Commonwealth Fall
Chapter Two: When Freedom Calls
A/N: This chapter works off of the pretense that everyone knows that the Enclave existed, and that they were the bad guys.
In Diamond City, most people had learned to stay out of Blake Autumn's way when he was stalking through town in his shadowed heavy combat armour and carrying his plasma rifle. The only exception to this was Piper Wright. Being a close friend of Blake, she would fall into step beside him only up to the gate. Today, though, was an exception. For the most part, whenever Blake left the city walls, his face was the very definition of blank. In this instance, however, his face was twisted with worry.
It didn't take Piper long to catch up with him, even though Blake was walking faster than usual, as fast as possible in his armour.
"Blake? What's gotcha worried?" Piper started, concern starting to show through her usual mask of sarcasm and quick wit.
"The survivors of Quincy are moving up towards Concord. I've been there before; it's a hotspot for Raiders. Hopefully by the time I get there, there'll still be survivors."
Piper's eyes widened at the news. Most people were fond of at the very least the ideals of the Minutemen. Protecting the people at a minute's notice was a noble goal indeed, but the Minutemen had become unreliable in recent years. But, there still were some noble Minutemen out there. Only one group of them had shown up at Quincy, still loyal to the cause. The thought that the last of them could die up in Concord wasn't a pleasant idea.
"I'm coming with you, Blake. One way or another." She muttered, following quickly after the fully-armed soldier.
"Alright, Piper. I guess you're about to get one hell of a headline today. I hope you're ready to sprint."
It took them nearly three hours to reach Concord. And when they arrived, the sight that greeted them was not pleasant. The Museum of Freedom was under siege by raiders, one Minuteman dead on the front steps and a single figure on the balcony. Blake immediately snapped his plasma rifle to his shoulder and loosed three short bursts, each blob of plasma burning into the chest of a raider. Before he could aim at the next two, a pair of 10mm bullets put them out of their misery. A laser blast from the museum balcony finished off the last raider.
"Hey, up here! On the balcony! I've got a group of settlers inside! The raiders are almost through the door! Grab that laser musket and help us, please!"
Blake nodded to Piper, who grabbed the laser musket off of the ground and cranked it up. Thick metal and ceramics clunked across the cement shortly before Blake planted his foot in the center of the door and send it flying backwards, the top hinge breaking off. The two raiders directly inside of the door barely had enough time to yell before a pair of plasma bolts tore through their faces, sending their corpses to the floor.
Piper found that the laser musket was a much better weapon than its scrapped-together appearance let on, the weapon's beam able to take the head off of any raider as long as she cranked its handle twice instead of once. Each time they entered a room, she would fire the first shot and Blake would quickly blast the remaining raiders before they could react. Room by room, they blasted their way up to the third floor of the museum. As they rounded the corner to the walkway, Blake tossed a grenade around the corner, killing both of the raiders who were banging on the door to the room.
The door to the room swung open, revealing a man clad in an old colonial duster and wielding a focused, scoped laser musket. Piper shut the door behind then as Blake strode up to the man.
"Man, I don't know who you are, but your timing's impeccable. Preston Garvey, Commonwealth Minutemen."
Blake simply nodded once, muttering a "glad to help" before starting to check his armour over for damage.
Even though Preston looked a bit off-put by Blake's attitude, he continued speaking anyways. "Well if that's true, we could use some more good will. As you can see, we're in a bit of a mess here."
Blake looked up, seemingly pleased with the condition of his armour. "Alright, how can I help out?"
Preston's face dropped. He sighed, and then started speaking. "A month ago, there were twenty of us. Yesterday, there were eight. And now we're five. We figured Concord would be a good place to settle. Those raiders proved us wrong. But…well, we do have one idea."
Blake nodded at Preston, a reassuring grin on his face. "One good idea can make all the difference. Let's hear it."
"Sturges? Tell him."
A well-built man in what looked like a welder's outfit leaned away from the terminal he was typing on and turned to face Blake. "There's a crashed vertibird up on the roof. Old school. Pre-war. You mighta seen it. Well, one of its passengers left behind a seriously sweet goodie. We're talkin' a full suit of cherry, T45 Power Armour. Military issue."
Blake's reassuring grin widened into a full smile. "Power Armour? I like it."
Sturges chuckled. "Yeah, I thought you might. Protection with an added bonus. Get the suit, you can rip the minigun right off the vertibird. Do that, and those raiders'll get an express ticket to hell. Ya dig?"
Blake's smile only widened at the mention of a minigun. "Minigun? Now we're talkin'."
"I know, right? There's only one hitch. The suit's outta juice. Probably been dry for a hundred years. It can be powered up again, but we're a bit stuck."
Preston leaned over, to the pair. "What you'll need is an old, pre-War FC. A standardised fusion core. Your high-grade, long-term nuclear battery, used by the military and some companies way back when. You'll need to find one."
Sturges intervened again. "But we can't get to the damn thing. It's down in the basement, locked behind a security gate. Look, I fix stuff. I tinker. Bypassing security ain't exactly my forte. You can give it a shot."
Blake's face twisted into something that everybody in the room could unanimously describe as devious. "Oh, I already have my own fusion core. Probably still at close to full charge. It should work better than the one in the basement."
Preston nodded. "Well alright. Sounds like our luck's finally turning around. Once you jack that fusion core into the power armour and grab that minigun, those raiders will know they picked the wrong fight."
Blake nodded once and started off towards the roof. "I'm going to perform some basic maintenance on the power armour first. I should only take about ten minutes. After that, I'll be down on the street."
With that, Blake started towards the roof, but was stopped short when Mama Murphy grabbed his arm. "Careful kid. There's somethin' comin'. And it is…angry."
Blake looked down at her, curious. "Can you tell me more about what's coming?"
She looked up at him and started babbling. All Blake could catch was "horns" and "claws". His pupils dilated and he looked over at Piper. He simple uttered one word. "Deathclaw."
Piper's face dropped, and Preston dropped his head into his hands. The Longs stopped pacing and moping and just sat down together, spouses embracing. Sturges, his face was unreadable.
And then Blake remembered what he had grabbed before leaving Diamond City. And he grinned.
"Everyone, can I have your word that what you see will never be mentioned unless necessary or held against me?"
Every single person in the room looked at him, dumbfounded, but after a moment, they all agreed to it. That done, Blake and Piper headed up towards the roof. Blake pushed the door open silently, a rusted old suit of T45 Power Armour and the wreck of a vertibird on the roof before him. He handed his plasma rifle and its cartridges to Piper, who took them with wide eyes. Blake looked back at her, simply telling her to "stay up here and shoot down at anything she saw."
And then he upended the bulging bag he had carried. Pieces of black ceramic casing and titanium spilled out onto the floor, and two pieces came to rest upright. The insectisoid helmet, and the breastplate, the Enclave's "E" logo facing proudly upwards, looking freshly painted. Piper's jaw dropped, and her heart seemed to freeze. Come to think of it, none of Blake's friends had ever learned his last name. He walked up to the suit of T45 and started callously ripping the rusted old plates off, the left arm and right leg actually disintegrating beneath his gloved hands. When all that was left was a bare but still very much functional frame, he began attaching the plates to the armour frame. As he snapped the left shoulder pauldron on, he heard a click from behind him.
"Piper? Are you really pointing a gun at me?" he muttered, barely above a whisper. He turned around to stare down the barrel of a 10mm Pistol. He looked behind the gun to see the confusion evident in Piper's eyes.
"What do you think, Blake? I mean, the Enclave were more of a boogeyman than the Institute! They sacked whole villages out West, they did experiments on the captives, they're bad people. And you're one of them!" Her gun shook with every statement.
Blake turned his back and kept putting the various pieces on the frame. "I know. But I'm not the others. I'm certainly not my dad. He's dead, anyways." He muttered, his tone turning icy with his last statement. As soon as he snapped the helmet on, he turned back around to face Piper. "Down in DC, the Lone Wanderer, as they called him, started waging a personal war against the Enclave, backed by the Brotherhood of Steel. When he got into our bunker, he started killing everybody inside. Set the whole place to self-destruct. I know there were some bad people in the Enclave, some sadists who liked their job. But most of the rest, they were just doing their job. Hell, the President was the genocidal one. The soldiers followed dad's orders when he told them to shoot the Lone Wanderer. And that nineteen year old vault dweller had the entire place blow up."
Piper lowered the gun slightly. "Wait, so your dad…he was…"
"Colonel Augustus Autumn, yes. He could be difficult at times, but he was still very much my dad. And when that bastard wanderer got to the purifier, he didn't flinch or hesitate, he just shot my dad in the head. I heard he even smirked when he did it. I know they were considered to be bad people, it's just…what would you think if someone walked into your life and killed everyone that you knew?" Blake started taking off the combat armour pieces, considering they would never fit in the power armour, revealing a long-sleeved grey shirt and black jeans. "Your friends, mentors…family. I had mine taken from me because everyone thought that we were the "big bad boogeyman". Well, we weren't as bad as they made us out to be. But, I guess that doesn't matter now. So…are you going to shoot me?" With that last question, he turned around.
Piper looked sullenly at him, and just lowered the gun. "Well, I guess you're helping those settlers down there…and you helped save our hides multiple times. I guess if you were going to kill us you would have done it long ago." She sighed, putting her pistol back in its place in her belt. "Well, go ahead. I'll cover you."
Blake nodded once, turned around, and twisted the handle on the back of the suit. The armour folded out to allow him inside, and the instant he was inside, it closed around him. Piper couldn't help but shudder at the dark chuckle coming from inside the helmet. He turned around to look at her, the eyes of the helmet now glowing a deep amber colour. "You stay up here, shoot anyone you see that isn't me or Preston. Alright?" Piper nodded once. Blake slowly stomped forwards on the rooftops, making as much noise as possible. The minigun came free from the vertibird with an ear-wrenching screech. A raider positioned on the rooftop adjacent to the museum looked over at the noise of the disturbance.
The sight that greeted him was a nightmare straight out of the depths of the hell that people would call Raven Rock, or maybe Navarro. A figure in jet black armour stepped out of the wreckage of an old pre-War vertibird. There were exactly five distinguishing features that only terrified this raider more. The insectisoid helmet, the glowing amber eyes, the spinning barrels of the figure's minigun. But the most terrifying part of this figure's appearance was the voice that scratched out from the suit's intercom.
"You raiders have no idea just how deep the shit you're standing in is."
With that, the Black Devil jumped down off of the rooftop and charged the line of raiders. Each one of them screamed and instantly turned around, running the opposite direction of Blake's massive bulk. Minigun bullets sprayed down the entire street, hitting the raiders, old trucks, and walls. One raider stumbled over a metal plate and slammed down onto it. Small bolts of plasma flew past overhead and melted the raider's face. His head popped like a grape, and his blood leaked into a crack in the grate. Blake froze when he heard the sound of banging against the metal. A roar echoed throughout Concord, and the remaining raiders froze and pointed their guns towards the source.
The metal plates flew off of the hole, and a massive Deathclaw climbed out of the hole. Before it could even stand up straight, Blake, Piper, Preston, and all of the remaining raiders started pumping as many rounds into the monstrous being as possible. 5mm rounds tore through the thing's armoured hide like it was paper, and the plasma bolts from the museum rooftop were incredibly beneficial. The raiders were just about only good for distracting it. However, since there were more of them, they're what the Deathclaw targeted first. By the time it had fallen over dead, there were only three raiders left. Blake looked at them, and they looked at him. Blake took one step towards them, and they all bolted.
Satisfied, Blake turned around and stalked back towards the museum, the glowing metal of the minigun finally receiving its chance to cool down. He didn't reach forwards for the door handle, or swing his gun to the side. The two-hundred plus year old wood finally shattered beneath just the force of him walking forwards. Preston Garvey swung his laser musket towards Blake, and then, realising who it was, lowered it by a nominal amount, still not putting it completely away.
"So…you're Enclave, then?" He inquired, almost disbelieving.
Blake nodded once. "My dad was the commander, Colonel Autumn."
Preston looked at him with a combination of fear and…pity? "My condolences, then. Family's family, no matter how bad they are. And I'm pretty sure the whole wasteland knows that you lost yours."
Blake just nodded once; glad to hear that not everybody thought the worst of his past. He looked around at the weary settlers, and decided to speak up. "So, did you guys have a plan for where to go once you got out of this mess?"
It was actually Mama Murphy who finally spoke up. "Sanctuary. It's an old place up just to the North-west of here. The Sight showed me it, it's a wondrous place of safety and prosperity."
Preston stared at her for a good ten seconds before translating her mumblings. "There's a good spot for a settlement up North-East of here. Sheltered, access to water, good soil for crops. You know, it could be a real nice sanctuary once we're established there."
Blake nodded in his armour, the helmet still not displaying emotions. "Alright. Let's get moving. I'll escort."
With that, he hefted his new minigun and the group started off.
Towards Sanctuary.
