeoffs would go wrong. But after just a few minutes of nearly constant conversation—he felt sorry for his bored followers—the two huge General Atomics Extended Range MQ-9 Reapers (Department of Defense designations: "M" for multi-role, "Q" meaning remotely-piloted aircraft system), also called Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), were in the air, and hadn't crashed, and were both on their way to the Goodsprings area. Both Nellis AFB and Goodsprings were in Clark County, Nevada. The Reapers had a 66-foot wingspan, were 36 feet long, 12.5 feet tall, and had a range of 1,150 miles and a cruise speed even faster than Cara's Black Hawk; they'd be in the area of operations real quick. At a high altitude—a ceiling of 50,000 feet, though they wouldn't be quite that high—they'd start being useful before they were close. If Cara remembered the geography right, the drones' high-resolution cameras might've already been able to see Goodsprings.
The Boomers were even better than Cara at working his drones. (He'd given them a few for their own use but they never used them; theirs just sat around collecting irradiated dust.) Then again, there were a good deal more Boomers than Caras, and the Boomers trained for stuff like that every day. They were a martial society.
Drones like the MQ-9 Reaper required satellites to work. Cara had never launched a satellite of his own into space before, though he wanted to sometime. Despite the weapons used in the impressively destructive two hours of the Great War, the third World War, and what they'd done to the planet and the life it had supported before, a great deal of the many satellites in Earth orbit hadn't been destroyed or electronically fried by all the nuclear weapons' electromagnetic pulses (EMPs); a great deal of military/defense satellites and even civilian ones were still floating around out there. Hacking into some of them—in truth, Cara had hacked into quite a few more of them than even he thought he'd need, collecting them—had been disappointingly easy. The encryption software was all old. Cara had expected it to be inexplicably and maybe even artificially difficult, like most things. But even after it had all been set up and tested and then worked properly, satellites and UAVs and UCAVs and ground control and lots of cables and computers and equipment and everything, Cara had still not believed it would work out. He still thought it might all fail spontaneously. It was why he didn't use them all the time. He didn't think to use them very much.
Cara worked out all the rest of the plan with Olivia and Sunny, who'd gone back to varmint hunting, over radio, and with the Boomers, in the process of the drones' liftoff. Once those were in the air he picked up a manpack radio, in a backpack, from inside his helicopter that he'd need to keep talking with the Boomers. It wasn't heavy. He put the backpack on. It was fairly comfortable—which was good as he'd need to do a lot of running with it on quite soon.
Before leaving the helicopter to go work out the plan with the rest of Goodsprings' population, he called over radio his base of operations—he needed to give it some cool name; at the moment he just called it his "lab facility thing"—for his frequent copilot, Viana, an ex-NCR military vertibird pilot with a lot of experience in her 40s, who was on duty today. She was one of his several employees. The others were scientists, lab assistants and researchers—Cara funded a lot of research—and a full-time mechanic and a dog walker. Viana's part of the plan was the easiest: he'd just pick her up in his Black Hawk. She was ready and eager to fly. Cara was the only way she got to fly anymore.
Cara also put on a flat dark earth 5.11 Tactical VTAC (Viking Tactics, a pre-war company) LBE (Load-Bearing Equipment) vest, a basic MOLLE vest, which he'd had in the helicopter, to carry ammo and a few grenades, and took off a lot of the gear he'd been lugging around and stored it in the Black Hawk. He'd move his MMAC and rucksack and SRS-A2 rifle up onto the roof with Olivia later. He removed the M26 MASS from his HK417A2; except for maybe 3″ magnum slug rounds, shotguns and buckshot in general were ineffective against the rugged exoskeletons of radscorpions; useless; dead weight. Fortunately, the removal of the shotgun only took about 10 seconds and didn't require special tools. He stored it in the helicopter.
Whatever they'd want to do about it, the traveling merchants in town needed to be warned of the gunfight coming. Olivia and Cara got together and looked for them.
One was in the saloon. They found her first. Loaded with a surplus of bighorner and big purple gecko hides and a wicker basket of wasteland penguin eggs, her pack brahmin was tied up outside. Cara and Olivia talked to her inside; Sunny, Cheyenne, Rex and ED-E joined them. Cara and Olivia had their other followers just hang around wherever they liked, which for Raúl was wandering around town and Cass in the saloon.
"We thought we should tell you: You might want to finish up your business and get out of here, for the time being," Cara told the merchant.
"Why's that?" the merchant said after a sip of beer, looking between Cara and Olivia and Sunny.
"Have you heard about the thing with the Powder Gangers?" Olivia asked her.
"A little, yeah," she said. "I was in here when that guy in the prison guard outfit confronted Trudy. Demanded, more like. It was a little while ago."
"'Demanded' is right," Sunny said. "I was there too. I heard him."
"That's why," Olivia said. "Sometime probably soon the Powder Gangers are gonna attack this place."
"Do you have any guards? Or mercs that travel with you?" Cara said.
"No," the merchant said. "It's just little ol' me."
Not a wise choice, Cara and Olivia thought.
"We were gonna go talk to the other merchants coming through here," Olivia said. "You guys might want to travel south together for protection."
"Or north," Cara said, looking between the merchant and Olivia. "We cleared those deathclaws outta there, and just moments ago you and Sunny cleared some radscorpions out too, right?"
"Yeah, that's true," Olivia said. "I didn't think of that. Oh! There are cazadores up there too, though."
"Shit, that's right, there are a couple nests up that way," he said, grimacing, then said to the merchant, "Or south to Primm, or whatever. If you want you could stay there a day or two, then come back, pero . . . if you wanted to do more here."
"No, I already got done all the trading I was gonna do," the merchant said, nursing her beer.
Cara shrugged. "I kinda thought so."
The other two merchants were about in town, one in Chet's general store and one in Doc Mitchell's house, buying things. After no persuasion they both agreed to travel with the third merchant for safety. One of them had a hired guard. One of them was slow for having to push a little metal skeleton goods cart. The merchants, guard and two pack brahmin shuffled off together that afternoon, heading south to Primm.
Cara assembled most of the temporary Goodsprings militia, including Trudy, to talk to them and told them he was going to be moving as fast as possible. He had two UCAVs (they didn't seem to understand what that was, though he explained it) watching their area, as well as all the Powder Ganger camps he knew about, as he'd synced his PIP-Boy's maps with the Boomers' gear and all the technology for use with the drones; they'd also be watching the Powder Gangers' base—the prison in Jean—and tracking a large number of targets they'd identified visually as Powder Gangers.
Meaning they actually looked like Powder Gangers and wore their outfits, not just were people who might happen to be around them. Not that many innocents would associate with them; Powder Gangers attacked everybody. The major powers, the NCR and Caesar's Legion, both hated the Powder Gangers, and the NCR and the Legion didn't agree on anything, though the Legion appreciated the Gangers causing trouble in the NCR.
Most importantly, the Boomers had quickly located Joe Cobb and would be watching him.
The riskiest part of the plan, once Joe and gang started moving, was what Cara would be doing; distance running, and pissing off a lot of radscorpions. The people of Goodsprings were to hold their ground from cover and not especially risk harm; if Cara's plan worked perfectly, which it wouldn't, they wouldn't even get shot at. Worst-case scenario: there were probably more Goodspringers than there would be Powder Gangers, and with Olivia, and Cara's very lethal drones, they were also much better armed, and would have cover and knew the area. They might also be able to use the several armaments of Cara's Black Hawk, namely the miniguns, depending on how well that end of the plan worked out.
If Cara had any radio problems, the plan probably wouldn't work, so if Cara didn't check in with or didn't respond to the Boomer crews for too long they were to just missile-strike the shit out of Joe Cobb and any Powder Gangers with him.
Until Cobb started moving, Cara needed to be a lot further south at soonest. He was nervous and excited to go try this. He'd carry along his HK417. Loaded it weighed nine pounds—less than his SRS and M14 EBR, the weapons he'd been carrying the most lately. He was also very strong; he could run with the HK417 in his arms and it wouldn't slow him down.
Before Olivia and Cara coordinated with ladders getting everybody on top of the Prospector Saloon for the impending gunfight, Cara ran back to his helicopter and brought out another bag with a manpack radio in it for Olivia. It had a range of hundreds of miles, much better than the few miles of their handhelds. This way she'd be able to talk to him throughout his long run; if she wanted she could listen in on what the Boomers were saying too.
Before they went to the roof of the saloon, Olivia, Cara and Sunny went to get Ringo from the derelict gas station he was hiding in.
When they opened the door, Ringo didn't greet them by pointing a weapon at them; probably an improvement, for Ringo's safety anyway. Instead, Olivia and Sunny went in first, and didn't even see Ringo. They became worried.
Cara came in a second later and because he looked around a lot immediately saw Ringo, to the left of the entrance door, standing close to the corner there and staring at the wall, completely silent. Cara pointed him out. Olivia became really creeped out and yelped. Sunny didn't seem bothered by it. When they spoke to Ringo to tell him it was time to get ready, Ringo acted completely normal.
Cara brought out a ladder from a willing Goodspringer's house and helped Ringo onto the roof of the general store, along with a few other Goodspringers. Olivia refused to be anywhere near Ringo, so she and Sunny and her followers helped bring two ladders to the saloon. More people would be atop there.
Cara's last touches before leaving were to help Olivia, Trudy, Sunny, Cass, Raúl, and Cheyenne and Rex, who could both climb ladders, up onto the roof of the Prospector Saloon; ED-E just flew up. For the duration of the gunfight, Ringo would be just across the alley, where everyone could see him, on the roof of Chet's general store; Chet would be inside it cowering. Cara stored his armored utility vest with some of his normal gear in it, his MOLLE II rucksack, and his SRS for fighting radscorpions, if they weren't all dead by the time he got back up to it, on the roof with Olivia.
Olivia, Trudy, Sunny and Cara worked with ropes and a few of Olivia and Cara's followers to bring up onto the roof of the saloon crates, barrels and a small stepladder so the three of them could look out over the tall façade of the Prospector Saloon, to shoot down at the Powder Gangers and probably radscorpions. There weren't enough things around to boost others, who'd have to shoot around the edges or something.
Olivia set the manpack radio at her feet and plugged her headset into it.
Then she stood on her stacked Sunset Sarsaparilla crates and gleefully deployed her Hécate 2's built-in hinged bipod, rested the weapon's weight on the lip at the edge of the roof, and unlocked the rifle's bolt, moving steel back and forth to chamber a round larger than her hand. I should've cleaned this today, she thought; it didn't move quite as smoothly as it should've.
Cara said, "It might be a couple hours before you need that," looking up at her from the normal height of the roof. He was much taller than her but still had to look up. He added, "Speaking of which, sudden thought: Cobb might wait to attack until night, or something. We'll deal with that if it's what happens."
Olivia removed the Hécate 2's magazine, which weighed three pounds loaded, less one round now, and tore open a Velcro pouch on her IOTV, pulling out one of a few loose .50 BMG match rounds. She thumbed it into the magazine, then put the mag back in the rifle; rounds: seven plus one. "Okay. I know," she said as she did it. "And . . . yeah."
"Is the safety on?" Cara asked, looking uneasily at her anti-matérial rifle.
Knowing he was joking, Olivia pretended to be upset and said, "What are you trying to say, Cara?!" and they both laughed.
After that Cara said, "Everybody? Could you all come here for a second, please?" He spoke to everyone on the roof, with enough volume for them all to hear.
Over a few seconds he arranged them all into a circle. "Can everyone put one hand into the middle of us now? Like this?" Cara said, doing it.
Everybody put their hands in.
"Okay. Now, everybody put your hands over one another's?—" he was saying, moving a few of their hands to illustrate.
"Great," he said.
Everyone joined in; Sunny tried to get Cheyenne to put a paw on the pile too, but the dog didn't want to and kept pulling her paw back. "Come on, Cheyenne!" Sunny said.
Smiling Cara went on, "Now we're gonna say 'Go team!' at the same time, and sorta throw our hands into the air. It's a teamwork-team spirit thing. Everybody ready?"
"I think so," Sunny said.
Olivia was smiling. She got it.
Trudy said "Okay" and noticed Ringo, across the small alley on the top of Chet's Goodsprings General Store, watching them, looking forlorn.
"I'll start it," Cara said, "but everybody say this along with me: Gooo . . . team!" Everyone joined in with him, at varying times, even Raúl and Trudy, whom Cara didn't think would participate. "Yeah!" Cara said, enthusiastically but joking.
"Yeah!" Olivia said with this big smile.
"Yeah!" Cass said.
Then he got moving.
To say goodbye for now on your dangerous endeavor, Olivia set her heavy rifle down, its 700mm (27.5") long barrel pointing into the sky, up against the edge of the roof, and she turned to Cara and gave him a big kiss on the cheek, which he returned, and a big, too-tight hug, which he also returned.
She stood very close to him and held him tightly, catching him completely by surprise when she said, "I love you," squeezing him. She meant it. She didn't let her emotions into the open much. She was afraid.
"I love you too," Cara said, not hesitating, squeezing her back. He meant it. He put one of his hands on her head, at the side. She leaned into it with her eyes closed. They'd never said I love you to each other before.
Her eyes opened, she looked at him, and she kissed him on the cheek again. On the way in she moved slowly, at first in the direction of his lips, just for two seconds. He thought it was about to become entirely another kind of kiss. But it didn't. Her lips smacked softly wetly against his cheek. It still felt really nice, especially with everything he knew was behind it.
"Don't do anything stupid," Olivia said. "Don't get yourself hurt." Her voice sounded a little thick, heavy. Cara was in such disbelief that he couldn't comprehend what it meant. And she was vulnerable. He'd seen her like that maybe twice before. He didn't know how to respond. He just let himself be vulnerable too, direct and honest and truthful. He didn't know what else he could do.
"I won't," he said. "You be careful too, okay? And if anything goes wrong, just kill all the Powder Gangers yourself." There wouldn't be many of them. Olivia likely wouldn't even have to reload, unless she missed. One .50 Browning Machine Gun round was enough to kill a human and then some. With other cartridges hits that would only be grazes often became, with .50 BMG, severed limbs. Most cartridges were lighter than .50 BMG, a bullet half an inch wide that could make human beings explode, put head-sized holes in cinderblocks, and shoot through schools.
"Okay," Olivia said.
"You've got your helmet, right?" Cara asked.
It was clipped to her IOTV. "Uh-huh," she said. She patted it. She should've patted him instead. She took one of his hands in hers. Her voice had evened out. Maybe he hadn't heard it, before. Her hand was a little sweaty. His was nice and warm and calm. "Will you wear yours for me?" she asked. "When you get out of the Black Hawk? So you don't bump your head?" He gripped her hand. She squeezed back, rubbing him with her thumb. Cara kept thinking as she spoke that she was done speaking with each additional question. She was self-conscious and grinning by the end.
"Yes, yes, yes," he said, smiling along with her, and hugged her again, still holding her hand.
She watched him climb down the ladder, run to his huge magical helicopter, get in, sit in the pilot's seat and put on his flight helmet, power up and flip switches, then lift off, turn around and fade away into the sky.
Olivia was talking to Cass and Raúl, then noticed something seemed to be bothering Sunny.
"Are you doing okay, Sunny?" Olivia asked.
Sunny was quiet for a second, then said, "Yeah, I'm okay."
Olivia watched Sunny, concerned, then changed the topic. "Hey Sunny?" she said. "Incase any of those really big radscorpions ever come into town, can I give you a higher-caliber rifle, or something?"
"Sure, if you want to," Sunny said.
"Okay," Olivia said. Then she put her headset back on and hailed Cara over the radio. She said: "You let me know how it's going while you're doing it, okay? Over."
"Wilco," Cara came back with. He felt very far away. "You'll hear me talking to the Boomers. But yeah, sure I will. You might miss it when the Boomers pick up that Cobb is moving, so I'll make sure to tell you when they do. Over."
"Have he and his guys moved at all?" Olivia asked. "Over."
"No, he's just loitering. They appear to be circle-jerking," Cara said. "I didn't know people actually did that. Over."
"Are they really? Do any of 'em have big dicks? Over," Olivia said. She was laughing.
Trudy asked her, "What're you laughin' at?"
Cass said, "What was that about dicks?"
Olivia said, "Cara said the Powder Gangers're jerkin' each other off!"
Trudy looked confused. Cass laughed. Sunny snickered.
"No, they're not really doing that," Cara came back over the radio disappointingly. "I'll call back when I have something to tell you, okay? Over."
"Ah, damn, he said they weren't actually doing that," Olivia said not over the radio, then replied to Cara, "Okay. I just like talking to you. Over."
"I like talking to you too. I'm just flying a complicated piece of advanced tech and I need to focus. Sorry. Over and out," Cara said. Then it felt like he was worlds away.
Cara felt guilty, but if he wasn't careful he'd crash the helicopter, flying alone. Thinking about Olivia was too much. And he could keep talking to her; during the run he'd have plenty of down time he could put to good use.
The Boomers were on the same frequency. He addressed them, though Olivia would hear too, and checked in with them incase anything had changed. Olivia listened in, but it was a little jargoney. They were tracking a lot of Powder Gangers; no movement yet. They were all just milling about in their campsites, drinking and smoking and apparently not having any forms of sex. He asked one drone crew to look around some more incase they'd missed anyone, and to double-check that the one they'd identified as Joe Cobb was Joe Cobb, to which the Boomers in good humor said they already were and had but would do it again anyway. Everything was going fairly well.