He trailed after Samara as she descended the long slope to the decaying barracks below. There was still a queasy tightness in his gut-an aftereffect of having his shroud of secrecy ripped from him-but at the same time, a strange sense of lightness, almost giddiness, pervaded him; it was a while before he could recognize it as relief. His secret was out...and Samara hadn't turned on him, hadn't repudiated him, hadn't attempted to attack him. She knows, and she doesn't care. He'd been hiding the secret for so long, and in the end, it turned out to be nothing.
The two of them made their way down the sloping hillside, past an overturned army truck and across a broken roadway until they found themselves in among a set of ruined wooden barracks. A billboard stood near the road, heavily weathered and canted at a crazy angle; it was so faded and battered that it was almost illegible, but he could make out what seemed to be the image of a flag. Over this were superimposed the words: America's Bright Future in YOUR Hands! Arcade winced at the sight.
Samara passed right by it without a glance. She surveyed the wreckage around them. Huge piles of rubble lay everywhere, in and among the ruined barracks; several buildings were half-buried, and far in the distance, faded to pastel by the constantly blowing wind and sand in the air, there were the jagged stumps of skyscrapers and overpasses.
"This is bad," she said.
"This damage-this is more than just decay." He frowned. "Was all this done in the war, do you think?"
Samara shook her head. "Most of this looks more recent. See all the rubble? The collapsed buildings?" she asked, taking in the entire vista of wreckage with a sweep of her arm. "Whatever wrecked this place came from underground."
"Underground. God damn." He thought of the sign they'd seen back at the missile base entrance-Building the American Dream ... On Solid Ground!- and rubbed at his eyes with the back of one hand. They watered slightly; grit from the ever-blowing wind had gotten in them. "Maybe that's what he meant by 'America's spears' and the 'wreckage they created.'"
"Maybe," was Samara's only response.
"Our little friend just enjoys being cryptic, doesn't he?" Arcade mused. He started to catch himself, concerned that he was talking too much-but then realized that it didn't matter what he said. Samara already knew everything; there was nothing to hide from her anymore. He didn't need to avoid calling attention to himself, or carefully monitor everything he said to make sure it didn't lead to questions he didn't want to answer. The sensation was heady, almost intoxicating. "I'm almost afraid to speculate what that 'detonator' is and why he wants you to find it."
Samara surveyed the devastation slowly. After a moment, she pointed. "I think I know."
Smashed up against the door of one of the barracks, buried in a pile of rubble, lay what was unmistakably an undetonated atomic warhead.
"Jesus Christ." Arcade stepped backward involuntarily. A primal, atavistic fear swept over him, as if he had just spotted a venomous serpent. He realized that he was shivering; gooseflesh had risen on his arms where they were left bare by his armor. "He can't-" He glanced at Samara, then quickly back to the weapon; his eyes were drawn to it as if by magnetic attraction. "You don't mean he wants us to-"
Samara's eyes narrowed. "I'm guessing there's a warhead up ahead blocking the path somewhere and that's the one we've got to detonate to get through."
"Samara-" Arcade turned toward her in alarm. "You're not actually going to do this, Samara, are you?"
"All I care about is finding Ulysses." Her jaw set.
"But Samara, you-"
She turned to look at him, and he fell silent.
"Come on." She started off, ED-E following. After a moment, Arcade went after her, his insides churning.
They wound their way among the barracks until they came to another broken road that passed through a gap in a bent and buckled chainlink fence. The wind lashed their faces with sand and grit; Arcade had to blink it out of his eyes and rub them heavily with the backs of his hands to see clearly. The gap in the fence through which the road passed was flanked by two more wrecked army trucks; and on a fragment of concrete was stenciled the same symbol they had seen at the top of the mountains-the stylized flag with the stars and stripes, only a different color this time.
"Why is this one red?" he wondered aloud.
"Danger," Samara said succinctly. She put her hand on the stock of her LAER rifle, and her face tightened. "Be cautious."
On the other side of the chainlink fence, the road ran past a blocky, concrete building off to the left and then on through a line of steel Quonset huts. Some distance beyond were the remains of what must have been the shopping district for the base town: ruined brick storefronts with boarded-up or vacant doors and gaping windows; crumbling, formerly majestic concrete structures that perhaps had once been banks, town halls, or government buildings. Wrecked vehicles, both civilian and military, were everywhere: crashed cars, overturned trucks; even a couple of long, jackknifed semis spilling barrels and crates out onto the ruined asphalt. The overcast sky threw lurid, gloomy shadows over it all; the wind blew without respite. It was one of the most desolate places Arcade had ever seen.
The only sounds were their footsteps and the moaning of the wind. From time to time they came upon bodies of the same red, flayed look as the one in the missile silo; these were not posed, but simply lay where they had fallen. A few of the walls had graffiti scrawled on them: mostly meaningless doodles, a few oddly disconnected, plangent phrases that were somehow disturbing in their strange emptiness, like stones dropped into a hollow well.
Where is everyone? one scrawl read, looping unevenly over the bricks of a shattered storefront.
A block or so later, as if in answer to the first phrase, they came across D-E-A-D, spelled out in vertical capital letters on the side of what might have once been a bank.
"'I feel fine'?" Arcade murmured, tracing words along the roof of an overturned semi. Something about the words gave him a chill. He wrapped his arms around himself, then turned to glance at Samara. "These are relatively fresh."
"What makes you say that?"
"Feel the wind? All the sand blowing around? If they'd been done too long ago, they'd have weathered away." He rubbed at his eyes again, trying to blink the grit out of them.
"How old do you think they are?" Samara asked.
Arcade shrugged. "Dunno. But at the very least, these weren't done in the immediate postwar period. The last few months or so, maybe even the last few weeks."
He watched Samara's face tighten as she absorbed that. "Come on," she said. "We need to keep moving." She motioned him onward, and did not ask the obvious question: Who did them?
Aside from the graffiti and the occasional bodies, there were no other signs of recent human presence. All the same, Arcade felt the skin on the back of his neck crawling. He could not shake the feeling that they were being watched.
"We are," Samara said when he mentioned it. She nodded to her PIP-Boy 3000. "Life signs, not too far off. Why they're not coming out to play, I have no idea."
Arcade digested that with an inward chill. "Maybe they don't know we're here."
Samara gave an awkward, jerky shrug. "If they don't know we're here after Ulysses, they've got to be deaf. The whole Divide could probably hear that." She glanced at her PIP-Boy again. "Doesn't matter. If they don't show up, fine; if they do, we'll take 'em out then."
Samara forged ahead through the ruined downtown area with solid, purposeful strides, as if she knew exactly where she was going. From time to time, she would stop and check her PIP-Boy 3000, though Arcade had no idea what she was looking for, and then set off in a new direction. He followed at her heels, his skin prickling, senses hyperalert. The eyebot bobbed along, usually behind Samara, though it sometimes darted ahead, the humming of its motor loud in the silence. Along the way, they came across more of those stylized flag markings, in white, blue or red, marking out the path to follow; Samara greeted each one with a stony nod.
"Bastard's marking the path for us. Good. That'll only make things easier."
As they wound their way deeper into the ruins, they began to come across what could only be described as campsites. Areas where fire circles had been made out of broken bricks, with battered, splintery chairs and foot lockers drawn up around them. Arcade glanced at one of the circles and saw that in addition to the usual chunks of wood culled from the wreckage, there were charred, blackened books, that had clearly been used for kindling. His jaw tightened. In absentia luci, tenebrae vincunt, he thought grimly.
Scattered beyond the campsites were several beehive-shaped piles of blocks that Arcade at first took for more heaps of rubble; it was not until they passed by one more closely that he saw the opening on one side. Huts, he realized. These are stone huts.
"Samara-look, there are-"
She gestured sharply without turning. "Not now. We're close." Her head was down and she was gazing at her PIP-Boy 3000 screen. With a sigh, Arcade followed her.
She strode down the street another block or so, past a few more abandoned cars and twisted lamp posts, until she came to what appeared to have once been a ruined two-story brick apartment building. After consulting her PIP-Boy 3000, Samara jerked her head toward the building. "In there."
The doors and windows to the building were empty gaping frames like hollow eye sockets, and a whole section of the wall had crumbled inward; Samara stepped over the threshold into the interior, and then climbed the concrete stairs to the second floor. A fallen slab of concrete provided a ramp to the roof. Most of the roof had fallen in long ago, but in one corner a segment was preserved. The section had been turned into a small aerie: a mattress lay on the roof with a chair and footlocker nearby and several boxes of ammo. Samara went straight to the footlocker and threw it open; inside, resting on a litter of ammo and MREs and bottles of water and other trinkets, was a square, dull-green rectangular weapon with a truncated barrel.
"This is it," she said, holding it aloft.
Something about the dull green metal gave Arcade a chill: it looked almost hostile in the lurid, overhead light. "Samara, are you really-"
She waved him to silence, checking her PIP-Boy 3000 and then looking over the edge of the roof. She traced a line on her PIP-Boy, muttering briefly to herself, then looked up. "South. We need to go south. Come on."
Without so much as a word, she began climbing down from the roof. Her eyebot darted after her almost eagerly. Arcade wondered if she'd even notice if he didn't follow.
As he picked his way down the heap of debris after her, he caught sight of another billboard off in the distance, canted at a crazy angle and skewered by a jagged, rusty girder. Our Hope For Our Children, this one said. Arcade grimaced and looked away. The billboards weren't funny anymore, even as black humor.
[*]
They made their way south through the silent, eerie streets, following the remains of a road through the wreckage of downtown and past the chain-link fence that defined the outer limits of the old base. The eyebot bobbed behind them, a silent witness. The road led back past the rusting Quonset huts to a high concrete wall with a gap in it for the road to pass through. The gap was with a mountainous jumble of building fragments, old cars, metal girders, concrete and boulders. In the middle of it all was a large warhead, sitting smugly like an egg in a nest. Next to it was another one of those damned flag symbols-in red.
Samara's mouth tightened in a grim half-smile. She looked down at her PIP-Boy 3000.
"Get ready," she said without sparing Arcade a glance. "They're all beyond there-swarming like ants. When I blow this thing, it's going to get crazy."
Arcade started to say something, then pressed his lips together. He sighed instead. "Fine."
The three of them-Arcade on the left, the eyebot on the right, and Samara herself in the center-took up a position behind a huge pile-up of ruined cars close to the entrance. From within her armor, she pulled a small bottle of Rad-X, and dispensed a couple pills for herself and for Arcade. They tasted bitter, and Arcade's throat was so tight he had a hard time swallowing them, knowing what was to come. Once they all were ready, Samara caught his eye meaningfully and then donned her helmet. There was a hiss and a clicking noise as it sealed home.
Here we go. Again.
Cursing Samara in his heart, Arcade drew his Plasma Defender as she produced the laser detonator. She aimed it at the warhead, and pulled the trigger. A beam of sizzling, red laser light lanced out, blazing green afterimages across his vision, and Arcade had just enough time to drop to one knee behind the rusting car heap and turn his face away from the blast.
There was a flash of white light and then a thunderous, deafening roar that shook the ground beneath him. Arcade saw chunks of shrapnel; then the whole, huge carcass of a car hurtled over his head and crashed into a storefront, which collapsed in a shower of dust. He could hear the Geiger counter built into Samara's PIP-Boy 3000 clicking like mad.
"Here they come!" Samara's electronic, synthesized voice rang out, and the eye-bot broke into the short phrase of music that signified the presence of enemies. Gripping his Plasma Defender, Arcade swung back to the front to deal with the threat.
The barrier was gone. Where it had been was now a blackened crater, a huge breach blasted into the cement walls. Smoke and dust filled the air, great billowing clouds, obscuring whatever lay beyond. And out of that dust, indistinct shapes were appearing-a score at least, possibly even more-howling and snarling as they came.
Even before they were fully visible, Samara was coolly lining up her shots. Bright blue beams of laser light lanced out from her LAER, as she fired with almost mechanical speed and precision at the shrouded forms, picking them off one by one as they swarmed through the smoke. Arcade scrambled to do the same, aiming the barrel of his Plasma Defender into the dust, shooting as fast as he could pull the trigger, and above them both, the eyebot sent its lightning bolts leaping among the attackers. As the dust began to settle and the wave of enemies surging toward them drew nearer, Arcade saw they the same flayed creatures as the bodies they'd been finding all over the site-only these were alive. They wore shabby, patched armor, carrying weapons that looked as if they were going to fall apart in a stiff breeze. Bullets snapped and zinged all around, but without any great accuracy; Arcade guessed by the condition of their weapons that the only way they'd be able to hit either him or Samara was by accident.
"Arcade! ED-E! Close up around me!" Samara's voice rang out as the first few flayed opponents began to get to melee distance. Arcade swore viciously, holstering his Plasma Defender and snatching his Ripper chainblade from his waist. The weapon gave a snarl as he powered it up, and the vibrations shook his hands. His gut was twisted in sick knots. Samara had taken out the strange axe with the glowing, dark blue blade that she had carried with her ever since she had come back from one of her jaunts-she called it the protonic inversal axe, he remembered distantly. Electricity crackled up and down the weapon's blade. There was no sign visible in her armored form of the dread Arcade felt; instead, something about her stance suggested readiness, even eagerness. Then Arcade had no more time to look at her, because the first of the enemies were upon them.
The next few moments were a confused whirl of stabbing and slashing with his chainblade, ducking and frantically trying to avoid blows, hearing the snarling, raging cries of those they fought, and Samara's own high shrieks of fury. His chainblade roared in his ears, and the vibrations shook his hands all the way into the bones. The eye-bot stabbed arcs of lightning into the swirling battle below; more lightning danced among the fray from Samara's inversal axe, as its glowing blue blade severed skulls and cleaved limbs from bodies. Arcade had all he could do to stay alive, let alone pay attention to his companions; it wasn't until he yanked his Ripper blade out from the torso of a doomed opponent and drew a breath, wiping a smear of blood off his forehead with one arm, that he realized all the others around them were down.
Thank God. Suddenly his legs were trembling with weakness. He dropped to one knee, breathing hard his gaze wandering uncomprehendingly over the bodies strewn before him. How many- He remembered, not opponents but weapons: there had been one with a huge sword, almost as tall as its bearer; another wielding a Super Sledge, a third with a combat knife- More than that. There had to be more than that. Perhaps there were, but he could not remember them.
His chainblade was still sputtering in his hands; he flicked the switch off, and saw that blood stained the housing. His hands still trembled; they were red and sticky, all the way up his wrist guards. More blood spattered across his battered armor, and checking with his eyes, he saw nicks and gouges that had not been there before. Quickly, almost automatically, he patted himself all over, making sure that he was unwounded. His stomach was still churning at the sight of so much violence-at the thought that he had taken part in it-and unbidden, it came to him that he had never participated in such things before he had begun following Samara.
Samara- A sudden jolt went through him and he heaved himself unsteadily to his feet, scanning for her frantically through the smoke and dust.
"Samara-?" he called. "Are you all right?"
His eyes found her: Samara was standing in the middle of the carnage, her Power Armor dripping. Blood sizzled along the blade of her inversal axe as she gazed beyond the smoking crater and down the road ahead. For a long moment, she did not answer, and Arcade wondered if she had even heard him; but then she seemed to come back to reality. She reached up and removed her helmet, and her eyes met his.
"Arcade," she said slowly. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine. You?"
Those pale eyes turned inward. "I'm okay. Check the bodies," she ordered peremptorily, gesturing toward the bodies of the dead that lay around them. "See if they have anything good."
Without further ado, she promptly suited action to word, going down on one armored knee beside a fallen enemy and beginning to roughly check it over. Muttering under his breath, Arcade followed suit.
The body before him was tall, probably as tall as he was, but much more robust: broader of shoulder with heavy, cable-like muscles visible where the armor left limbs bare. A deep gash from Arcade's blade cleft his chest. Like the man they had seen pinned to the wall in the missile silo, like the other bodies they had come upon scattered in the streets, this individual had the appearance of one who had been flayed alive: the red ropes of sinew and tendon were visible, but dry and hard to the touch. Like a ghoul, the man had no nose or ears, and his open eyes were milky, cataract-white. As Arcade leaned over him, there was the faintest twitch of the man's exposed facial musculature.
"This one's still alive."
Samara straightened from the man she had been checking over. "What?"
"He's breathing." Arcade held his metal-and-ceramic wrist guard over the hole in the downed man's face where his nose had been, and watched it fog up. "See?"
"Not for long." Samara's jaw tightened and her pale eyes hardened again. She began to advance on the fallen man, reaching into her armor and pulling out the 10mm pistol she had taken from General Retslaf. She clicked the safety off. "Clear the shot."
Another chill ran down Arcade's spine. "Put that away, Samara," he snapped at her. On the spur of the moment, he reached into his armor and took out a stimpak. "I'm going to try and bring him around."
He turned to the man lying beside him, hearing the click as Samara put the safety back on. "What?" she asked in confusion. "Why?"
"Why not? We can try and talk to him, at least."
He heard her armor servos whine as she shifted restlessly, and the eyebot beeped above her. When she spoke, it was with a strange diffidence. "Arcade...why bother?" He glanced up at her and saw her brows were furrowed again, as if confronting a puzzle. "I mean, I-I'm pretty sure these guys are some kind of feral ghouls. I don't think they're sentient-"
"They're not like ferals," Arcade snapped. "Look, have you ever seen a feral ghoul wear armor?"
"No, but-" Samara began.
"Use weapons?"
"Well-no, but I don't-"
"Build huts, for Christ's sake?"
"They build huts?" she asked, baffled.
"Weren't you listening to me back there?" Arcade demanded. "Yes, they build stone huts. Now I ask you-do you think a feral could do that?"
"No," Samara acknowledged, still frowning.
"Exactly. Thank you." Arcade examined the downed form before him, searching for the best place to apply the stimpak. "There's something-some one-in there, Samara. If we can just bring him around-"
That furrow between Samara's brows deepened. "Fiends are sentient too, but whenever we fought them you never tried to bring one of them around."
"If we wake this guy up and he understands us, we can talk to him-ask him questions about what we're up against, at least. Don't you think that would be useful?" he challenged her.
"And if he can't or won't talk to us?"
"Then we're no worse off than we are now. Look, we can at least try, can't we?" He selected a spot on the red, flayed man's neck. "Here goes."
"Wait." Samara's metal-gauntleted fingers closed on Arcade's shoulder. She was still holding the pistol on the man. "Move aside."
"What the hell are you doing?"
"If you want to bring him around, fine, but I'm not going to risk your life for this. If he wakes up and starts threatening you-" Her eyes hardened. "I'm going to shoot."
Arcade gauged the usefulness of arguing with her against those stony features and sighed. "Fine. Just don't interfere." And he placed the stimpak against the fallen man's neck. The needle jabbed straight into the muscle and the plunger depressed. Arcade sat back on his heels, watching.
Slowly, the main's breathing strengthened and tone returned to his muscles. The gash in his chest began to close, bit by bit, fading to a raw, angry-looking weal. Arcade guessed the radiation in the area probably helped as well; he could still hear the Geiger counter built into Samara's PIP-Boy 3000 clicking away in the background, and tried distantly not to think about how many rads he was taking, even with the protective effect of the Rad-X. At length, the man opened his eyes. When he saw Arcade bending over him, he tensed. His hand started to creep down by his side, when Samara cocked her pistol. She took a step forward, her heavy tread ringing on the pavement, and the man's eyes went to her.
"Don't move."She was glowering at him. "Do you understand me? Don't. Move." She repeated the words, clear and distinct, shoving the gun at him, making sure he could see it. The man let out a long, slow hiss.
"Under...stand," he said slowly, as if having to dredge the word up from a long disused portion of his brain. His voice was raspy, grating. "No...move."
Samara snorted in disgust, though she didn't take her eyes off the man for an instant. "He's all yours, Arcade."
Great. Arcade sighed. He drew a breath, considering how to proceed. Samara said nothing more, clearly seeing the whole thing as his affair; she simply continued to watch the man, holding her weapon steady.
And the man is watching her, Arcade realized suddenly. The flayed man had glanced at Arcade briefly when he'd first come around, but when he'd caught sight of Samara, she had suddenly become the focus of his whole attention. Even now, he was studying her closely, as if trying to figure something out. It could be just because she's holding a weapon on him, Arcade mused...but somehow, there seemed to be more to it than that.
Memories of time spent working with some of the more isolated tribes came to mind-in the real backwoods places, the version of English the inhabitants spoke had undergone so much change that it was almost a different language and communication was exceedingly difficult. He leaned forward, catching the man's eye.
"Arcade," he said, tapping his chest, then gestured toward Samara. "Samara." He indicated the man. "You?"
The man again glanced at him briefly and then returned his gaze to Samara. His ruined face twitched in a grimace that might have meant anything. "Sa...ma...ra?"
Arcade sighed. "Yes. She's Samara. You?" he asked again, and once more indicated the man.
The man's grimace deepened. "No. Not...Samara. Wal...ker."
What? "Walker?"
"She...Walker. She...bringer. No..." He shook his head. "Not...bringer. She...He say..." His jaw twisted, and some gurgled sounds came from that ruined throat, sounds that perhaps approximated "Courier."
Arcade glanced at Samara quickly, but she showed no reaction, simply holding her weapon on the man. He sighed again. "Yes. Some people call her the Courier. Who are you?" he asked again.
The man gave a rough, choking noise that Arcade almost recognized as a laugh. "Blis...ter."
"Blister? Your name is Blister?" At the man's nod, Arcade frowned. "I'm guessing that's not the name you were born with."
Blister gave that choking, gurgled laugh again. "Born. Yes. Born...here. Blis...ter."
"You were born here?"
"Born...two times." He held up two fingers to demonstrate. "Second...here."
Second here? Arcade glanced at Samara, who shrugged slightly. Blister was still watching her with that fixed gaze. "What do you mean, you were born two times?"
Blister ignored him. "You. Walker," he said to Samara instead. His voice was awful, a horrible, wet, rasping gurgle; each word, each syllable sounded as if it were physically painful. If he had been Arcade's patient back at the Old Mormon Fort, Arcade would have diagnosed him with double pneumonia based on the sound of his voice alone. "We. Know ... you. Before ones...know...you."
Samara's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?" she asked suspiciously. Blister just laughed again, the watery sound of a diver with a bad rebreather.
"Hey," Arcade interposed, leaning into Blister's field of vision. "You said you were born twice. What do you mean? Where were you born the first time?"
Blister didn't take his eyes from Samara's face. "You...me...answer ... him?"
Samara's face twisted in confusion. "Why are you asking me? Yes. Answer him. He's my friend."
Blister hissed in something like disgust, but turned his attention to Arcade again. "You. Walker. Of...Bear."
The NCR. Of course. "No, not exactly-"
"Me...Bull." And he gestured to indicate horns. "Born...of Bull. East. To...East. First time."
"Legionary." Arcade couldn't repress a shudder at the sheer level of loathing in Samara's voice. She said the word as if it were an obscenity. Her face hardened as she steadied her weapon.
"Put the damned thing down, Samara," he snapped. "You said he was all mine, well, let me handle this." As she hesitated, uncertain, he needled her, "Besides, I thought you said the Legion wasn't your fight anymore."
Her glower made him wish he'd kept his mouth shut, but she relaxed a fraction; still, he could see the stone in her eyes. He turned back to the man.
"You were with the Legion?"
"Le...gion. Yes," Blister gurgled. "Le...gion. En...See...Arr. These words...long ago. Bear...Bull... No more. Now...Marked Men."
"Marked Men," Arcade repeated, frowning. "That's what you call yourself?"
"All...Marked Men." Blister stretched out one red arm to encompass the whole Divide. "Once Bear. Once Bull. Gone. Only...Marked Men...Now."
Arcade turned and looked back at Samara, who shifted her eyes fractionally to him. "The armies that met in the Divide," he said. "No one ever knew what became of them."
Samara nodded. "These...Marked Men...must be the survivors."
Blister gave a wet, painful-sounding laugh. "She...knows. Wal...ker. Sa...ma...ra. She...there."
Samara froze. "What. Do. You. Mean."
Arcade waved her to silence. "What happened here?"
The Marked Man hissed. "Fire..." he breathed out. "Great...fire."
"Explain."
Blister was silent for a long moment, casting his milky eyes down. Crude spasms crossed his rudely disfigured face. It seemed as if the Marked Man were excavating his memory, searching through rusting, disused scraps of his brain to produce an answer to Arcade's question-as if there were such a vast gulf between what he had been and what he now was that his prior experiences were almost inaccessible. At last, slowly, he raised his eyes to Arcade.
"We came. Here. We came...Legion...En See Arr...Together. To...this place. Divide. We came...to..." He cast his eyes down again. "Fight," he said at last, as if just now remembering.
Arcade glanced at Samara. "Makes sense-the NCR wanted this Divide for their supply lines, and Caesar's Legion wanted to cut them off."
"Supply lines. Yessss..." Blister hissed, and laughed again. "We came...To fight. Here...people. Town. A town..." He nodded again toward Samara. "Sheee...made. Wal...ker. Sa...ma...ra. She...made...town."
Arcade turned back to stare at his companion. "You? You...made a town?"
"I don't remember any of this!" Samara shouldered forward, holding her pistol on the Marked Man. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Town...You made..." Blister's eyes moved past Arcade as if he no longer existed. "You made. Made ... path. People...come. Live. You...keep. Keep tied...desert. Keep...alive. You. You...Courier."
"That's bullshit," Samara snarled, furious.
"You. Town. Town...love you. Honor...you. We come."
Samara looked about ready to interject some more questions; Arcade interrupted in an effort to keep things moving. "Okay. So there was apparently a town here that had some connection with Samara-" the black expression on Samara's face deepened "-and the Legion and the NCR came here to fight over it." He could not repress a snort. "Sounds like them."
"Which?" Samara asked.
"Both," he replied rather tartly. He looked back at Blister. "What happened to the town? And what about Ulysses? Where does he come in?"
"Ul...yss..eeesss..." Something akin to reverence seemed to cross the Marked Man's face. "Wan...der...er."
"Yes, where does he fit in?"
Blister's flayed face seemed to twist. "Not...speak. Wanderer's...name. Bad...bad luck. Not speak. Wan...der...er. He hear...he know."
"He can't hear you now, I assure you," Arcade said. "How does he fit in? Can you tell me?"
That strange expression crossed over Blister's face, like the shadow of fear. "Close..." he breathed. "Close...in. No one ... hear. Sheeee..." He glanced at Samara. "Sheee...not hear."
"Anything you can say to me, you can say to her," Arcade argued, seeing Samara's displeased expression, but Blister shook his head.
"You. Lean in. Close. She... not hear."
Samara nodded, and Arcade leaned in.
"Closer..." breathed Blister. "Closer..."
He leaned in closer. "Say it?"
The Marked Man's ruined features twitched, twisted. He put his left hand on Arcade's shoulder-
And two pistol shots cracked out. The top of the Marked Man's head exploded in a rain of flesh, blood, bone and brain matter; his long, lean body jerked and then fell away, his fingers releasing Arcade's shoulder.
"What the hell!?" Arcade leapt to his feet, spinning on Samara, his hand going automatically to the stock of his gun. He was shaking; the pistol shots so close to him, so close to his ear, had dumped a shitload of adrenaline into his system. A bright flash of rage and fear filled him. He could feel Blister's blood stippling his cheek. "Samara, what the fuck do you think you're doing?! What the hell-He was talking, he wasn't-"
Samara was standing there, looking at him and holding General Retslaf's 10mm in her hand, the barrel still smoking. She nodded toward Blister. "He had a knife. You didn't see it."
Still shaking, Arcade turned to look down at Blister's corpse. True to what Samara had said, a combat knife lay by Blister's outstretched right hand; he had clearly just pulled it from within his armor. When he told me to get closer- The knife's blade gleamed dully in the dim light from the overcast sky. Again, Samara glanced downward, shifting awkwardly.
"I told you I wasn't going to risk your life," she offered, sounding almost like she expected to be scolded again.
Arcade swallowed hard; his stomach was roiling. Everything seemed nonsensical. He started, automatically, to wipe at the blood he could feel trickling down his face, but when he saw the red still staining his hands from the melee, he abruptly jerked them down. He wanted to be sick.
"Are you all right?" he heard Samara ask. "Did he get you?"
"Give me a minute." He waved at her, and she fell silent as he tried to collect himself. What the hell is wrong with me? he found himself wondering. I've been close to death before...but now...?
But he'd just been talking with Blister not half a second before Samara shot him. They'd literally been in the middle of a conversation...he'd been close enough that the man's brains had splashed him.
Goddamn you, Samara, he thought with real venom, as again it occurred to him that he had never been in these kinds of situations before he'd known turned on her, wanting to take a piece out of her; but when he saw her standing there, looking at him so awkwardly, something about her diffidence disarmed him. His own eyes dropped to the knife, still gleaming, and he muttered a curse. She had saved his life, after all.
"Thank you," he said in a low voice.
Samara nodded. "Come on," she said, nodding toward the shattered, gaping hole in the concrete wall. "We have to get moving."
[*]
Beyond the wall was a nightmare jumble of huge, shattered blocks. Chunks of concrete taller than a man lay piled on each other at jagged angles, creating a nearly impassable wasteland. Arcade thought that he was looking at the remains of a highway overpass, but that was no more than a guess. The wreckage was colossal; he felt like a child facing the ruins of some giant's castle. He turned to ask Samara how they were to get through that, but his companion simply forged ahead, her eyebot following her.
They climbed down over a sharply-angled concrete slab with faded highway markings-Arcade missed his grip and skidded the last few feet, scraping his hands-and then picked their way slowly through the rubble to where a car fallen at a slanted angle provided a bridge to a lip of undamaged roadway jutting out over their heads, stark black against the sky. The car shifted uneasily as they stepped off it onto the concrete, and they found themselves staring at an overpass arch that seemed to open onto a shadowed cave or tunnel. A jagged slab of concrete was propped up against the wall of the arch, with Ulysses' white symbol painted on it; next to it was another slab with the words, also in white: KEEP OUT.
"Through there," Samara said. That stony distance was creeping back into her eyes.
Arcade nodded to the two slabs of concrete. "Our friend appears to have a serious case of mixed signals."
"It doesn't matter. Or rather, it won't when I find him," she said, and plunged under the archway.
[*]
The tunnel beneath the overpass was a cave of gloom and shadows. The scent of dust and decay was everywhere. The sky above was completely blocked by huge chunks of pavement; only a few glimmering shafts of light filtered down to them through the cracks in their concrete roof. Their surroundings were just as chaotic as they had been outside: great mounds of rubble bulking darkly in the twilight, overturned and smashed cars and trucks protruding at different angles. A whole brick building that had probably once been some sort of store was almost completely buried. It was staggering to consider the forces that had wrought such destruction.
There was something spooky about the dull murkiness surrounding them. The darkness felt almost alive, as if it were breathing. Watching us. Something's out there. Arcade could sense it...he held his breath instinctively, not wanting to make the slightest noise-
"Ulysses! Ulysses, can you hear me!? Come on out and fight!" Samara's shout rang throughout the tunnel, bouncing echoes back from the distant reaches of the darkness.
"Samara, Jesus, quiet!" Arcade hissed. She was standing taut, staring into the gloom as if she could pierce the space between her and her quarry with her eyes alone. "No, Ulysses can't hear you, of course he can't, but whatever else is in here can hear you just fine!"
"Let them come. I'm not afraid of them. All I care about is Ulysses." Her face was set, and she fingered her weapon; Arcade suddenly had a visual of her charging a stone wall at full speed. And to be honest, I'd only give even odds to the wall. He drew a breath.
"I know that, Samara, but can't you at least see the need for stealth? There could be things here-"
A low growl rolled out of the dark.
Samara raised her LAER rifle and Arcade aimed his plasma defender, cursing Samara under his breath. Like that, see, like that, he wanted to say, but held his tongue. The two of them backed toward each other. Another growl came, from somewhere up ahead; but the echoes bounced and reverberated so greatly that it was impossible to tell exactly where it originated from or how far away it was. Arcade risked a quick glance over at Samara, and saw that she was studying her PIP-Boy 3000.
Taking a tight grip on his urge to throttle her, he asked, "Do you see anything?"
"Nothing. ED-E hasn't detected anything either," she said, nodding toward the eyebot. She straightened her shoulders. "We head on. Further in."
"Samara, do you hear the growling?" The echoes were still chasing each other in the corners of the tunnel. "Do you hear that? I know your PIP-Boy doesn't detect everything-if it's something like night-stalkers, then-"
"Then we'll kill it when it shows itself," she said, her eyes hardening. "Come on."
"Samara, think for a moment. Anything could be out there, we don't know what it can do-"
She turned and looked at him, and he broke off. "Fine," he said with a sigh. "After you."
As they threaded their way through the piles of wreckage, Arcade was tense and jumpy, expecting them to be attacked at any moment; but nothing happened. Low growls drifted out of the dark now and then, and from time to time, something clattered far off in the shadows, but whatever was there seemed content to do nothing more than watch.
For now, anyway, he thought grimly.
There was no order to the overpass tunnel; they had to pick their way among the debris, and were forced to back up a number of times and seek an alternate route. As they rounded the edge of an overturned semi truck, Samara touched his arm.
"Look," she said.
Arcade turned, raising his weapon by instinct, and then stopped. By the light of her PIP-Boy 3000, he could see a body sprawled in the back of the trailer, arms flung wide, head turned to the side. The body was clad in damaged NCR Trooper armor; however, the armor was not patched, as on the corpses they'd seen earlier, and though there wasn't much of the face left, there was enough to tell that this was not a Marked Man.
"A Trooper," he said. Her face had been clawed to unrecognizability, and jagged swipes extended down her throat, so deep that Arcade could see the white glint of her spinal column. A chill ran through him and he rested his hand again on the stock of his pistol. Whatever killed her, it's still in here.
"Yes. ED-E, guard." Samara glanced up at the eyebot, which whistled acknowledgement, then knelt by the body. As she went through the soldier's pockets and then checked the armor, Arcade studied the trooper. She was stocky and solidly built with olive skin and short-cut brown hair. Arcade guessed that she probably had been young, maybe on her first deployment. He wondered at the life course that had brought her here, so far from California.
Samara rose to her feet, holding up a small gray firearm with a short barrel. "Looks like she had a flare gun. And here-" She handed him a couple of canisters. "Flashbangs. And I think here-" She pulled a sheet of yellow military flimsy from the soldier's armor. "It's orders of some kind." Arcade leaned over her shoulder as Samara unfolded the paper and held it under her PIP-Boy light.
"At 0600 hours," Samara read aloud, "Bravo Team will conduct sweep-and-clear operations in advance of the main force. Early intelligence suggests the tunnels are only sparsely populated by small subterranean semi-humanoids, which are easily cowed by bright light and loud noises. Bravo team has been issued flashbang grenades for this purpose and is expected to meet minimal resistance."
Minimal resistance. Arcade looked down at the dead trooper, her face clawed to ribbons, then at the canisters Samara had handed him. Flashbangs. "God damn."
He hadn't meant to speakaloud, didn't realize he had until he saw Samara looking up at him, her brow furrowed. "Arcade...?" she asked.
He rubbed at his eyes again, surprised and rather disturbed by the depth of his bitterness. Samara was still watching him and he shook his head slightly. "Just...arrogance. Damned arrogance. The NCR think they know everything-"
"Well, we're not the NCR," Samara interrupted. "And we've got stuff with us a lot more deadly than flashbangs." She turned away from the downed woman without so much as a backward glance. "Come on, let's go."
A fairly decent migraine was starting in his right temple; Arcade gritted his teeth. "Of course. I didn't mean to interrupt your little quest for vengeance. By all means, lead the way."
She gave him a hard look, and for a brief moment, Arcade wondered if he'd gone too far; but then she turned away, striding forward into the dark. Arcade trailed after her, massaging the side of his head. It didn't seem to help much.
They continued on, deeper into the shadows of the concrete jungle. More growls and scuttlings followed their progress; Arcade found himself jumping at shadows. Samara didn't seem to be worried, he observed sourly, though she did stop and change out her microfusion cells for overcharged ones. Arcade silently followed her example; whatever was lurking out there, he wanted to be prepared.
Near a jackknifed, half-crushed semi truck, they came upon a few more bodies: two more troopers and a solid, broad-shouldered man in Ranger armor. Each of them had the same swiping claw marks raking them as the trooper had. Samara retrieved a few more flashbangs from their belts.
"See in there?" she asked, nodding to the back of the truck.
Arcade looked, and saw the tangled limbs and dun-colored hide of a Deathclaw. He felt himself shiver. "Could this be it?" he asked Samara. "What killed those troopers?"
Samara shook her head, biting her lip again. Above them, the eyebot whistled. "Look," she said, indicating the body.
Arcade followed the line of sight with his eyes. As he examined the Deathclaw's corpse more closely, he saw that it had been disemboweled. Its guts spilled out in a dark pile on the floor of the dented metal truck. He swallowed.
"NCR troopers didn't do that," he murmured.
"No. Nor Legionaries, either." Samara glanced over at him. "Stay close."
"You don't need to tell me twice." He followed after her with his hand on his weapon. Above them both, the eyebot hovered.
Near the exit, Samara tossed a truck door out of their way with her powered armor and pointed. "There."
Arcade peered through the gloom. The path before them slanted upward, to a jagged edge of broken concrete that was clearly part of a fallen highway overpass. A collapsed sign reading HIGHWAY ½ MILE canted at an angle that formed a sort of archway. Above them, more sharp edges of concrete sliced the night sky into jagged shapes.
"I see the symbol," he acknowledged. Ulysses's white symbol was stenciled on a slab of cement to the right. On the left was another splash of violent red graffiti, but neither of them acknowledged that...though he did see Samara's jaw tighten as her eyes fell on it. Then she frowned.
"Hey, what's that?"
Lurking beyond the splash of red graffiti was a strange mound of some sort. As they moved closer, Arcade saw that it seemed to be formed out of chunks of broken concrete that had been cemented together as if by some sort of glue. The mound was fairly sizeable-as high as Arcade's chest and probably the span of his arms across-and in the center of it was a perfectly round, human-sized hole. Samara strode toward it and Arcade followed more cautiously, raising his weapon.
"It looks like a burrow of some kind," he said.
"But what made it?" Samara asked. Steam was rising from the mouth of the burrow, a sickly greenish color; it smelled of sulfur and radiation. Arcade frowned, feeling his skin prickle.
"Whatever it was, it was big. Look at that hole. A person could pass through that easily."
"Yes. Or several people." She turned and looked at Arcade soberly. "Do you think we-"
The blast of music from the eyebot behind them made them both jump. The little bot blared its threat cue, only to have it cut off halfway through by a loud metal banging sound. Samara whirled-Arcade would never have thought that he could have seen anyone in armor move that fast-and cried out, "ED-E! ED-E, are you-"
And then the threat was upon them.
The two of them were instantly engulfed in melee. Arcade's Ripper was in his hands somehow, though he had no memory of drawing it. The chainblade coughed and roared as it sliced into dark, shadowed forms with broad shining eyes that seemed to glow as brightly as the moon. They just kept coming, more and more of them pouring over and around the mounds of concrete rubble in an endless river. His mind was still reeling from shock; Arcade hacked and slashed desperately, his knees shaky and his limbs weak as water. The vibrations from the Ripper made it feel like it was slipping out of his hands; his timing felt off, as if he were half a second behind the attackers and had to hurry to catch up. He could hear Samara screaming, yelling the foulest language he'd ever heard, shouting furious threats and raging about ED-E, but he couldn't dare to look at her; he was scrambling to keep up with the waves of enemies surrounding them.
He couldn't have counted how many there were. He felt their hot blood on his hands, their foul breath on his face, as he strove to stay alive just one second more. Claws raked across the back of his armor, knocking him off-balance; he barely managed to keep his footing as he wrestled his Ripper around to deal with the threat, only to run into a massive blow against his helmet that jarred him so badly he saw stars. He lashed out blindly in the direction of the attack, driven by the sharp, bright edge of fear even as he felt the blade make contact and heard the wet sound of his Ripper tearing into flesh: knowing that he couldn't keep this up much longer, any minute now would be the blow he didn't see-
Then he heard the sizzle of Samara's LAER weapon and a flare of blue-white fire blazed across his sight. When the after-images died away, he realized that he was standing in the middle of a pile of ashes, all that Samara's weapon left behind. All was quiet.
He drew a few shaking breaths, trying to steady himself. The ground was covered with dismembered, vaguely humanoid corpses, mixed with small mounds of ashes; at some point, he realized, Samara had gotten her rifle out. His hands and the housing of his Ripper chainblade were covered with fresh blood, greenish-black against the red stains from the Marked Men earlier. He saw her hulking form in the darkness. "Samara-"
She cut him off with a wave of one hand. "ED-E!" It was a plaintive wail. She bounded across the shattered concrete subsurface to fall on her knees at the side of the eyebot. Within moments she had pried off the machine's access panel and was prodding frantically at its innards, sparing Arcade not so much as a glance. "ED-E, oh my God, ED-E-ED-E, be okay, please-"
A flare of irritation so strong it rose to anger spiked in Arcade's chest as he watched her working desperately away at the circuit boards and wiring of the machine's interior. What about me, Samara? he wanted to shout at her. Do you even care? He bit down on the response. Instead, he said sharply, "Samara, we can't stay here long. Let the eyebot go. More of those-those tunnelers might be along at any-"
"I'm not leaving ED-E!" The words were a shout; Arcade stepped back. Clenching his fists, he turned away, staring out into the darkness around them. He still felt shaky and unbalanced, and the bright flare of anger had not subsided. He concentrated on breathing until he felt more in control of himself, as Samara worked away at the eyebot behind him.
To distract himself he turned his attention to the bodies of their attackers. The creatures that lay sprawled on the ground around them were roughly humanoid, but with dark green, scaly skin and hands much larger than human hands, tipped with sharp, long curving claws, like those of a mole-rat. Guess now we know who that burrow back there belonged to. He glanced up at it again, the hole in the pile of rubble with greenish smoke rising from its mouth; it matched the size of the creatures before him exactly. Their heads and shoulders bore short spikes-perhaps for sensing in the darkness?-and their eyes were enormous and a glowing white. They looked to be adapted for crouching and traveling on all fours, with their hind legs appearing permanently bent-the possible beginnings of an evolutionary transition back to digitigrade locomotion?
"Samara, have you seen-"
"Not now!"
"Geez, fine, whatever," he muttered sullenly. He wandered to the edge of the circle of light cast by Samara's PIP-Boy 3000 and knelt by a small pool of murky, foul-looking water that reeked of sulfur. A quick taste revealed that it was brackish and unsuitable for drinking; almost certainly radioactive too, Arcade thought sourly. That was all right, though; he had no intention of drinking it. Instead, while Samara worked frantically away at the eyebot, Arcade tried his best to wash the blood and grime from his filthy hands and chainblade. It was no easy task; the blood of the Marked Men and the-the Tunnelers, Arcade supposed-had combined into a substance somewhere between shellac and glue, and he had to scrape at the stuff with his fingernails and even handfuls of concrete dust to get it to release its grip. Traces still remained in the creases of his skin and deep under his nails by the time he heard the metallic sound of Samara closing the panel and the eyebot's "ready" whistle again.
"ED-E!" Samara cried. Arcade stood up and turned toward them. ED-E had risen from the ground and was once again hovering slightly above head height; Samara was gazing up at it.
"God, ED-E, I thought-I was afraid-"
The eyebot whistled reassuringly. Samara reached up to lay her hand along one side of the round thing's housing. Her face was almost glowing with happiness. A sudden, wild urge came over Arcade to simply march over there and shove her away from the bot; he fought it back, hard.
"Thank God I was able to fix you," Samara said, beaming up at the round satellite. The machine whistled again, and Samara laughed as if it had said something she understood. "I don't know what I'd have done without you."
Arcade kicked at the ground with one foot while Samara gushed over the bot, digging futilely at the rim of black blood under his nails. Samara herself was almost stainless, he saw when he glanced at her; the longer handle of the protonic inversal axe probably helped keep the mess away from her. There were a few spatters on her cuirass and shoulder guard, but that was all. That migraine was still pulsing in his right temple, and he winced at a particularly loud whistle from the robot. "That's right, ED-E," Samara replied, laughing again. It sounded so wrong to hear her laugh like that that Arcade gritted his teeth. "You are still alive. And we can move on."
The bot beeped in acquiescence.
"Come on, ED-E. Arcade," Samara called with a perfunctory glance at him. "Let's go."
Sure. Why not. Some devil was driving what felt like railway spikes into the side of his head, and Arcade vowed silently that when he caught the little bastard, there would be vengeance. "After you," he replied with saccharine cheerfulness. He waited to see if Samara would call him on it, but she didn't even seem to notice. She simply turned away and began climbing the ramp to the break in the concrete, that damned bot orbiting her. There was nothing for him to do but follow.
[*]
They emerged from the underground to stand on the remains of the highway overpass: the broken and cracked concrete roadway stretched off into the distance before them, dotted with burned-out cars and missing large chunks of itself. Above, the gloomy orange sky washed everything with somber light. Arcade squinted after the darkness of the caverns, while Samara checked her PIP-Boy 3000.
"Okay," she said after a moment. "It looks like we just stay on this roadway for a while."
Arcade frowned, still massaging his temple. "Is it intact the whole way? Because I'm not really in the mood to backtrack through that cave if it turns out otherwise."
Samara studied the flat green screen. "I think it should be okay. This looks like-"
That high-pitched whistle emanated again from the eyebot, screeching across their conversation like fingernails on a chalkboard and echoing back from hills and valleys of wreckage around them. Samara froze, yanking her eyes up from the screen to the eyebot; Arcade started in surprise, automatically raising his weapon.
"There you are," that grating voice boomed out, seeming to come from all around them at once. Arcade felt himself tightening up. "You went quiet for a time. Was beginning to wonder if the Divide had claimed you after all. Should have known better. Divide can't kill you; you're too tough, too mean. We're alike that way. If the Bear had some of your toughness, the fight for the Mojave might be an even match."
"You son of a bitch." That frightening white light had leapt up in Samara's eyes. She raised her LAER at the bot, then lowered it again after a moment. Thunderclouds collided on her brow. It made Arcade's gut churn to see her like that.
"Haven't you caused enough trouble?" he called to the eyebot.
"And your shadow," the eyebot rumbled, "still following faithfully at your heels. Thought you would draw on him, turn on him, payment for deception. But you kept him, I see, even after learning what he was, what he stands for. Him...and that machine of yours. Even now. Why, Courier? Tell me that."
"Come on out here and I'll tell you everything you want to know!"
Samara's whole body was drawn as taut as a cable on the verge of snapping. Quickly, in an attempt to divert her, Arcade called out, "How did you know about-about who I was?"
The bot rotated toward him fully, with what seemed to be a faint air of surprise. "Can smell it on you. You reek of it-privilege, decadence; it's buried in your bones. Soft life breeds soft men. Soft women too. Take away that shiny Plasma Defender, that Ripper-you wouldn't last an hour. Not like her. Take away her weapons-a different story. A survivor from a line of survivors; we're alike in that way, she and I. She had to fight, to struggle for everything in her life. It's strengthened her, refined her steel. If the Bear had that steel, this war would be over very quickly. As it is...NCR hasn't the strength to do what's necessary. Caught between the world they want to be, and the world that is; unable to choose; trying-failing-to navigate between 'is' and 'should.' Legion doesn't try. It does. That's what makes them better. That's why they deserve to win."
"Over my dead body they'll win!" Samara shouted. Arcade felt his frown deepen as Samara's anger spilled over to him.
"Wait a minute, 'deserve to win?'" he demanded. "Hey, I'm the farthest thing in the world from a blind NCR supporter, but how can you possibly say that the Legion is better than they are?"
"Because he's Legion too." The fire in Samara's eyes leaped up; they seemed to glow with a terrifying white light. Her face contorted in rage. "You. Legionary. Bastard." She said the word Legionary as if it were the vilest insult possible. Arcade didn't know whether to step away from her or to go to her and wrap his arms around her-if perhaps doing that could quench her blazing wrath.
"Bull, you term me. You say true. Bull I am, now. I walked the East as you walked the West, saw the miserable, barren tribes, clinging to life, saw the Bull come, swallow them, knit them together, make them strong in ways the Bear could only dream of. Bear's too squeamish; won't stand for blood on its paws. Bull...Bull isn't afraid to trample its enemies, grind them into the dust beneath its hooves. Strange truth of life in the Wastes: if you grind an enemy down far enough, crush them to abjection, the enemy can become an ally. Bear doesn't understand this...or if it does, scruples to use it. Bull knows this well, lives this knowledge...and Bull succeeds."
Samara only snarled. Arcade knew he should keep silent, but he couldn't let it lie; he wet his lips and called back, "That sort of success isn't worth the cost. At least the NCR realizes this." He paused for a moment in thought. "Most of the time, anyway."
A short contemptuous chuckle rolled out of the eyebot's speakers, echoing back from the canyon walls as the bot turned to face him. "Surprised you'd say that, shadow man. Your Enclave knew this too, though rarely used it. No, your Enclave preferred to eradicate, rather than to ally. Scouring the Wastes clean of impurities...in the long run, could only weaken them. Few who walk the Wastes are 'pure,' in any sense of the word. Enclave sought the peace of the grave...and that's just what they got. Wonder, shadow man, how much of those attitudes you imbibed. Is that what you're working for, with her for? To finish what your Enclave started?"
As that grating, grinding voice rolled over him, Arcade felt himself bristle with hostility. "Look, they're not my Enclave, all right?" he called to the bot. "The Posiden oil rig base was destroyed before I was even born, I had nothing to do with any of that. And furthermore-"
"Who cares!?" Samara roared. "All I want to know from you right now, you Legionary son of a bitch, is how to find you! Tell me! Tell me now!" She raised her weapon and pointed it again at the bot, trembling as if she were on the verge of shooting-
"Wait!"
Arcade hadn't realized he'd interrupted Samara until she swung on him. He recoiled a step and held out his hands automatically.
"Arcade, stay out of this!"
"Samara, quiet. We talked to a-a Marked Man," he said, gazing up at the eyebot. "He said something about a town? That Samara had-had made a town here? In the Divide? What was that about?"
"A town?" The eyebot paused. "Suppose you could call it that. Place of houses, people, families...hopes. Dreams. A town...or a new life, better life. Better world. Yes, Courier," and the voice out of the eyebot suddenly sharpened, "you built the place, caused it to grow out of the dust of the Divide; you found the path, opened the road for others to come after you; kept that road open through seasons, storms, bringing the stuff of life to those who settled the trail you walked. Your home, Courier; perhaps not the place you were born, but the place you loved. Must have. Only love could have sustained that kind of dedication. " Samara stared at the eyebot without the slightest hint of comprehension, her face dark with wrath. "Built from the Old World but not of it, forged from the lessons that were all that remained in the ashes of what once had been. A place where new thoughts could take root, a new nation could grow-until it died. Until NCR came. And Legion. And you."
Timbres of bitterness and pain laced the dark, distorted voice. "What happened to that town?" Arcade asked.
"Not your place to ask me, shadow man. Hers."
Arcade glanced over at Samara and could tell immediately that all of what Ulysses had said had gone right over her head; there was only fury and a sort of baffled frustration.
"Tell me where you are," she growled.
"Walk west into the sun, and keep walking until it dies. There-I'll be waiting."
There was a click as the transmission shut off. Samara gave a frustrated cry and pulled her LAER, aiming it at the eyebot again; then lowered it. Instead, she stood still, rigid and staring down the open road ahead of them, her body trembling with anger. Arcade went to stand beside her, reached out to her, almost touching her shoulder, then refrained. Again, he wondered distantly if he should wrap her in his arms, if that might drain the fury from her. Somehow, he didn't quite dare.
"Wow," he said at last, trying to lighten the tension. "I have to say, after listening to this guy, the NCR never looked so good."
He thought at first she had not heard; she made no outward acknowledgement, but slowly, the stiff set to her shoulders began to relax. "Son of a bitch," she muttered, so quietly, Arcade almost could not make out her words.
"Samara, are you-?"
She drew in a long breath. "We should go. The faster we find this guy..." She trailed off.
Together, they stepped out of the shadow of the arch and onto the High Road.