IV

Facility — Grove — Chariot — Dry Lake — Pandinus Imperator — Movement — Messin' with Radscorpions — Herd — Predation — Relay — No Hard Liquor — Progress — Long Run — Variable Power — Gunfight — VATS — Shock — Scorpion Scramble — Returner — Penetration — Victoria

To keep the place locked down tight and concealed the primary helipad of Cara's underground military lab facility thing was normally lidded over by a dome of camouflaged covering, but as he'd asked it was open when he got there in the Black Hawk. He landed cautiously, but it was routine.

He ran into a section he called the grove, a huge interior garden park thing that natural light got into through the ceiling, where he kept his dog pack, to see and play and run with them for a few minutes. They were all doing well. They'd been fed. He didn't encounter either of the two white-beige cats who stayed with him, who usually avoided dogs. The grove was a big place, and a bunch of other animals were in there too, such as birds; no problems with them.

Then he went to the air control area, saying hi to almost half of his employees on the way. Viana was in the pilot's lounge, ready and excited to go, already wearing a flight suit and carrying her helmet.

They got right to it.

Viana was easy to talk to. So was Cara. They chatted on the way southwest.

As they flew, over the intercom Cara said, "Hey Viana. You're Japanese, right?"

"Asian, I guess," Viana said. "I don't know which one."

Cara said, "Korean?"

"I really don't know," Viana said. It took her several seconds to realize Cara had been joking, and even then it was because he was laughing. Viana laughed too and said, "Dammit, Cara."

Olivia listened as Cara took to the air again and updated her and the Boomers on his progress over radio. She liked knowing what was going on in the world around her; it was mundane, though.

The most—the worst—radscorpions Cara had ever encountered had been at this one dry lakebed thing near the NCR's Mojave Outpost, which was in California. He'd been to the lakebed twice or maybe just the once. Not Ivanpah Lake; this one was further south. It was a big empty place with a military cargo plane crashed in. He hadn't thought to give it a place marker on his PIP-Boy map, the pre-war world map or the local sonar one; he just avoided it. The closest place he'd marked seemed to be the Morning Star cavern, which he wouldn't be going near. Nightstalkers were fast.

Nightstalkers wouldn't have trouble slaughtering a few Powder Gangers, but neither would Olivia alone. Killing Powder Gangers was easy; they'd all apparently learned combat from watching hamsters play-fighting. Ease of slaughtering Powder Gangers wasn't Cara's only search criterion. He needed—well, wanted—critters that were kind of easy to kill, too. With Olivia's Hécate 2 or his SRS even giant radscorpions went down easy, sometimes exploding bodily on the way. Radscorpions were quick in a rage but not good distance runners, and foolhardy; they never backed down from a fight. It was difficult to scare them away from anything. They wouldn't be able to escape Goodsprings once Cara got them there. They also wouldn't try to.

On the way to the dry lake, Cara thought about what route to take back to Goodsprings. He'd thought about it before, but now that he was about to get there it was suddenly worth reviewing. He couldn't go through Primm's streets or bystanders would get killed, but if he went around the town, west, he'd get feral ghouls chasing him too, and he wasn't sure there was a way through to the east; it might've been blocked off by fences or something.

He didn't want to waste time thinning his herd once he'd gathered them, either; might not have time to. He was concerned that gathering the herd would be by far the hardest part. Or the most dangerous, anyway. If he gathered too many he'd have to kill some, and he didn't want to kill any more animals than he had to—they were ornery and gigantic, but still innocent animals—to take out the half dozen or whatever poorly armed convicts-cum-raiders.

Before they got to the dry lake, Cara and Viana passed by a map marker Cara had labeled "Nipton Road Pit Stop." He wasn't sure why he bothered capitalize each word. There were almost always Jackal raiders there, at the pit stop, but he didn't think about that until he heard dings and pangs on the helicopter's fuselage; Jackals down there were shooting at him, the bastards. He couldn't hear the gunshots. The small-arms fire just bounced off the helicopter, though; Cara didn't worry about it, Viana hardly noticed, and the Jackals quickly lost interest. He still considered sending some missiles their way; the helicopter was very much armed.

Cara and Viana circled the lakebed area for 30 minutes.

While communicating with Olivia and the Boomers about his and their statuses, Cara mapped the ground area out in his head as best he could. He could see where most of the radscorpions below were, though they were all moving and likely would be elsewhere by the time he got out. He still paid attention. He thought he saw some yellow or gold giant geckos too.

In a holding pattern, he and Viana waited for Joe Cobb to start moving. Cobb was at the place Cara had marked "Powder Ganger Camp West," just southwest of the Jean airport on I-15. It was a little closer to Goodsprings than Cara would've liked, and for the distance he'd have to run.

Before telling Cara that Cobb had started moving, the Boomers double-checked it and re-verified that it was really Cobb, so a few seconds had gone by.

Cara specifically addressed Olivia to make sure she'd heard.

Olivia said, "He's what? Over."

"Were you listening, Pretty Lady? Over," Cara said.

"Not really, it was pretty boring. Uh, over," Olivia said.

Cara laughed. He said, "Cobb just started moving. I'm gonna get going. I'll let all you guys know when I get out, but I might not be able to talk as much for a couple minutes. Just so you know."

Cara and Viana swung around and brought the UH-60M to a low then lower hover, and Cara told everyone over the radio he was getting out, until they were only a few feet above the ground. By then Cara was putting his flight helmet down, plugging his LASH II headset into his radio manpack and putting its backpack on, strapping on his Enhanced Combat Helmet and HK417A2 battle rifle, and touching Viana on the arm as kind of a thanks and a gesture of solidarity and for good luck though he didn't believe in luck. Viana was going to stay with him at first but then head to Goodsprings and land north of town, out of the Powder Gangers' path.

Cara hopped out of the helicopter onto cracked dry sand and immediately remembered to pull down his dust goggles in the rotor wash cyclone; he was in a storm of sand, and it was hard to see even with them on.

He had 126-grain M993 high velocity armor-piercing rounds loaded in a couple of the transparent 20-round magazines for his HK417, including the current one, incase anything went wrong and he had to shoot his way through gigantic radscorpions. Olivia had loaded the bullets for him, based on pre-war US military specs, and he'd supplied the materials.

He pulled the battle rifle's charging handle and chambered a round and the ejection port's dust cover popped open, then he flicked the fire selector from safe to semi-automatic and looked around. He thought he might have to shoot something mutated and giant. He did his best to stay aware, so if any radscorpions had already got that close, maybe attracted to the noise of the strange dark flying machine, he might at least see them before they could strike. He flicked the fire selector once more to full-automatic. He and Viana had done their best to spot any radscorpions near his deployment zone and hadn't seen any, but he couldn't be sure, and now he was exposed.

He started moving as soon as his goggles were on. He was maybe 30 yards north of the crashed cargo plane. He remembered getting past that before encountering radscorpions, and all the ones he and Viana had spotted from the air had been south of its wreckage.

Viana pulled the Black Hawk up and away. As she did he heard the engines whine, and got his bearings. He saw there weren't any radscorpions near him, and that he hadn't missed being chomped on. He didn't see anything near him.

He raised his right arm to use the Personal Information Processor (PIP)-Boy 3000A computer on his forearm—a joint venture between RobCo Industries and Vault-Tec Industries featuring Vault-Tec's goofy mascot Vault Boy. He turned on its Identify Friend-or-Foe (IFF) short-range radar, and saw a few red vertical bar slashes on its dial around him. The IFF displayed on the PIP-Boy's compass. He couldn't tell what the red slashes were; one of the 3000A's drawbacks. Cara had optimized and tweaked his PIP-Boy's settings and made a few after-market modifications, so now it wasn't always on, wasting power and distracting him; he'd also installed an old military motion tracker, but didn't want to bother using that.

Three red slashes were in the direction where he expected to find a horde of radscorpions.

So he wouldn't slip and shoot himself in the dick or something, he flicked the HK417's fire selector back to safe, closed the dust cover for the weapon's sake as sand was blowing around everywhere, though the weapon would fire even if he submerged it in sand, and ran toward his vague destination.

Passing by the cargo plane wreckage, he slung the HK417 on his back and drew his sidearm, a slightly blocky-looking but sleek black semi-automatic Glock 22C pistol, and racked its slide, chambering the first of 15 rounds in its magazine—he tried to remember the number—and cocking it, and kept it up in his hands.

He intended not to go far into radscorpion territory, so he wouldn't get more of them following him than he wanted.

He saw two radscorpions, then kept moving and raised his PIP-Boy to check its IFF dial on the compass again. It showed five red red slashes, likely radscorpions. He moved further. Then a little further.

One small radscorpion started heading toward him, suspicious, from off to his right, 50 or 60 yards away. He wouldn't need to work to get its attention. It was small as radscorpion sizes went, but still giant compared to any natural pre-FEV Emperor scorpion, their average full size having been about that of an adult person's hand; this one was bigger than a basketball, several feet long, and its stinger-tipped tail rose more than a foot into the windy sandy air above it, maybe more than two feet.

He moved further south, not at a full run anymore.

Cara remembered Cobb was advancing on Goodsprings. He wanted people to see what the radscorpions made of the Powder Gangers, but then he thought about that more; if he could kill all the Gangers before they reached Goodsprings, the people of Goodsprings needn't be anywhere near gunfire; no stray bullets hurting people or bighorners or wasteland penguins or brahmin, or damaging property. Cobb was moving at a crawl, but still in Goodsprings' direction. Cara picked up his pace.

He saw a lot of red on his PIP-Boy in a few more seconds, and the small radscorpion had started to run at him, rather than pointedly stroll.

He got an urge to shoot it through its stupid little head. For just a second he considered doing it: Holster the 22C, whip around the HK417, unsafe it as he put its stock in the meat of his shoulder and lined up its sights, put the front sight over the radscorpion, pull the trigger once, and it would almost certainly be dead. But he didn't do it.

He also didn't use his PIP-Boy's Vault-Assisted Targeting System (VATS), but wondered how many radscorpions he might be able to spot if he did. He expected he'd count quite a few more than he wanted. There must have been some kind of nest.

He watched the radscorpions he could see—there was a stiff breeze in the dry lakebed, and a lot of flying sand—to work out their relative sizes and distances from him. Some seemed big and far away but were small and close. A few seemed like they couldn't possibly be as large as they were.

Cara picked out two of the biggest and fired his 22C pistol at each of them once. The biggest ones were easily eight feet long and several tall, not including their tails.

He was using a .40 S&W load of Olivia's, who went for velocity and accuracy; this one very accurate, with a muzzle velocity of about 965 feet per second; and despite the wind he heard pops as the gun went off pretty clearly through earplugs. The load wasn't supersonic—the speed of sound about 1,100 fps. He wouldn't be able to find or collect the bullet casings. The bullets were 180-grain Hornady XTP hollowpoints, XTP a brand/marketing name, "eXtreme Terminal Performance." He didn't know if their terminal performance was extreme, but their ballistics and accuracy were good.

He wasn't sure what kind of feeling sensitivity radscorpions had, though he knew they had raised sensory hairs on their pincers and tails, which made them even uglier, and he was pretty sure they would feel the bullets' impacts against their exoskeletons. He didn't think it would cause any pain. They'd probably hear the pistol going off somehow, too.

He also fired at two smaller, about average-sized radscorpions—still gigantic ones, as big as a very large dog or two, but of an average size among the other sizes of radscorpions—with a plan to shoot a few more, but a great deal of them seemed to have become interested in him by then.

Both of the average-sized radscorpions staggered when the bullets hit. Hollowpoints mushroom, expanding on impact, expending their energy immediately; but, hitting a surface as hard as the radscorpions' shells, Cara wondered if the bullets might not just explode into a useless confetti of fast-moving sharp metal fragments, insubstantial, without enough direct energy behind them to pierce tough exoskeleton, then maybe the main bodies of the bullets would bounce off them harmlessly as well. Evidently when the bullets hit they still had some force. He didn't see any yellow-green gore fly into the air.

His smaller targets felt the bullet hits. They reacted. He surveyed them before moving.

He was gathering a crowd now. He imagined one of the radscorpions saying, when it felt the bullet hit, "That's a right statement of intent, that is!"

The one that'd noticed him first was closer than the others, but still distant. It'd got lucky spotting him. He moved and tried to make it draw even with his other pursuers.

There were more in the crowd following him, he saw, than he thought he'd need; three of the giant ones (two probably would've done), five of the normal ones, and between four and eight small ones.

Cara started running again, but not at full speed, and not at a sprint. He didn't want to lose them.

One of the giant radscorpions sprinted ahead of the others. They did that sometimes. Cara decided to just let it be closer. If he put more distance between him and them he might lose the others somehow.

Cara put the 22C back in its holster on his leg and kept running. Not at full speed.

He went east wide, then whipped back west, running past the Nipton Road Pit Stop so fast that the six or so raiders there didn't even have time to start shooting at him until a second before the radscorpions started mangling and killing all of them. Two of the Jackals went down before any of them fought back.

Cara got a little too far away to appreciate it, so he went back closer.

It took a few seconds longer than he thought it would for the radscorpions to kill the rest of the Jackals. One of them started screaming pretty badly as two then three of the radscorpions pulled her apart, fighting over her. And one wore jury-rigged scrap metal armor crudely shaped and badly welded, which the first two radscorpions' tail stingers couldn't pierce, so they held the human still with their pincers and pulled and twisted and collaborated to remove the man's legs and arms messily. When he was down at their height they just started eating him.

Only one of the radscorpions went through all of the Jackals to get to Cara. He didn't see it get shot at. It was average-sized. He respected its tenacity.

Cara ran around in a loop, going away from the pit stop and then circling back close to it. On the way he ran right past some of the radscorpions, and shot at three others with his pistol. They mostly looked busy and content, eating the corpses or howling not-quite corpses of the Jackals. Some of them just milled around doing nothing. Cara might've lost a few of his pursuers to their prey here. Most of them readily started chasing after him again, though. He didn't pause to count them. He didn't mind; he'd had too many, and those he lost he'd fed Jackals. That was okay. The three giant ones were all still interested. That was good; the Powder Gangers might have a chance against smaller radscorpions.

He zig-zagged, and took the lull in the chase to update the Boomers, Olivia and Viana, who was still flying in the Black Hawk, on his status over radio. Olivia said he was crazy again. The Boomers still seemed to think what he was doing would be more fun to watch than Cobb and company's slow progress toward Goodsprings; Cara agreed, but politely asked the Boomers to focus just on the Powder Gangers. He had them stop tracking other Powder Gangers, but be wary incase any more joined Cobb's group, or something, and with two drones the Boomers could easily comply. Cobb was walking with five other men. Cara suspected that one or both of the UCAV crews glanced down at himself, running and more interestingly pursued by a small horde of radscorpions, anyway.

I gotta speed up, Cara thought as the Boomers updated him on Cobb's progress. Cobb was passing by the Jean airport.

Cara shot at a few of the bigger radscorpions. That seemed to do the trick; the whole group sped up. Cara almost needed to exert himself to stay ahead of them, yet tantalizingly close enough to keep them interested, and still vary his speed and navigate rough terrain. He was getting a good run in.

Back in Goodsprings atop the Prospector Saloon, in her peripheral vision Olivia saw Cass pulling something alcoholic out of her bag. Cass went to take a drink. Olivia stopped her. Cass snorted irritably.

"What's my rule?" Olivia asked her.

"Dammit, Courier," Cass said.

"What's my rule?"

Cass said, "No hard liquor before 11 am." She looked to Olivia, then looked longingly at her big bottle of whiskey, then put it back in her bag. "What time is it, anyway?"

Olivia moved her forearm so Cass couldn't see her PIP-Boy's display, then checked the time. It was well after noon. Olivia didn't share that.

Cara ran well, making progress, feeling good, going past a Nevada Highway Patrol station where the radscorpions killed three more Jackals and one loose Powder Ganger wearing typical wasteland merc armor stuff, asking for updates, letting Olivia and everybody know how he was doing. Cobb was still between Jean and Goodsprings; there were miles between them.

Cara passed by Primm, using an underpass he hadn't remembered until he'd seen it just now so he wouldn't give the radscorpions any targets or hopefully distractions. The underpass was cluttered with junk. He hoped his radscorpions were in enough of a line to get through and not get caught on anything. They all seemed to make it just fine. He heard somebody yell "Save me Jeebus!" as radscorpions passed underneath them. Cobb was nearing Goodsprings' water source, a few minutes' walk south of town. That was too close.

Cara thought about breathing and updated everybody on his progress, but first checked where he was: Running, he looked at his PIP-Boy's world map, zoomed in far enough that not even all of Clark County was in picture. The PIP-Boy and the global positioning system (GPS) it used were tracking him well—ever since he'd commandeered a bunch of satellites and made some system tweaks, the GPS had been working a lot better, and sometimes even got right which way the PIP-Boy was facing. He told the Boomers and Olivia where he was. He was tremendously glad he ran so much, miles and miles every day; he was doing just fine even after such a run.

Olivia heard Cara saying over radio, not sounding very exerted, "I'm passing through Primm quite quickly right now. Over."

Cara passed by the Powder Ganger camp that Cobb had come from, then the Jean airport seconds later. His trail of radscorpions was holding up. A few of them seemed to have wandered off, but there were still three giant ones chasing him, swinging their stingers, clamping their pincers, making creepy chittering noises.

Cara was following the road, making good time, when Olivia first told him that she could see Cobb through the variable power scope she had on her Hécate 2, a big Bushnell Elite Tactical Long Range Scope (LRS) 5–15x40mm zoomed in to about 10-power with a mil-dot reticle—a series of dots on normal crosshairs developed in the 1970s to help US Marine snipers estimate distances—and about two minutes later that Sunny and the Powder Gangers had started shooting.

Damn, he hadn't timed it perfectly. He was just passing by Goodsprings' water source. He looked back at his trail of monsters. Two or three giant purple geckos had joined it. They weren't attacking or being attacked by the radscorpions. And—was that really . . . ?—for just a second, Cara thought he saw a person in typical slipshod raider armor running alongside the radscorpions. A giant, very pale brown Arizona bark scorpion had also joined the group somewhere, but as Cara saw it, it and one of the average-sized radscorpions both stopped chasing him and started fighting each other. The radscorpion was a little bigger. He didn't have time to find out who won.

Looking at him through a pair of meager 2.43-fixed-power M&A binoculars, Sunny got a good view of Cara, running, with a bunch of very large dark blurry forms chasing him. There was enough light to see him quite clearly, him and the lines of his legs and his arms and his shoulders and the gear he was wearing. And his face.

"That's Cara? Oh my god . . . Oh my god . . . " Sunny said.

"What, you didn't get a good look before?" Olivia said. "You were totally checking him out!"

"I was . . . I just forgot how hot he is," Sunny said.

Olivia said, "He is a sexy son of a bitch."

"Damn he's fast," Sunny said.

Cara heard the distant cracking and popping of gunfire in Goodsprings, saw some flashes of light.

The way it had gone was:

For a few seconds, as the Powder Gangers, inside of Goodsprings, walked closer and closer to her, Olivia kept thinking that suddenly, unannounced, Cara and his cloud of radscorpions would just appear and it'd all be over, quickly and cleanly.

Then Sunny stood straight up and started firing her varmint rifle, most of their plan thrown out with her bullet, and by her second shot the Powder Gangers, who didn't all have guns, mostly all started firing back, and all the Goodspringers with guns started to shoot back at them too, and the Gangers were too far away to start throwing dynamite, then Sunny's gun jammed—it looked like the bolt got stuck along in the breech, after extraction of the fired casing—and Sunny crouched back behind the wall of the Prospector Saloon's façade.

Olivia panicked a little, not sure what to do. Later she was incredibly embarrassed by this but only told Cara, who didn't judge her for it or laugh. She'd thought he would be there by then, despite him and others cautioning her otherwise.

She looked around. Trudy with her new shotgun that Cara gave her a week ago, Raúl with his big very loud revolver, Cass with her crappy over-and-under double-barreled 20-gauge shotgun and ED-E with his laser were all firing, making lots of noise and occasionally barking things at the Powder Gangers. After a few seconds Sunny stood back up and started shooting again too.

Olivia set her Hécate 2 down barrel-up and checked that her radio, at her feet, was on and on the right channel, then—then remembered she'd just seen Cara and focused on breathing for a second or two.

Cautiously she took up her Hécate 2 and rose. Bullets went off and flew by all around her, bouncing off and embedding in the saloon's façade with great thunks, and snapping and zipping as they flew by her into the air. She set the heavy Hécate 2 down on its bipod against the roof, then shouldered it, flicked the safety off and surveyed the Powder Gangers.

There were six of them.

She looked between Powder Gangers for a ranged threat and found one in about the middle of the pack to the right holding a rifle, probably a varmint rifle. They were all just standing there and shooting and moving side-to-side a little.

She moved her arms around each other with some difficulty and pressed a button on the top side of her PIP-Boy, engaging her VATS, injecting herself intravenously with a large dose of adrenaline that made her vision much sharper and clearer and seemed to slow down time.

She hoped she'd zeroed her Hécate 2's scope for a very short range, which she probably had, and aimed just above the man's left knee exposed in black shorts and pulled the rifle's light, 3-pound trigger. During travel she jerked it a little, which threw her aim off, but at this range not critically; it still hit. She didn't practice shooting enough.

Olivia's Hécate 2 had on the end of its barrel by default a huge reverse-flow muzzle brake which reduced the considerable felt recoil of .50 BMG officially by 50%, to more like what she'd expect of a 7.62x51mm/.308 rifle. She certainly still felt it fire, but it didn't make her lurch two fucking feet backward, either. The weapon still jumped. Her sight picture went back, upward. It felt good.

The muzzle blast was considerable, though it didn't look like much in daylight; it was extravagantly violent at night, with big gouts of flame blasting forward and left and right out of the cuts in the muzzle brake. It was also loud as hell, at any time, and made louder by the muzzle brake. From the massive percussion and pressure of the round going off, smoke and dust—she wasn't even sure where it came from—flew up into the air all around and in front of the Hécate 2's barrel, and acrid burnt gunpowder smell rushed back past Olivia in the wind.

For a few inches above and below the knee, the man's leg simply disappeared, in a dark blurry explosion of gore and chunks of bone and red muscle and stringy skin tearing. All Olivia could see was some lower thigh, and the man's foot sideways on the ground, gone above the shin somewhere, a small pool of blood already gathering below him, quickly being added to at a pour from both the man's thigh and dismembered lower leg, apparently from several different blood vessels in each.

The bullet must've buried itself in the dirt and sand of the desert somewhere far behind him. It'd crashed through the soft tissue and bone of the leg like it was nothing.

She should've put the center of her crosshairs lower. She might've put the bullet high enough for shock from the tens of thousands of foot/pounds of energy of the big .50 cal round to hit the femoral artery, a major one; the Powder Ganger might pass out or bleed to death before Cara and the radscorpions got there.

For the time being, she'd have to be content with the man's pitiful high screaming of bloody murder, and agonized rolling around on the street's patchy paved blacktop, as he tried to hold his blood in what was left of his leg with both hands, only to see it spurt thickly through his fingers.

"Gotcha, bitch!" she said out loud. Likely no one heard her. She didn't hear herself.

Satisfied, Olivia reached forward and unlocked the Hécate 2's bolt, rotated it up and pulled back and with a belch of white smoke a huge brass .50 Browning Machine Gun casing sprang out and flew and spun a couple of feet to the right, and the next round in the magazine popped up, pushed by springs. She pushed the bolt back forward, stripping the next round from the mag and into the chamber, and locked the bolt back down.

She could see Cara. The ground behind him seemed to be following him. Then Olivia realized it was living things, chasing him; the plan had actually worked.

Olivia had made sure nobody stood on her right, but there Sunny was now, down off her stand. Olivia looked in time to see Sunny's booted feet shuffling as Olivia's ejected .50 BMG casing hit the floor/roof. It must've hit Sunny in the torso somewhere and fallen down, bounding around the skinny young woman's curves and her leather armor and its straps. "Dammit, Sunny," Olivia said, but Sunny—who like some other people in town had declined to wear any sort of earplugs or hearing protection—likely deaf, didn't seem to hear.

It felt like only a second later: Cara was passing by six very confused Powder Gangers, two or three of them wounded and bleeding, and one on the ground with a leg looking unnaturally short. Cara heard another of them see all the radscorpions behind him and yell "OH MY FUCK!"

Cara wanted to go up to Olivia and Trudy and Sunny and the rest and retrieve his SRS, but he wanted to watch this happening even more. He didn't think it would take long. He paused just before the Prospector Saloon.

Then . . .

It was glorious.

Olivia tried to watch each individual death, but the radscorpions—and was that one of those big geckos?—made such quick work of the six Powder Gangers that she could only snatch glimpses of it all. An arm, firing a pistol, suddenly bending around itself impossibly; she realized it'd been lopped off and was just spinning as it fell. At some point the people of Goodsprings started cheering all around her. Olivia heard Cara re-tasking the Boomers over the radio to track the radscorpions rather than the Powder Gangers. Cass taking a swig of something. A whole human leg flying through the air, trailing blood. Several screams at once; agony. An arm holding a lit stick of dynamite going into a gecko's open mouth, and both the gecko and the man the arm belonged to exploding and throwing everything nearby into the air, including an awful lot of dust and sand and smoke, except for one giant radscorpion the size of a small pre-war car. Screaming. Joe Cobb's face blank and pale, through her scope's ocular lens close up, its mouth wide open, blood pouring out.

Cara made it up onto the roof in time for at least a few radscorpions to still be alive; all of the giant ones. He'd get to help clean up the mess.

He accepted and returned hugs from Viana, from Cass—with a big kiss on the cheek and a private smile—from surprisingly Raúl, from Rex, from Sunny, and from Cheyenne who tried to jump on him then just licked his hand, from Trudy, and finally from Olivia. That one felt the best by far. She kissed him on the cheek twice, once for each side. He kissed both her cheeks back smiling, nearly going for her lovely full lips and mouth. Then they hugged again.

Sunny interrupted. She said, much too loudly because of new hearing damage, "Our guns' bullets are just making those rad-scorpions mad. We need you guys to finish them off."

Cara and Olivia watched for a few seconds. They saw one Goodspringer with a single-barreled shotgun repeatedly shoot one giant stationary radscorpion, which didn't even seem to notice it was being shot. They saw Ringo, from the top of the general store, firing off the side, empty a pistol magazine on two average-sized radscorpions, and two or three times saw a bullet strike dull grey-black exoskeleton and ricochet off. One bullet thunked into the wall of the general store. One kicked up dirt out behind the store on a small hill.

Sunny had killed one of the geckos in Cara's train with her varmint rifle, but had next tried shooting a gigantic radscorpion and the same rifle hadn't worked against it. She'd seen the bullet just bounce off.

"CAN I BORROW A GUN?" Sunny asked Olivia. Sunny couldn't tell she was speaking at full volume. Olivia nodded and shifted her Hécate 2 to her left hand, which was a challenge, then drew her Beretta M9A3 with her right hand, and gave it to Sunny. "Try this," Olivia said. It only occurred to her seconds later that Sunny probably couldn't hear her words. Maybe Sunny could read lips. "I don't have a round chambered so you'll need to rack the slide. That has one of the newer 17-round magazines in it."

Sunny got most of what Olivia said.

Thinking How could you get that many bullets into anything?, Sunny pulled the M9A3's slide back—it moved easily, certainly easier than her varmint rifle's bolt—and let its spring clink it back forward, not loud among all the gunfire popping and cracking around them, loading a round and cocking the pistol's exposed hammer. "Your varmint rifle's five-five-six, right?" Olivia asked.

"Yeah," Sunny said.

"That round should be faster than my nine-mil here," Olivia said, "but maybe you were using hollowpoints or soft points or wadcutters or something. I have FMJ loaded in that mag. They might penetrate better. Or not."

Nervous from the firefight, Sunny wasn't even sure why she asked, "What's FMJ?"

Sometimes Olivia forgot that not everybody loaded their own ammo and knew lots about different types of bullets and stuff.

"Full metal jacket," Olivia said. "It's just the default."

Sunny tried Olivia's kind of weird-looking futuristic open-top pistol. Sunny brought it up into both hands and tried the safety on the slide with her thumb. It dropped the hammer; she'd de-cocked the pistol. Damn. She pulled the hammer back down with her thumb. There was a lull in the gunfire around her long enough for her to hear the hammer click, dimly through ringing ears. One of the Powder Gangers was still screaming. Sunny brought the pistol back up. Olivia had installed radioactive tritium night sights on it, which in the late afternoon didn't glow but showed up pretty well as three greenish white dots. Sunny lined them up over a slowly-moving average-sized radscorpion, focused on the front sight, covering where on the radscorpion's face she wanted to hit, and fired. It seemed like she had to put a lot of weight on the trigger for the first shot. She almost didn't think it would go off. Then the trigger finally broke and the gun popped loudly as a round went off and the gun jumped back and up. The slide shot back faster than she could see and threw the little empty bullet casing way out back and to the right, cycling forward and cocking again automatically and loading the next round. She wasn't used to pistols, though the 9x19mm Parabellum recoil wasn't hard to deal with. Her rifle kicked more. She had to bring the pistol back down and re-aim. She fired two more times, faster. Then the radscorpion was dead. Somebody else might've shot it too.

Looking around the back and sides of the Prospector Saloon along with Olivia, Cara chambered a round in his SRS, shouldered it and unsafed it as Olivia took out one radscorpion, worked her bolt, which took a while because it was huge, and then took out two more, both in one shot. The first of those two, a giant one, shot backward a few feet and slumped over slowly from the force of the bullet. When the bullet went through the big one and hit the second one, an average one, its body exploded, into a mess of gore and giblets and pieces of abdomen and legs. Cara heard her ejected brass bouncing around on the rooftop—ringing hollow metal. Cara had thought Olivia was using FMJ rounds, or maybe match; he mentally noted to ask if she was using Nammo Raufoss Mark 211s again—combined effects High-Explosive Incendiary/Armor Piercing (HEIAP) rounds meant for use mostly on light armored vehicles and machinery.

Unlike nearly every weapon he encountered in the area, Cara's SRS was designed and built to work in bad conditions—the kind of beating that hard use in the windy, hot, dry, sandy Mojave Desert brought upon a weapon. It was also easy to shoot and work with. It would be a joy to take out some radscorpions with Olivia and friends.

Cara found a giant radscorpion still alive and reflex-shot it, using the profile of his weapon more than its expensive Leupold & Stevens scope, which he'd zeroed at 200 meters (218 yards) anyway. He was lucky, but also good at doing that. The shot was flawless. And loud, though not nearly as loud as Olivia's rifle. And he'd fired without deploying his rifle's Harris bipod, so he felt all the recoil, which was unfriendly at best. The armor-piercing .338 Lapua Magnum round he fired went straight through the radscorpion, whose creepy multi-eyed face seemed to explode yellow from pure force, and then it got stuck in the pincer of a smaller radscorpion directly behind it, but the bullet still hit hard enough to spin that radscorpion around and confuse it, and then the dropping corpse of the giant radscorpion landed right on top of the smaller one, pinning it down and, from the dull dry crunch sound, breaking one or two of its legs.

Cara cycled his SRS's bolt, kicking out one long smoking shell. He fired again; he tried shooting around the giant radscorpion's body to hit the smaller one, and it seemed to work. Even if he hadn't properly aimed around the big one's body, he'd fired a 253-grain armor-piercing round traveling at about 2,970 feet per second; at such close range it'd probably go through the giant radscorpion.

He cycled the bolt again, watching where his shell landed to remember to retrieve it. .338 Lapua Magnum was extremely rare.

He'd seen two or three average-sized radscorpions running behind the saloon, between it and the general store.

Cara saw Viana firing her pistol at an average-sized radscorpion back that way. One or two other people were shooting at it too. After three or four of Viana's shots and by the time Cara aimed, the radscorpion had stopped moving. Viana had bought herself the same service pistol she'd used when she was still in the military, the NCR's standard issue sidearm, a 9x19mm Browning Hi-Power, the same pistol Ringo and at least one Goodsprings settler had. It was very common in the Mojave.

Cara briskly checked in with his Boomer UCAV teams over the radio. They were tracking three more radscorpions, but with two Reapers in the area they were also scanning for any more they might've missed.

"Three more," Cara called out incase anyone would hear, swinging around his HK417 and holding the SRS in one hand; it was so small that was easy. He unclipped the battle rifle from its sling and handed it to Viana, whom he'd trained and drilled and shot with before; she knew how to use it, though she was nowhere near as good with guns as Olivia, or as crazy about them, which was probably healthy. Her pistol wasn't effective against radscorpions, but his HK417 was. He told her it already had a round in the chamber. She had hearing protection in; she understood. Viana started looking for targets with the battle rifle, but Cara never heard her fire. He heard Olivia fire—the deep, very loud boom of .50 BMG going off—a few times.

By the time Cara found his next hostile target, Olivia was already killing it. Her bullet went through a pincer, which exploded, and its arm started flailing, spraying bright blood, as the bullet went through its head area and scrambled some important parts inside, bouncing around in its carapace, causing its corpse to jump a few feet backward and rotate then twitch for a while.

Cara went around and shook hands with and congratulated everybody. He hugged Olivia, who seemed a little high despite only firing eight times. Then again, eight times with .50 BMG was like a good deal more than that with normal bullets, even if her rifle did have that really good muzzle brake.