Arcade opened his eyes to sunlight slanting in from the mouth of the cave. It took him a moment to place where he was. Dammit...she didn't wake me, he realized, remembering he had told her to let him take a watch.
He pushed himself to a sitting position, looking around. "Samara? Sam-"
"You're awake." At the sound of her voice he saw her, standing at the mouth of the cave entrance. She was back in her full Power Armor, with her weapons at her back; when she turned her head to look at him, he drew back a little at the coldness in her eyes. "Can you walk? Good. We need to get moving as soon as possible."
"Samara, I-" He got his feet under him and pushed himself to stand; the diagnostic part of his mind noted that his leg was completely back to normal and the weakness that had afflicted him the day before was gone. Seems like the stimpak did its job at last. "I was thinking that maybe we could-"
She looked at him again, and he took a step back. The woman who had wept over him, who had assisted him solicitously throughout the day, who had drunk with him and conversed with him and answered his probing questions, was gone as if she had never been. No trace remained of the relaxation and ease that had been between them the night before. Her walls had slammed back into place, higher and harder than ever, and a total stranger looked at him out of her pale blue eyes.
Who is she? A chill went through him and he swallowed nervously.
"Come on. We need to go." Without so much as another word, she turned her back on him and started for the cave mouth.
Well, that was nice while it lasted... Arcade hesitated; then, muttering curses, followed her.
[*]
They spent the morning wandering among the ruins-in, around and over slabs of collapsed highway, overturned cars and buses, fallen signs and billboards, and huge toppled chunks of skyscrapers, tracing an erratic, looping path among these obstacles as they followed the cryptic dictates of Samara's PIP-Boy 3000. Having never possessed one himself, Arcade had no idea how they worked; but Samara's faith in hers seemed to be absolute, even when they had to backtrack for half an hour because it led them down a blind canyon.
The ruins were absolutely deserted. There weren't even any bodies to testify that humans had once been there. The only sound apart from their footsteps was the wind whining through the broken windows and downed powerlines. The silence had Arcade on edge. He remembered Bonesaw back in the Village of the Marked Men telling them to watch out-that this area was under the control of a man named Blade. He was right about Rawr at least, Arcade reflected, touching his healed leg, so where is Blade? The ruins were as silent as a ghost town.
And Samara drifted among them like a specter herself. The stony light that he had seen in her face was gone; if anything, her eyes were now dark, veiled-as if they opened onto another world. A creepy absence hung about her, as if her body was there, but her mind was not. Following her was like following a ghost. A powerful unease seeped into Arcade's gut as the hours crept by, a deep-seated, grinding fear, as ever-present and monotonous as the pain in his leg had been. The silence made him want to crawl out of his skin. He wound his way after her through the ruins, wishing with all his heart that he were somewhere-anywhere else. He followed Samara only because he was afraid not to-and he could not tell whether he was more afraid of her or for her.
That ridiculous prophecy the Think Tanks had given him at Big Mountain kept recurring to his mind: Death... Fire... Loss... The end of everything that has gone forward. Except that somehow, in his present mood, it didn't seem so ridiculous.
Something bad's going to happen. I can feel it. More than ever, he wanted to snatch Samara up and shut her away, somewhere safe where nothing could hurt her.
The entrance to Ulysses's Temple was halfway up one of the cliff walls of the divide; slowly, as the sun rose higher into the sky, they wound their way up a trail with several switchbacks along a pile of broken buildings. The trail led to a narrow pathway along the side of the cliff face which ended in a small landing area or plateau. Several of the Marked Men's stone huts stood in a loose circle around a cement block fire ring in the center; two splintery bookcases formed a rough barricade. A couch was back against the rock wall at one edge of the plateau and mattresses, ruined books, crates, and other odds and ends were scattered around the village.
"Here," Samara said, checking her PIP-Boy 3000. It was the first word she had said in hours. "This is the place." She was not looking at him.
Arcade followed the direction of her gaze. An unassuming metal door was set into a recess cut into the side of a cliff.
"There?" He indicated the door. Samara nodded.
"Stop here. We'll eat something and do a final equipment check before we go further."
They settled down around the fire ring, not saying anything. As Samara began laying out her weapons, Arcade examined the ring. Wisps of smoke were rising from the ashes, faint in the air; Arcade leaned forward and touched the cement blocks. Still warm. Someone was here recently.
"Samara," he said, then, seeing her engrossed in her weapons, "Samara."
It took a moment before she pulled her attention away from her work. "Huh?"
He studied her, and then sighed. It's not going to matter anyway. "Never mind."
Arcade lit a fire in the fire ring, using some ruined books from a trunk, while Samara worked on her weapons. The trunk also contained a few MREs; he picked up one for himself and tossed another to Samara, which she barely acknowledged. Arcade opened the pouch and dug into heavily processed meatballs and marinara sauce, his eyes resting uneasily on Samara. That air of absence surrounded her like a thick blanket; he felt almost as if he were suffocating. Though she was sitting no more than a couple yards from him, she seemed very far away, as if he were viewing her through the wrong end of a telescope. The chill had settled in his gut, becoming an all-consuming sense of dread; he could scarcely choke down the centuries-old protein and starch, and the food tasted like ashes in his mouth.
The silence dragged out as Samara continued to work intently and efficiently on her equipment. Arcade knew he should be checking his own equipment as well, but he was so tense he couldn't concentrate; he stood up and began to pace, trying to work off some of his nervous energy. Samara paid him no heed; she had gone away completely inside herself, to some place he could not reach. He could feel some sort of disaster looming, one from which he was powerless to protect himself-or her.
After a moment, he realized she was humming, low and tuneless, as if unaware of what she was doing.
"Samara. Hey. Samara."
He had to call her two or three times before she looked up. Even then, he could see that she was only about half paying attention to him. "Huh?"
"What's that song?"
"Song?"
"You're humming," he said. "What song are you humming?"
"Oh." She looked down for a moment. "I think it's called 'Ballroom Blitz.'"
"'Ballroom Blitz?'" He tried to think; he couldn't remember hearing it on either Radio New Vegas or the Mojave Music Station.
"Yeah." She paused, then sang a few bars.
"Now the man in the back is ready to crack
As he raises his hand to the sky
And the girl in the corner is everyone's mourner
She can kill with a wink of her eye
And the man in the back said Everyone attack,
And it turned into a ballroom blitz
And the girl in the corner said Boy, I wanna warn ya
It'll turn into a ballroom blitz
Ball-room blitz..."
Somehow the words did not exactly reassure Arcade. "Doesn't sound familiar. Where'd you hear it?"
"Don't remember." Samara gave a noncommittal shrug and turned her attention back to her weapons, lapsing back into silence. The sun, high in the sky, cast shadows over them from the walls of the canyon; from Arcade's perspective, it looked as if the dark mouth of the temple entrance was about to swallow Samara in its gloom. The shadows hung over her like doom; she seemed alien, unreachable.
Arcade flung himself down across from her, running a restless hand through his hair. He racked his brain, desperately, searching for something, anything he could do to penetrate that crystalline shell of distance around Samara-to bring her back to him from wherever she'd gone, to erase that frightening absence behind her eyes. He was seized with an overwhelming sense that this was his last chance to avert whatever darkness he could sense was coming. Wild ideas roiled in his head, forming and bursting like bubbles: if I could- if she did - maybe if - He tried to grasp at them, but came up with nothing usable. He leaned forward, bracing his forehead on his hands, and rubbed at his temples.
Samara...
She stood up. Her shoulders went back and her jaw tightened. She turned her head toward the door behind her.
"It's time."
Too late.
[*]
The door rumbled aside at a touch from Samara, and the two of them stepped into a dim, shadowy interior. The left side of the room was filled with boxes and barrels, while a defunct computer station stood against the back wall. Samara ignored both of these and headed for the door on the right. Arcade followed numbly. A sick sense of dread was hanging over him, nestling deep in his gut, and with every step they took, that dread deepened.
Where is everybody?
The entry room opened onto a long hallway with a supply closet to the left. As they stepped into the hallway, Samara held up a hand, staring at her PIP-Boy.
"Wait," she murmured.
They held still a moment, listening, and in the silence, Arcade could hear faint sounds: an electronic voice, muffled by walls of metal and concrete, rasping through the silence of the bunker. He glanced at Samara.
"Sentry bot?" he murmured.
She nodded, and took her LAER rifle from her back. Arcade drew his Plasma Defender. At another gesture from Samara, the two of them proceeded stealthily down the hallway, pressed to the walls, until they reached another metal door. The sentry bot's chatter was very loud now. Samara motioned Arcade to a halt, then held up one finger and indicated the door.
Let me go in first.
Arcade nodded in response, though his heart was in his throat. Memories of Samara, moving on a diagonal across a tunnel as a hail of red laser fire strafed around her, came to him; he clenched his hand on the stock of his Plasma Defender, tensing as Samara touched the door control panel. The door folded itself away, and quick as lightning, Samara spun away from the wall toward the center of it and fired three shots from her LAER. An explosion echoed from within, but he did not relax until Samara lowered her weapon.
"It's safe now," she said. That absence was still in her eyes; they seemed to open onto a dark place. Perhaps, Arcade mused, somewhere deep inside herself, she was gathering her resources, for the confrontation to come.
The room on the other side of the door was shaped like an L. They had stepped into the short, stubby leg of the L, with a longer, narrower segment of the room to the left. Against the left-hand wall were various pieces of large computer equipment, lights flashing silently to themselves. The sentry-bot Samara had shot lay tipped over in the middle of the room, one wheel still spinning.
Samara checked her PIP-Boy and proceeded to the door at the far end of the room. After fiddling with it for a moment, she shook her head. "Locked." She glanced around abstractedly; a blinking computer terminal set on a counter on the right-hand side of the room caught her gaze. The terminal was under a bank of scratched, scuffed windows. Samara went to tap in a few commands on the computer terminal-then stopped. She looked up through the windows and her eyes widened. A strange alertness crackled around her.
"Samara?" Arcade ventured.
She didn't respond. Instead, she tapped frantically at the computer terminal in front of her, then drew her LAER. That hyperfocused intentness filled her.
"Samara-"
"Stay!" A sharp gesture cut him off. Samara moved to the left of the bank of windows; Arcade saw a door there, in shadows, that he had not seen before. She touched the door and it folded itself away.
"Sa-"
Samara plunged into the room with a yell, and Arcade heard her LAER firing. Bright fear flooded him. Goddamn it, Samara- He raised his Plasma Defender and started to go after her, only to hear her call, "All clear!"
He lowered his weapon, taking a breath, trying to settle his system after the fear in his gut. Another breath, and another. "You could have warned me," he accused, stepping over the door sill into the room. He started to ask what was so important about the room anyway, when his eyes fell on them.
The room was a large square, with two destroyed sentry bots gathered close to the door; against the far corners, Arcade could make out the remains of laser turrets, detonated by blasts from Samara's LAER. Two tables pushed together near the center held another computer terminal, and behind the tables...
God-damn it, Arcade thought with weary anger. Three Bot Maintenance Pods stood in the center of the room, and the one in the center was occupied.
It was clear Samara had seen it too; at once she was fiddling with the computer terminal, and then the center pod hissed open. The round eye-bot within floated out with a bright chirp.
"ED-E!" Samara cried. Her face lit with happiness, and for a moment the frightening absence that had been in her eyes all day was gone. The eye-bot bobbed over to her, and Samara beamed up at it with clear, unfeigned joy. "Oh, ED-E! I can't believe it! I thought you'd have been taken apart for scrap by now, or melted down, or-"
The bot whistled cheerfully, and Samara fell silent, listening to it as if it were actually speaking. That rapturous expression had not faded from her features; she gazed up at the eyebot as if she were enchanted by that hunk of metal. Arcade could feel his own frustration rising. Should I even bother to point out to her the possibility that this isn't even the same eye-bot that was following us earlier? he mused darkly. He crossed his arms over his chest.
"But what did he even want with you?" she asked, gazing up at the bot. The eyebot whistled again. Arcade's nerves were so overstressed that the piercing sound made him want to jump out of his skin. For a wild moment he fantasized about just shooting the damned thing out of the air.
Yeah, that would be a good idea. Try it and see how Samara reacts, he mused sardonically.
"Well, I don't know either," Samara replied, "but I'll tell you something, ED-E: We're going to find out. I won't let that son of a bitch get away with this. It's one more thing he's going to answer for." Her back straightened. That cold distance was seeping back into her face; Arcade could actually see the veil of emptiness come down behind her eyes, and he shuddered. "Come on, ED-E. We're going to find that son of a bitch, and everything he's done, he's going to get back double. I swear it. I swear."
She started back for the outer room, that absent intent in her face, and the bot chirped again before it followed her. Perhaps it was just Arcade's imagination, but the bot's little beeps sounded almost uncertain.
Goddamn it, I'm getting as bad as she is, he thought wearily.
In the outer room, Samara pecked at the computer terminal again, and the door at the far end of the room folded open. Beyond it was a long tunnel, looking somewhat like the one where they had first entered, with stained concrete walls and a trash strewn floor. Emergency lighting blinked on and off, flickering above them. The near end of the tunnel had collapsed in on itself and was filled with rubble; an Auto-Doc machine lay at a slant angle in the wreckage, suggesting to Arcade that perhaps a medical clinic had rested above the tunnel at one point.
At the far end of the tunnel loomed a massive, metal door.
"This is it." Samara studied her PIP-Boy and nodded to the door. In truth, Arcade hadn't needed her to say it; he could sense, just by looking. The door seemed a brooding, malign presence waiting for them. The dread in his gut was almost all-consuming; he wrapped his arms around himself and rubbed at his shoulders. As they approached the other end of the tunnel, every step felt as if he were walking to his own execution.
Or hers. He stole a glance at Samara's face and looked away. The stranger he had seen in the missile silo was rising, slowly yet inexorably, to the surface. The emptiness in her eyes looked like lowering madness. One last time, he searched his mind, seeking desperately for something he could do to bring her back to him. Yet he sensed it was useless. If there had ever been such a chance, it was long gone.
Samara cracked open the control panel to one side of the door. "Ready?" she asked him, her fingers poised over the circuitry.
No backing out now. Arcade's mouth was dry. He wet his lips. "No," he said, "but go ahead. I can't stop you."
Samara fiddled with the circuits. The door folded open.
[*]
On the other side of it was a completely unassuming elevator lift.
Samara stepped onto it, the metal ringing with her armored tread; Arcade followed, as did the little eye-bot. She touched a few buttons, and the door slid closed like the door of a tomb; there was a low humming sound, and the lift lurched into motion.
The long ride down was mostly silent. Arcade's heart was racing in his chest; he drew deep, steady breaths, trying to calm himself. If Samara was nervous, she showed no sign. The stranger he had seen in her face before was becoming clearer, more distinct, and an almost visible air of something he could not name hung about her. Readiness, perhaps. The bot hovered behind Samara, humming softly to itself.
What am I doing here? Arcade found himself wondering. He tried to trace the chain of events that had led him from his comfortable if slightly dull existence researching broc flowers and xander roots and treating the occasional junkie in the Followers outpost in the Old Mormon fort to here, descending into the depths of an active nuclear missile silo at the side of a madwoman. He couldn't do it; there was such a disconnect between then and now that he couldn't bring the two together. Whatever possessed me to leave the Followers? What was I thinking?
As the elevator began to slow, indicating they were finally reaching the bottom, Samara spoke. "Here," she said, turning to him. She pressed into his hands a bundle of chems, including several stimpaks. "Don't know if you'll need them, but just in case."
Arcade took them from her. "Samara..."
She didn't answer. Actually she seemed to have already dismissed him from her thoughts. Arcade didn't know what he wanted to say anyway. He stowed the chems in his armor and lapsed back into silence.
The elevator came to a stop.
[*]
The door opened onto a low-ceilinged deck or lobby, lined with banks of dead computer equipment on either side. Metal doors were set into the walls to the left and right, of the folding type that Arcade had seen in military bases all throughout the Mojave. The floor was corrugated metal, rusted, with planking missing in several places and strewn with the detritus of two hundred years and more.
The far end of the deck was open. Beyond, Arcade could see a vast, cavernous space, hewn out of the living rock of the mountain. A temple, he thought in those first, terrified moments, a temple to Armageddon. The walls of the temple, which might have been a hundred feet across, maybe even more, were rough, unfinished stone; six of the titanic nuclear missiles stood three to either side in between stout metal buttresses, stretching up to the heavens like gigantic trees, lining the walls like sentinels. Half-a-dozen more loose warheads were littered around the space beyond: the carelessly strewn toys of some giant child. A raised walkway led from the floor of the deck out into the cathedral, running above pits to either side filled with banks of computer equipment and work stations where, two centuries ago, technicians would have tirelessly monitored these massive implements of destruction: swords great enough to reach around the world, arrows able to fell millions at one blow. Above this vast cathedral space was a ceiling of metal tiles, and set into it was a huge circular oculus of overlapping strips of metal, its basilisk glare closed.
In the center of the temple, as if in a position of veneration, was the raised dais of a launch platform. A circular catwalk surrounding a deep pit where missiles slumbered, with a gantry like a steel skeleton rising above it, a ladder to the heavens. Two bent and crippled girders stood one on each side of the platform, and hanging from a line stretched between them, the flag of the Old World resplendent, hanging almost to the floor.
In front of that flag...
And there he is. Arcade's breath caught in his throat.
He was a tall man-even at this distance Arcade thought they might stand nearly equal in height-with dark hair in short dreadlocks; he had broad shoulders and muscular, pale-brown arms, displayed by the sleeveless duster he wore, which fell to just above his ankles. His back was to them, displaying a stylized image of the flag of the Old World, stenciled on the back of his duster-the same marking that Samara and Arcade had been following through the Divide. He took no notice of them; his head was tilted back as if he were gazing up at the towering edifice of girders, flag and gantry in veneration-or hatred. One hand clasped a golden staff topped with an eagle, and by his side hung a 12.7mm submachine gun: one of the favored weapons of the Legion.
Even at this distance, a tremendous presence hung about him. Arcade would have sensed who he was even if they had met on the street; there would have been no mistaking him. And he was a spy for Caesar? Arcade thought inanely; it seemed utterly absurd to him, in that moment, that a man so formidable could ever have passed unnoticed.
The lift was whining. Behind him, one of the giant missiles was slowly rising into view.
"Ulysses..."
The rolling, rumbling growl raised the hairs on the back of Arcade's neck; his arms prickled with gooseflesh. He glanced over at his companion reflexively and immediately wished he hadn't. Ulysses had been recognizable at first glance; now, his first thought on seeing his companion was completely instinctive: Who is this?
For Samara was gone. The total stranger that had shown herself at the Ashton missile silo had risen completely to the surface, rearranging the familiar geometry of Samara's face into alien and terrifying shapes. Her skin was stretched almost to transparency over the knife-sharp bones of her face; her eyes seemed to glow with a steady white light, as broad and bright as the eyes of the Tunnelers they had fought under the earth; and her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a snarl of Deathclaw-like ferocity.
Arcade would never have recognized her as Samara. He would only have given fifty-fifty odds that she was even human.
Samara's entire being was totally focused on the man standing on the dais. She lurched into motion, those broad bright eyes locked on him like salvation. As she strode toward him, her armored boots rang like the fall of doom. Arcade didn't try to hold her back-he would no more have dreamed of it than of trying to seize the arm of a rampaging Deathclaw.
"Ulysses!" she howled, her voice echoing throughout the vast space of the temple.
The man on the dais turned, two eyebots rising to take their place on either side of him. The lower half of his face was completely obscured by a breath mask, and Arcade wondered at it distantly-but his eyes were alive. They shone a bright, almost metallic golden, and they never blinked as he turned to face then both. Those golden, gleaming eyes glanced at Arcade and then looked away, dismissing him; it was clear that Arcade did not matter here. Only Samara did.
"Even in this place, the NCR's shadow falls." His voice was raspy, distorted by the hissing and gurgling of his respirator. "Or is it just you, Courier, without the Bear's corpse to weigh you down? And your shadows, both of them-carrying the legacy of a dead and dying world. Doesn't matter now. Either way, the Divide giants are awakening. The missiles here, on their way home. There is no way to stop them."
His words fell on deaf ears. Samara did not acknowledge them in the slightest. Her eyes were still that shining white and her face that of a demon's. Without breaking stride, she took her LAER from her back, raised it, and then flung it aside with contempt. She drew her protonic inversal axe, and then hurled it from her; it skidded and spun on the walkway, landing just short of the computer pit to one side. The sniper rifle was next, and despite everything, Arcade winced to see the delicate weapon being treated that way. Watching her slow, deliberate advance, it seemed as if no power in the world could have turned her back.
Servos whined as she raised her fists, and Arcade was close enough to see Ulysses recoil in shock as with an incoherent scream, her massive, armored form closed the last few yards between them at a run.
In a split second, Ulysses leapt agilely backward; if he hadn't, she would have smashed him into a red stain on the catwalk right there. Samara's huge weight crashed into the rail separating the catwalk from the missile bay. The rail gave dangerously; anyone else would have gone right over. Yet Samara handled Powered Armor like no one Arcade had ever known; she whirled with the grace of a dancer and lunged at the other man again with a howl.
Once more Ulysses leapt backward, evading Samara's full-on rush at the last second. He was visibly startled; Arcade guessed he had not been prepared for such raw ferocity. As he stepped back, he swung at Samara with the eagle-headed staff. Arcade had no idea what he expected it to do and he never got a chance to find out. As he swung at her, Samara stepped to one side, reached out, and locked her hands around the staff.
It wasn't even anything close to an equal contest. Even without the armor, Samara was strong enough that Arcade suspected she had had some modifications put in somewhere along the line; with it, she could rip a steel girder in half with her bare hands, and outweighed Ulysses by a couple hundred pounds to boot. She wrenched the staff away from him as if she were taking a toy from a child. The other man was flung, sprawling, to the floor. Samara raised the staff over her head, brought it down over her knee, and with an animal's snarl, snapped it in two.
In the distance, a klaxon began to blare.
Everything seemed to happen at once. Ulysses scrambled to his feet, grabbing for his 12.7 mm submachine gun with an alacrity that spoke of outright alarm. Arcade could hear pounding feet thundering along corridors, and then the rumble of metal doors folding away; panic gripped him as he heard the gurgled and growling shouts and yells of Marked Men soldiers. Overhead, the two eyebots that had flanked Ulysses whistled; one of them rotated and struck Samara with some kind of glowing ray. Her armored form staggered, and she grunted in pain.
"Arcade!" Samara shouted, catching herself. "Get the Marked Men! ED-E! Handle the bots!"
"Ulysses?" Arcade shouted back, though he hardly needed to.
"He's mine!" And she gave another howl.
Get the Marked Men? Is she crazy!? Even as he thought that, Arcade was already moving, taking up position at the head of the catwalk, where it debouched into the platform where the missile gantry was located. Marked Men were pouring into the lobby on the far side of the temple, from the two metal doors on either side of the lift. To Arcade's fear-sharpened senses, they seemed like a flood, armed with huge swords, assault carbines, hunting shotguns and thermic lances. Goddamn it, goddamn it, I never wanted to play Horatius at the bridge, I never wanted - Behind him he could hear the chatter of Ulysses's 12.7 mm machine gun and Samara's yells of fury, but he didn't dare look. His Plasma Defender was already in his hands, though he didn't remember drawing it, and he poured green fire into the Marked Men at the far end of the catwalk, dropping them as fast as he could pull the trigger.
"On ne passe pas," he growled between his teeth, scarcely aware of it.
For the rest of his life-as long as he lived-Arcade would maintain that that moment in time was the closest he ever came to dying in battle. The Marked Men were an endless stream, constantly pouring in through the metal doors; it seemed as if for every one he felled, two others came to take his place. Power Armored Samara with LAER in hand could have handled that many-perhaps-but Samara was fully engaged fighting Ulysses, if the sounds behind him were any indication-he did not dare to turn and look, not even for a moment-and the beeps and electronic crackling sounds told him that the eyebot was likewise occupied. It was only him, alone against the oncoming tide of Marked Men, and he fired his weapon and dropped them with speed born of sheer, mortal terror.
Now I guess we know where they all were earlier, Arcade thought inanely. He must have every Marked Man in the Great Divide after us!
Two things and two things only saved his life that day: the chems Samara had given him in the lift on the way down and the fact that, as he had noticed all the way back in Hopeville, the Marked Men were terrible shots. A few puffs of Jet here, a lightning quick jab of Psycho there, a gulp of Hydra during a seconds-long lull in combat-it wasn't much, but it was somehow enough to keep him going. Bullets sang around him, bouncing off the rails, the catwalk plates, glancing off his armor hard enough to stagger him; Arcade felt a trickle down his side, and knew that it was either sweat or he had been hit, though he wasn't feeling it-but somehow, nothing hit him anywhere vital.
It couldn't last. He knew this. Even as the Marked Men fell in heaps and he heard Samara and Ulysses raging behind him, he knew his luck would have to run out. There was no getting out of this situation. He was essentially a dead man, had been since the moment he had stepped off the lift-since the moment you entered the Great Divide, he thought grimly. In the medical phrase, this was not a situation "compatible with life." Aside from the fact that he didn't want to think about what the Marked Men would do to him if they took him alive, the only thing stopping him from just throwing down his weapons and getting it over with was the fact that Samara had told him to keep the Marked Men off her and if he failed, she was as good as dead. She was counting on him. She needs me to get the Marked Men, and dammit, that's what I'm going to do, he panted to himself, his Plasma Defender hot in his aching hands as he fired again and again. Not for the first time during this whole sorry escapade, Arcade found himself wishing desperately for something more powerful. A Plasma Caster, now, that would be about perfect- He was going to stay here and guard this bridge-guard Samara's back-even though it cost him his life.
Stranger, go and tell Samara that here I lie, obedient to her command, the sardonic thought came unbidden, and Arcade cursed viciously between his teeth. He was starting to see shimmers now, moving among the other Marked Men, and though he should have recognized it immediately, he didn't figure it out until he hit one by accident. The shimmer dispersed, falling away to reveal another Marked Man behind it.
Cloaks-goddamn it- Stealth Men, he remembered Bonesaw saying back in the village of the Marked Men a lifetime ago, and he cursed again in despair. This can't get worse-
And yet it could, for one of the shimmers was moving forward, separating itself from the horde beyond and moving out onto the bridge, toward him.
It should have been an easy shot. Arcade pulled the trigger-but instead of the familiar bolt of green, there was only a click and an electronic fizzle. Shit! Shit! Shit! A bad energy cell- It happened sometimes-at least he prayed that was all it was-but he had no time to clear it; the Shimmer was closing fast. At least he had the presence of mind to slam the Plasma Defender back in its holster instead of dropping it; he grabbed for his Ripper with trembling hands-
The shimmer stopped.
The cloak fell away to reveal another Marked Man. He was a few inches shorter than Arcade, although most people were; but he had the thick musculature of a Brahmin steer. He wore a battered version of NCR patrol armor, patched with the usual street signs, but it was the mask he wore that truly identified him: a half-helmet with a crest and horns to either side, covering his eyes and leaving the lower portion of his face bare. At his back he carried a huge blade that Arcade recognized as a replica of Lanius's signature weapon: the Blade of the East. His mind went back to what Bonesaw had told them in the Marked Man village, and he realized:
This is Blade.
The Marked Men at the other end of the bridge were holding fire, as if they were waiting. Blade studied Arcade through the mask. He drew his massive sword from his back-Arcade powered up his Ripper at the same moment-and then, the huge blade raised in salute, Blade offered Arcade-a bow?
What?
Arcade's breath was coming too rapidly; his mind was racing with fear and he fumbled, thoughtless, before it came to him what Blade was doing. Is he challenging me to-a duel? What the hell-?
It seemed like the craziest idea he had ever heard in his life. His first impulse, which he immediately squashed, was to glance back over his shoulder at Samara, to see what she thought; but explosions and the full-throated chatter of Ulysses's weapon told him their combat still raged. Completely at a loss, Ripper racing in his hands, Arcade bowed back; he didn't know what else to do.
The moment he straightened up again, Blade swung his massive weapon for Arcade's head.
Completely caught off guard, Arcade barely got his Ripper up in time to parry. The whirring teeth of his chainblade screeched against metal and the vibrations jarred Arcade's hands.
Blade yanked his weapon back and swung again.
Arcae parried desperately, thrusting, stabbing, doing everything he could to push Blade back. The Marked Man fought in grim silence, his masked face expressionless. Nevertheless, Arcade was in big trouble, and he could tell Blade knew it. Hand to hand combat had never been his forte, and if it hadn't been for the fact that his Ripper was a better weapon, he would have been dead in seconds. As it was, the racing teeth of his chainblade chewed into Blade's massive sword again and again, digging so many notches in the blade that it began to look as if the edge had been deliberately serrated. Glowing hot metal fragments seared his cheeks, and the roar of his chainblade began to stutter and skip. Arcade could tell by the vibrations in his hands that the chain would slip its track soon, and prayed desperately for it to hold just one more moment, just a second longer...
There was no more time. His Ripper jarred against Blade's weapon; he recovered incorrectly, and his foot slipped on the edge of the catwalk. He fell to his knees. Blade swung his weapon at him. Arcade managed to yank the Ripper up again, and this time, the chainsaw sheared all the way through Blade's weapon; the huge sword snapped in two about midway down its length, leaving Blade holding about a two-foot long remnant. Wild elation surged through Arcade, and he started to get to his feet, only to have Blade deliver a powerful kick to the chest, throwing him onto his back. The metal catwalk rang as he crashed down on his back, his Ripper falling from his fingers. The Marked Man put a foot on his chest. Blade loomed above him, that terrible, dispassionate metal mask seeming to fill his world. He drew the stump of the blade back so that its sharp edge faced him; as if hypnotized, Arcade could see the gleam of light along the keen edge of the blade. His breath was coming too fast; he was panting, desperately gasping for air to fill his lungs. This is it. This is how I will die. His heart was racing in his chest. Blade started the downswing...
...and then stopped. He raised his head, looking past Arcade toward the dais beyond.
In that same moment, Arcade became aware that the sounds of battle coming from behind him had fallen silent. The intensity in Blade's body compelled him; he rolled onto his side and looked back at the altar.
Ulysses was lying on his back, his gun several feet away, with Samara kneeling astride him-actually on top of him. Even at his distance, Arcade could hear bones cracking and the other man groaning in agony, even over the wailing klaxons. He was struggling against her titanic weight; he seemed to be trying to speak, but Arcade could not make out any words. Samara's face was fixed in an absolutely terrifying mask of rage. Her armor whined-she laced her fingers together and raised her joined fists above her head-
"Samara! No!" Arcade cried out in horror.
With all the strength of her armor behind her, Samara swung. Arcade jerked his face away at the last moment, but it didn't help; he heard her savage cry, the hollow splat sound, the grating of metal on metal as she ended Ulysses's life.
"Dea!"
Above him, Blade tossed down the shattered remains of his sword. He reached up, and pulled off his half-helmet, revealing flayed features beneath; then slowly sank to one knee, pressing his helmet to his chest. Arcade could hear the clatter of countless other Marked Men discarding their weapons and going down on their knees as well, and like a great wind, the word rolled back from many throats: "Dea..."
Samara took no notice. She was weeping.
Her armored form had bent forward over what was left of Ulysses's body; she was bracing herself on the ground almost on all fours. Her head hung down, hiding her expression, but her massive pauldrons were shaking. Huge, painful-sounding, gasping sobs were tearing their way out of her chest, harsh and unlovely, filling the temple air. The eyebot hung behind her.
In the distance, the klaxons still wailed.
Arcade glanced quickly at Blade; his erstwhile opponent was still kneeling, helmet pressed to his chest, his head bowed. Carefully, Arcade rolled over and began to get to his feet. He felt a hundred years old; every part of his body ached, and deep, stinging pain drilled into his side with every breath. He hadn't noticed it before. I must have taken a bullet, he realized, and glancing down at himself saw that his armor was indeed streaked with blood. He fumbled out a stimpak, and leaning on a rail, plunged it into his neck; then reeled, gasping as the shock of healing ran through him. He was still a little tender when he straightened again. His Ripper was a few feet away; Arcade gathered it up, noting grimly that the chain was almost off the track, and hooked it back at his waist. His limbs were trembling with exhaustion; his armor seemed to weigh a hundred times more, and for a moment, he wondered if he were going to fall flat on his face.
Slowly, limping a little, he began to make his way toward Samara.
She took no heed of his approach, simply kneeling there and sobbing as if her heart were breaking. Those sobs tore at his heart-and frightened him a little too. The audience of Marked Men did not move or speak, simply watching. Feeling intensely self-conscious, Arcade went to her and knelt-at her side, and slightly behind her, where what remained of Ulysses was hidden from his view.
"Samara," he said quietly, reaching out to put one hand on her shoulder. "Hey. Samara."
She heaved another one of those gasping sobs and her entire body shook.
"Are you all right? Are you..." He groped for something to say, some way to reach her in the depths of her pain. "Are you injured?" he asked, groaning internally at the inadequacy of his response.
"They didn't come back," she sobbed.
"What? I don't-"
"The memories. They didn't come back. I thought-but there's nothing there, I don't remember anything! They didn't come back!"
Arcade swallowed. "I know. Samara, I'm sorry," he said quietly, though privately he was unsurprised; hell, I told her that when we first talked about this months ago-that the cure for amnesia was usually more complex than that. "I'm sorry for you, I really am, but - " He bit his lip and looked up at the missile, fully in position now, towering far, far above them. The oculus was open; he could see bright sky above. "But Samara, we've got bigger problems right now."
"Wh-what?"
"Samara..." He wet his lips and glanced upward at the open missile silo. Not much time left... "Remember? Ulysses said he was going to launch missiles at the NCR. That's what he was doing when we got here. We've got-Samara, we've got to find a way to stop that launch." She glanced up at him now, over her shoulder; her tear-streaked expression wrenched his heart. The raging demon that had charged Ulysses barehanded was nowhere in evidence; there was only Samara now, her face ravaged by pain. He drew a breath, steadying himself. "We've got to, or a lot of innocent people are going to die. I can't-Do you know anything about this technology? Does your PIP-Boy tell you anything?" As she continued to stare at him blankly, he begged her, "Samara, please. Please-we've got to do something, Samara-"
Slowly, what he was saying seemed to get through to her. She sat back on her heels, slowly getting herself under control, then pushed to her feet. As she did so, Arcade carefully positioned himself so that she blocked his view of Ulysses; he didn't think he could take looking at the ruin of the other man right now. Samara's cuirass was splashed with blood and bits of brain matter, and red stippled her arms all the way up to her pauldrons. Her face was streaked with tears and spatters of blood. She drew a few long breaths, getting herself under control, swallowed once, then drew distance around herself like a cloak.
"Right," she said. "What do we need to do?"
She's with me now. Thank God. He felt he was seeing her-seeing her-for the first time all day. Aloud, he said, "I don't know." Arcade bit his lip, casting around himself. "There's got to be a console somewhere, maybe a control panel-"
Samara nodded. She glanced down at her PIP-Boy screen, then grimaced; it was covered with blood. She wiped it against her armored side, somewhat ineffectually, and then tapped at it with her other hand. She raised her head.
"Over there," she said, indicating one of the control pits on the right of the walkway. "Come on."
Blade rose from his kneeling position as she approached, and behind him the rest of the Marked Men did as well. "Dea," he said reverentially. "You...slay...Ulysses. Divide...yourrrs."
Samara glanced at him, then looked away dismissively. "Whatever."
They went down a flight of steps to the right of the walkway, down into the pit of computer equipment, with the eye-bot bobbing after them. Every nerve in Arcade's body was screaming at him to hurry! Dreadful images of the aftermath of the Great War-images he'd seen during his training with the Followers-haunted his mind. Urgency prickled along his skin. Goddamn it, we've got to do something-
Smashed, dead computer banks lined the walls of the computer pit, with here and there a few consoles with their lights still blinking. Samara ignored them, consulting her PIP-Boy, while Arcade shifted from foot to foot and tried to throttle his impatience. The klaxon continued to blare in the background, hammering away at him. After what seemed a year, Samara looked up.
"There," she said, pointing to a platform that stood a little below the edge of the catwalk, holding one of the few active remaining consoles. Next to it was a lit, battery-operated lantern, probably dropped by Ulysses when setting the launch up. "Up there."
The two of them scrambled up the short flight of stairs to the active computer bank. Arcade thought he could hear the song of engines powering up, and ground his teeth.
"Hurry, Samara," he urged her as she fiddled with the computer bank. "There might not be that much time left-"
She shook her head, biting her lip. "There's no time left. It's counting down right now."
"Shit!" Arcade cursed viciously. Horrible images of charred cities, burned flesh, ghouls, filled his mind-the images of what had been left in the wake of the Great War. Never again, his Follower instructors had always told him. We must make sure this never happens again... What the hell is wrong with humanity anyway? The Marked Men watched silently from the walls, living reminders of what the consequences of failure would be. "Goddamn it, Samara, there has to be something- Can you abort the countdown somehow?"
Again, she shook her head. "Abort code's been overridden. Ulysses didn't want anybody interrupting this launch." Her cool dispassion was maddening to him. "I can't hack this, it's beyond my skill. I might be able to change the target, but I can't cancel it."
Frantic, Arcade cast about wildly. His eyes fell on the little bot, still hovering behind Samara's head. "The eye-bot. Can the eyebot do it? It hacked the door earlier-"
Samara glanced up at the bot. "ED-E?" The bot whistled. Arcade flinched; his nerves were so overstressed that the whistle ground on him like broken glass.
"He says he can do it but it'll cause him to overload."
"Well, have him do it then!"
Samara was silent. The klaxons blared in the background.
Arcade stared at her, feeling a touch of unease. "Samara?"
Still, she said nothing. Again, the contours of the stranger were beginning to surface in her face, alien planes and angles coming to the fore in the dull lighting. The unease was blossoming in Arcade's chest.
"Samara, what are you waiting for? Tell the bot-"
Her jaw tightened. "I'm not sacrificing ED-E."
A horrible dread filled him, raising the hair on the back of his neck, turning his gut to ice. "What do you mean you're not sacrificing ED-E? Samara, you have to! Don't you understand-"
She was already tapping at the console, her face set in iron, unfamiliar lines. "The Legion has this coming."
The Legion- Arcade felt as if he had been punched in the gut. His legs felt shaky, his limbs weak as water. She's going to- "You-you can't be serious," he breathed.
"This is a chance to strike a knock-out blow against the Legion. I'm not going to waste it." The dull emergency lighting painted her features with lurid colors.
A tide of black horror was seeping into Arcade's chest. He barely heard the words he was saying. "Samara, you can't- You don't know where that's going! You could kill hundreds of thousands-not just Legionaries-there could be women-children-"
"The women will be better off dead. Boone would agree with me," she said coolly. "And the children will just grow up to be Legionaries themselves and continue the cycle." A snarl leapt across her teeth. "Better to end it here and now."
That black horror had closed over Arcade's head completely. He couldn't believe what he was hearing; it was almost as if the words didn't make sense. Never again, the Followers said-never again- "No, I won't let you do this!" he cried. Without thinking, he reached for Samara's arm, meaning to pull her away from the console-
Wham! Something impacted hard into the back of his head, hard enough to stun him. He realized he was lying on his back on the grated floor of the platform; Samara had flung him away with force enough to throw him down. He struggled to get up, meaning to take her down by force if he had to-if I can-when he heard a click. His eyes focused on the open barrel of a pistol.
General Retslaf's pistol. It was the same 10mm pistol that Samara had retrieved in the Hopeville Missile Defense station, what felt like a lifetime ago. Without taking her eyes off the console, she had aimed it directly at him.
Arcade felt as if his body had been turned to ice. A frozen numbness seemed to pervade him; a sense of distance, of unreality. The end of the gun barrel seemed as large and dark as a train tunnel. She wouldn't, he tried to tell himself, as he had in Ashton Missile Silo. She wouldn't actually... But the granite lines of her face, seen in profile as she worked the console, told a different truth. At that moment, there was no doubt in his mind that if he moved so much as an inch, she would pull the trigger without a second thought-or even a first one.
Get up. Get up! he shouted at himself. You've still got your Ripper-get up, do something- It was useless. He might as well have been paralyzed for all the good it did. He could only watch as Samara tapped at the console, inputting the final destination codes. The ground began to shake under him, and roaring filled the world. A blast of superheated air washed over him, but he could not take his eyes from the end of the gun barrel as the missile roared up into the sky, carrying the deaths of millions with it.
"Dea!" the cry rolled from the throats of the Marked Men watching. "Ave, Dea!"
Samara paid the acclaims no heed. She stowed the gun inside her armor, then turned and strode toward Arcade, her face as grim as death. Alarms were howling, and explosions were rocking the launch bay, shaking the floor under them and billowing smoke into the air. That strange paralysis still held him; he could not resist as she gripped his arm and hauled him to his feet. She dragged him along with her as if carrying a piece of baggage as she strode toward the lift, and Arcade was so discombobulated he simply allowed her to. He was numb inside, frozen, almost shell-shocked.
Blade met her at the door. He stepped into her path and held her weapons out to her, the ones she had discarded in her final charge at Ulysses. "Dea," he said, in that horrible, rasping voice. "Cou...ri...er. Killer...of...Ulysses. Here. Yours."
She spared him a glance as she took her weapons from him; then shook her head and shoved Arcade ahead of her into the lift. The doors slid closed, and the lift began to rise, carrying them away from the missile silo, and the Divide.
[*]
The sky was a faded blue, instead of a murky reddish brown; it arched above them like a dome filled with clear water. Wisps of clouds drifted past, and the sun cast clean, warm rays over it all. Before them, a cracked, dry land with tufts of grass waving here and there sloped gently away from them, down a long run to a flat, level plain; farther beyond were the low, dark brown shapes of mountains, rendered small by distance. To their backs were more mountains forming an almost solid wall; the only gap in the wall was gated with old cars and corrugated metal, a jumble that would have to be carefully threaded to reach the passage on the other side.
A footlocker lay at their feet. Still further off, even beyond the far mountains, was the looming smoke from what remained of a mushroom cloud.
Arcade crossed his arms over his chest. His whole body was aching from tension. The rasping voice of Ulysses drifted from off to his right:
"...message is this: the destruction that has been wrought in the Divide-or elsewhere if you couldn't stop me-it can happen again. It will keep happening. If war doesn't change, men must change, and so must their symbols. Even if it is nothing at all, know what you follow, Courier-just as I followed you, to the end. Whatever your symbol, carry it on your back-and wear it proudly-when you stand at Hoover Dam. [/click.]"
Samara hissed through her teeth. "Even in death, this guy can't shut up."
She closed her gauntlet, crushing the holotape that held Ulysses's final message to fragments. Then she turned to the other items Ulysses had left for her in the foot locker-a replica of his eagle-headed staff, and a duster, similar to his own, with the NCR's two-headed bear on the back of it-and busied herself with settling them for travel. It was just the two of them standing there; the eyebot had taken off the moment they had gotten out of the base. Now or never.
Swallowing down nervousness, Arcade turned to her and spoke the words he had decided on during the long trip back from the Divide-possibly even earlier, at the top of the Ashton missile silo. "Samara, I'm leaving."
She stopped. Her head lifted and her pale eyes stared at him.
"I'm going back to the Followers' outpost at Freeside. It's where I belong. I never should have left in the first place. I don't know what I was thinking."
He swallowed again, and braced himself, waiting for the explosion. It never came. Samara's face might have been carved from stone; perhaps her eyes tightened a bit, and a muscle quivered along her jawline, but that was all.
"Your choice," was all she said. Sliding the staff into place at her back, she turned away and started off, striding away down the long, grassy slope.
Arcade stared after her, somewhat unbelieving. That's it? Really? A strange, prickly sensation welled up inside him, not unlike hurt; his arms tightened a bit across his chest. "Don't try to stop me," he called after her, only half sardonically. "My mind's made up."
Samara did not so much as look back. Arcade stood, his arms wrapped around himself, gazing after her as her figure grew smaller and smaller in the distance.
[*]
"And then what happened?"
He pulled himself out of memory, to look at the girl-almost a young woman-sitting in front of him, listening eagerly. Jade, her name was, one of the many urchins rattling around Freeside: she was one of the students in the Followers' free school. She had come in for some medicine; her brother had one of the many wasting diseases all too common among Freesiders, and Arcade had been treating him for a while now. Jade had long black hair roughly pulled back and clear green eyes in a snub-nosed, brownish face; she showed the scrawniness typical of the Freeside gutter rats who managed to make it to some semblance of an adulthood, but unlike so many others, there was still a kind of innocence in her eyes.
Arcade shrugged, stretching his legs out in front of him, pushing back from his camp table. "What happened? Oh, about what you'd expect. She went back to Boone and they managed to patch things up, or so I heard; they killed Legion together, lots of Legion, just as Samara had promised. They fought together at Hoover Dam, and helped bring about the NCR's victory, ushering in this brave new world." He gestured around himself, a touch sardonically. "They helped out with the aftermath too, hunting down and eliminating remaining Legion squads. I used to see Samara around occasionally, and we spoke a few times; usually not much more than a couple words, though. Yeah..." He paused for a moment in thought. "The NCR tried to turn her into a hero-her and Boone both-but it was never a good fit for either of them. She sort of let them for a while, but it didn't last. I guess I knew it wouldn't, watching her." He remembered, the few times they'd spoken, how her eyes would gradually slip past him-past the walls of the Fort, the walls of Freeside-as if her immediate surroundings could not hold her interest, only to settle on the distant horizon. "Eventually she and Boone separated. Boone's still around here, so they say, protecting the caravan routes and the Long 15; don't know if you've heard the legends of the Ghost Sniper, but that's supposed to be him. As for the Courier-" Memory touched him; he pushed it back. "She just walked into the East one day and never came back. Maybe she found whatever it was she was looking for out there."
Those big green eyes watching him never blinked. Jade sighed in admiration. "I think the Courier was a hero."
Arcade raised one eyebrow. "Have you even heard a word I said? Samara was many things, but I would not call her a hero-"
"I would," Jade said firmly. "She went where other people wouldn't go and did what they couldn't do. If it weren't for her, the NCR wouldn't have won at Hoover Dam! She changed the world. That makes her a hero."
She gazed up at him, buck teeth showing in an eager grin, her green eyes bright and earnest. Arcade sighed.
"Shouldn't you be running along? Class starts in-" he checked his chronometer "-five minutes, and if you don't hurry up, you'll be late."
Jade jumped as if she'd been stung. "Oh, wow, you're right! Thanks, Dr. Gannon!" She leapt up from his footlocker where she'd been sitting and dashed out of his work tent as if a Deathclaw were after her. "See you next week!"
"Don't forget to take that medicine to your brother!" Arcade called after the skinny little brown figure. Jade waved one hand in acknowledgement, then disappeared among the other work tents. He gazed after her for a moment, thinking.
A hero...no. A symbol... Maybe.
With a quick shake, he pulled himself out of his thoughts. All right, that's enough time on memory lane. Back to work. He picked up his stylus, and turned again to the stack of patient files before him, marking and making notations as the sounds of Freeside drifted in from outside.
Finis.