I found the entrance exactly where it was supposed to be, hidden under a rose bush in the backyard, though the rosebush was now dust. I punched in the code and the hatch slid open. Nathan hadn't wanted this, he'd thought it was overkill. Now, I was happy to have tossed a couple of million into installing a hermetically sealed titanium bunker with an independent generator under the house. It was worth the hours of arguing with Nate over it. It hadn't taken five minutes to sell Mikhail and Natalya on the idea and have them get one of their own, but Nate and I had to go round and round on it.
I climbed down the ladder, every surface was covered in dusk. I hoped the bunker's seals had held. I fumbled around for a minute before I found the light switch. The lights flicked on with a buzz, I punched in another code and twisted the hatch wheel. There was a slight hiss as the seals released and I dragged the heavy door open. Once again, I had to fumble for the light switch, we were able to build nuclear reactors that could fit inside cars, but nobody ever thought to make a glow in the dark light switch.
I was pleasantly surprised when the lights came on, the seals had held and on first glance, everything looked fine. This made me glad that I was such a pack rat when it came to operational stuff. General Li's naginata leaned against the wall in one corner, Lord Albrecht's silver masquerade mask sat on top of a box of old tee shirts, the insignias of the Seven Shadows were stacked up next to a tub of Christmas ornaments, and of course, a jade dragon stolen from the Forbidden City. Those were just to name a few, we had a habit of taking trophies from ops, a gold-plated AK-47 taken from the corpse of the Emir of Ossetia hung from a peg next to one of my old rain coats, a bottle of wine from the Pope's personal reserve sat next to my old cap and gown from graduation, this room told the story of most of my career.
But I wasn't here to reminisce on the past, I started picking through the clutter. First, I had to hunt down clothes to change into, something that was less obvious than the bright blue and gold Vault suit. Thankfully, I was a clothes hoarder and kept anything I didn't wear in the basement, so it didn't take me long to find a decent tee shirt, some jeans, and a pair of old tennis shoes, not to mention new underwear. Once I was changed I moved on to getting my operations gear together.
I kept my gear in a locked reinforced steel chest. I didn't have the key, but that was alright, the lock was more of a red herring than anything else. The real way to unlock the chest was pressing a specific series of panels on the top and sides of it. The HN66 Sirius.12 Assault Suit was my armor of choice for heavy combat operations, but my nano gear was my go-to all-purpose suit. As for weapons, I had my nano sword, a silenced pistol, and a suppressed DKS-501 sniper rifle. I go into detail because I'm a bit of a nut about my gear, blame it on the fetishist in me. Of course the real arsenal was hidden in the lockers across the room where Nate had stowed his old gear.
His tastes were far more straightforward, assault rifles, combat shotguns, explosives, heavy combat armor, etc. I'd leave that for a rainy day, now I needed my tech. That was hidden in a box underneath some old photo albums. One of the old pictures caught my eye, it was on the cover of the book marked 'C.I.T.' The photo had been taken back when we'd first became a team, it was a group shot in the old café after hours, Me, Emma, Liam, Nate, Mikhail, and… Ming.
Ming… the love of my life, the person Nate always wanted to be. Two years of the best medical treatment money could buy, three Nobel Prize winning doctors and a medical staff better than the president's own, and nothing could get her out of that coma. I wondered how that last experimental treatment had gone, not that it mattered of course, she was probably vaporized hooked up to one machine or another. That made me think of something, I put the picture down and hunted down a large black leather bag.
Inside were a bunch of things that cannot be described in polite company. Ming's black bag of dirty tricks, all of our old toys, bedroom toys to be specific. At the bottom was a hand carved Juniper Heartwood box. Etched into the top was a naked woman who bore a close resemblance to me, with a Chinese dragon wrapping around her. Inside the box, on a lining of bright red silk, was a thin band of platinum with a locking clasp on the back and a leashing clip with a jade pendant hanging from it on the front. The pendant had a dragon carved into it, she loved her dragons, as the tattoo on my ass demonstrated. And on the bottom edge, along the side, was a series of small Chinese symbols etched into the platinum.
In English, they read as, 'The Property and Beloved of Mistress Xiu Ming.' Next to it on the silk was a small platinum key. This was a physical symbol of her love for me, it said all that anyone needed know about us. I belonged to her in every way that mattered, and she belonged to me. She was my lover, my friend, and my mistress. Of course no one outside of our inner circle had ever seen it, war with the Red Menace may have forced the US to move forward as a society, but wearing a collar like this out in public would have drawn some nasty judgements, and more importantly made some unflattering headlines.
Well, damn the judgements, and I doubted that there were any newspapers left, and if there were, they didn't matter anymore. I took the collar and slipped it around my neck, there was a soft click as the lock slid into place. I smiled at the familiar feeling of the cool metal against my skin, not choking or chafing, just tight enough so that you could never forget you were wearing it. It was my ownership collar, roughly the equivalent of an engagement ring. I shook my head, we'd never gotten around to an actual ceremony, I regretted that every day.
Enough reminiscing, I had business to attend to. I closed the box and put it back into the bag. Then I went back to retrieving my tech. I swapped the old Pip-Boy I pulled out of the vault for my old Activity-issue model. A sleek black little thing with a whole lot of special add-ons that you weren't going to find on a standard issue model. I immediately tried to activate the uplink to the ISA network, but it was unresponsive. Well, there went one continuity of government contingency. Well, not entirely unresponsive, the GEOINT network was functional on a basic level. It seemed that at least some of the satellite network was still online. Other than that, I had to pick up my portable terminal, these were incredibly uncommon even back before the war, an average one costing the equivalent of the annual income of a middle class family. The one I had was a custom model built by Robert House himself, it was worth the equivalent of the combined GDPs of several small countries.
Once I'd gathered everything up, I got my tactical rig and a rucksack to store everything. I'd stash what I didn't need in the house until I was ready to use it. Right now all I would need was my PT and my pistol. A thought occurred to me, and candy, candy would help, possibly with Nuka Cola. Yes, Nuka Cola from my private reserve. I had a few cases of it in the basement, perfect.
It was time to debrief my first defector in over two centuries.
…..
This alludes to a whole lot of noodle incidents, if I ever get back to the Shadows in the Tunnel, I'll elaborate, if not, then I guess you guys can just fill in the details with your imaginations.
By the way, I'm using a lot of mods, the nanosuit and HN66 being two good examples, I'm just using them as baseplates of course, stats have to be translated, origins converted, basically I have to make it my own. The reason I'm saying this is to make it clear that I am in no way taking credit for them, I am basing this on my playthrough to a certain extent, thus they shall be included, but all credit for the basic concepts of the modded content should go to the mod authors.
I'm not going to list all of them, in part because I'm terrible at remembering that sort of thing, and in part because Bethesda has that stupid cap on the amount console players can download, so I have to keep shuffling whenever I find a new mod that looks intriguing. If you have questions about a specific part, drop a review or send me a PM and I'll tell you whether it's a mod or me, and if it is a mod, which one it is.
Okay, long as hell author's note done.
R&R people.