Author's note: The song for this chapter is Lindsey Stirling - Moontrance.

All's Fair In Love and War

Harkness

"Shit!" I heard Elle curse softly as she surveyed the valley through the scope of her sniper rifle, Victory. "That is not good!"

"What?" I asked, not in the mood for any more hiccups in our plan. After two hour's hard push to get to the only viable pass through the mountains ahead of the trio of synths that were currently headed for a city full of people that I had vowed to protect, I wasn't prepared to deal with another wasteland related delay.

"My Pip-Boy says that our targets are almost here, but we won't be able to set up an ambush for them now. Take a look." She inched slowly back from the edge of the cliff and passed me the rifle.

"Damnit!" I breathed out a curse of my own when I got a good look at the valley myself. "Goddamned Talon Company base down there, crawling with those assholes!"

"Yeah," Elle whispered, "and our synths are heading right for it. As a matter of fact, look at them. They're prepping for a major movement. How much you want to bet that they've disguised themselves as fellow Talon Company and put forth a plan to get the rest of Talon Company to help them do their dirty work?"

"Not one bottlecap," I whispered back, "because I'm sure that's exactly what they did, and Talon Company's just the kind of assholes who would see the profit in taking over Rivet City, and fuck anyone who's got to die to achieve that goal."

"What now?" she asked. "We're armed for big game, but not quite that big."

I thought for a moment, then replied. "We whittle them down, one at a time, for now. Stop them cold before they get it together. We can't take on that entire force head on, but if we can cause them to stay inside their base, they won't be getting anywhere near Rivet City and we can deal with them on our timetable."

"Sounds like as good a plan as any," she said. "How shall we begin?"

I outlined a course of action for her that had us separating to opposite ends of the small valley. From there, we would each pick one target and snipe him, moving quickly to another position before the mercs down below could figure out where the fire was coming from, then repeat the process as long as the enemy was stupid enough to stay out in the open. Unfortunately, we would only be sniping from one side of the valley, having no way to sneak across it, and that would limit how many times we could pull this particular trick off. Eventually the enemy would wise up to which side of the valley we were on, and then we'd have to think of something else.

"Meet me back where we started in three hours," I ordered, and she nodded her assent, moving away with such stealth that I almost couldn't believe she was only nineteen and had spent most of her life in a vault.

Three hours later, we'd managed to remove a fair number of enemy soldiers from the equation, and they were starting to figure out that any man who ventured out in the open had a more than average chance of getting his head blown off. They'd been staying off the walls for a while, and were beginning to travel in groups if they had to move about the camp, higher level officers surrounded by lower level cannon fodder to protect them.

"Time for a new tactic," I whispered to Elle when we met up again. "Ideas?"

"Maybe. You see those two guys I shot off the wall down there, the ones who fell outside the wall?" She pointed down into the valley where two bodies were lying on the ground outside the fortifications.

"Yeah," I replied. "Where are you going with this?"

"I brought one Stealth Boy with me, in case we needed it, but those things are damned bulky, so I couldn't bring more than one," she said. "We need to get inside that camp and do some more damage up close and personal, so I could use my Stealth Boy to sneak down there and steal the uniforms off those bodies. When I've got the uniforms, we chunk a whole bunch of frag grenades into the camp, making it really obvious where they came from. They'll have to send a patrol to check it out, and we'll have some traps waiting for them. Then, in the chaos, we climb down and come in through the pass, all dressed up in Talon Company uniforms, and claim we were sent from some other patrol with supplies. We walk right through the front gate like we belong, and if we don't act suspicious, no one will suspect a thing."

"I'd prefer not to get that close to the action," I grumbled, "but I don't think we're going to have a choice. How are we going to get you past the guards though? There's a contract on your head, remember, and I'm sure they all know what you look like."

"Thought of that too," she said smugly. "Use your shirt to bandage my head and face, like I've been really badly burned, and tell everyone that we were off hunting me and that I got flamed in the face when we cornered me." She took the knife out of her boot and reached up to cut a few small locks of hair from the nape of her neck, wrapping them in a cloth when she was done. "Show them this, and tell them that's all that's left of me after we were done. No one else in the Capital Wasteland's got hair that color, so they'll think you're telling the truth, and once we're in, as long as we act like we're on very important business, no one will bother us. We'll make it real public when we're headed in, act like it's just dumb luck that we stumbled in here, and the force that's been pinning them down is everywhere."

I rolled my eyes. "I think you've watched too many war movies, but it'll have to do. If we let this go too long, they'll head for Rivet City en masse, and then there'll be nothing we can do to stop them."

It took us a while to lay some mines and set up a clever trap to annihilate whatever unlucky patrol was sent out to find us, but a couple of trip wires and a bunch of frag grenades later, I was reasonably certain that it would cause a small rockslide to crush whoever was under the overhanging rock at the time. The days were short this time of year, and the sky was darkening by the time Elle got back from her stealthy foray into the valley to loot the two bodies of their armor, which suited me just fine. The darker it was, the sneakier we could be, and the less chance of getting caught. I'd watched Elle sneak right up to the wall of the Talon Company base, heart in my throat the whole time that she would be spotted, but she managed to make it there and back within the duration of the Stealth Boy. Thanks to my augmented android vision, I was able to see through the concealing stealth field, and it was unnerving at best to watch Elle waltz up to the two dead soldiers, give the finger to the ones on the wall, then strip the dead ones of their armor when the others weren't looking, all under the noses of an entire base of Talon Company. I wanted to shake her for her bravado, but settled for giving her a stern look in the growing dusk as I helped her into the stolen armor and concealed her face with my shirt.

Contrary to every principle of Murphy's Law, things actually went according to Elle's wild plan. We managed to frag a large group of mercs with our grenade cluster, and I could hear the brass screaming for someone to go check it out. In the turmoil that followed, we climbed down the rocks and came in the same entrance to the pass that the rest of Talon Company had used earlier, sauntering up to the gate with a duffle bag full of explosives as if we hadn't a care in the world. I guided Elle along by the hand as if she was having trouble seeing, all the while giving silent thanks that the bulky, outsized set of armor completely camouflaged the fact that she was a woman. I'd never seen a woman in the ranks of the notoriously misogynistic mercs, and wasn't even sure if they took women as anything other than camp followers. I showed the gate guard the locks of purple hair and a copy of the contract for her life that Elle had saved off one of the many, many mercs who had come after her, and we exchanged manly noises about a job well done. Elle made an inarticulate noise under her makeshift bandages, which confused the guard, but was really just her smothering a laugh.

"Rookie here took a flamer straight to the face when we caught up with the bitch," I grunted, trying to look like I didn't care if the 'rookie' lived or died. "He's so hopped up on Med-X right now that he barely knows down from up. One thing's for sure, he won't be attracting any women any time soon." The guard shook his head and waved us forward, and I jerked on Elle's hand, propelling her through the gate.

"Come on, dumbass!" I growled in character. "If the doc manages to save your face, maybe you'll learn not to lead with it next time."

Elle made several more strangled noises beneath the shirt over her face, and I shoved her in front of me, acting like I was completely fed up with being saddled with such an idiot. Once we were out of sight of the gate guard, we quickened our steps, walking with a purpose as my old commander from my human memories used to say. I opened up the duffle bag and held it at my side as we walked, while Elle surreptitiously primed frag mines and tossed them in front of tents, on well-used paths through camp, anywhere she thought they would do the most damage. When we had made a complete circle of the camp and the duffle bag was much lighter, we made our way to the back gate, which was being guarded by one lone merc who looked like he was barely out of his teens. Elle snuck up behind him and slit his throat, calm as could be.

"Damn, girl!" I whispered. "That was cold."

"You do what you have to," she muttered, or at least that's what it sounded like. "The Capital Wasteland taught me that."

We hunkered down in the dark shadows by the back gate, and I used my amplified android strength to toss several frag grenades into the center of camp. They detonated with a thunderclap that could be heard throughout the whole camp, and pandemonium erupted. Men fleeing their tents were stepping on frag mines and having their legs blown off, people in various states of undress were running every which way, and I kept throwing frag grenades until the duffle was empty, turning mercs into fine red mist and creating an even bigger panic in the enclosed space.

Elle, meanwhile, was firing my plasma rifle with gleeful abandon into the crowd, more often than not dropping a guy in his tracks and leaving behind a glowing green puddle. Then the masses were upon us, and I waded into the fray, SMG in one hand, combat knife in the other, killing everyone in my path. I saw Elle sling the rifle over her shoulder, then draw her .44 magnum and her own knife, and join the brawl, but I lost sight of her as the swirling sea of humanity separated us. I lost count of how many men I killed, but it did eventually seem like their numbers were dwindling, and since I didn't stand out from the crowd, I hadn't taken any injury more serious than a thin knife slice along the ribs from a crazed merc who'd been swinging wildly and managed to hit me accidentally.

"It's her!" I looked around to find that Elle's fake bandages had been pulled off in the free-for-all, and her purple hair blazed like a beacon in the firelight, effectively alerting all present that they'd been infiltrated.

"That's right, assholes!" Elle crowed. "You can't touch me!" She danced away from the man who'd unmasked her, leaving him with a gaping wound in his throat. As much as I worried for her safety, since she apparently thought she was invincible, right now I was more worried about killing every man who came near me.

I don't know how much time had passed; it seemed like forever, but soon there was nothing but a few stragglers who hadn't figured out that they should have ganged up on us if they wanted to survive. I was picking off the last of the survivors when the assassins we had been tracking finally made their presence known. I'm not sure how I knew it was them without the aid of Elle's Pip-Boy, but there were three of them clustered together, and something about them just screamed that they were the ones we were here for. They converged on me silently, dropping their guns as one and squaring off as if they wanted to fight man to man. I aimed at one of them and fired several times into his chest, but he closed the distance and swatted my gun away.

"That isn't how this works," he said in a deadly quiet voice. "We will fight, you will lose, and we will grind your components into the ground until there is nothing left of you."

"Oh really?" I heard from near the wall, followed by the unmistakable report of Victory, and then the assassin's right eye exploded, along with half of his head. He crumpled in a heap at my feet, looking for all the world like a real human being, but I could see the circuits sparking through the gaping hole in his head.

"Kill the female," one of remaining two ordered the other one, then launched himself at me before I could react, tackling me to the ground and pinning me momentarily. I was discovering that I was at a serious disadvantage when going into an unarmed fight against these androids. I had been just like them at one point, but had given up many of my augmentations when I went under the knife to become human; these three clearly still possessed what I lacked, and then some.

The assassin and I grappled for dominance, rolling about on the dusty, blood soaked ground, when I looked over and saw that Elle was about to be in serious trouble. She had dropped her rifle and turned her back to deal with one last surviving Talon Company merc. It was clear that she'd finally let her temper get the better of her, and I could hear her angry words as she stabbed the man repeatedly with her boot knife.

"That's for Fort Bannister, that's for Arlington Library, that's for my armor, that's for almost blowing my boob off…!" She was so involved in making mincemeat of the man that she was completely oblivious to the android headed her way.

"Elle!" I screamed at the top of my lungs to get her attention, and she turned just as the assassin came up behind her. It grabbed her by the throat as she tilted her head to look at it, and effortlessly lifted her into the air.

"Human, female," it said in an emotionless voice. "Weak. I could kill you in two point five seconds."

"Yeah?!" she snarled breathlessly, gasping for air and struggling in the android's grip. "You're not so tough! I killed your friend."

She made a choking sound as it tightened its grasp and shook her by the neck, and I saw red. Summoning every ounce of artificial strength I possessed, I grabbed the one I was grappling with by the face, gouging my thumbs into its eye sockets and blinding it long enough that I could roll it over and bash its head repeatedly on a handy rock until it stopped moving. I came off the ground in a blur, palming my knife as I went, and putting on a burst of inhuman speed, I sprinted toward the android that held Elle captive. I didn't think it was possible to surprise one of my kind, what with our reflexes, but he was just barely starting to turn as I jammed the blade of my knife into the base of his skull, severing the control cluster. His hand twitched spasmodically, dumping Elle unceremoniously onto the ground, then collapsed into the dirt.

"Elle!" I ran to her and crouched down beside her to examine her. She was rubbing her throat, and I could see a set of livid bruises already beginning to form around her neck. "Are you okay? Did he break anything?" I handed her my canteen and felt her neck for anything out of place.

"Just my ass, it feels like," she grumbled in a scratchy voice after downing the entire contents of the canteen. "Though I thought for sure it was gonna be my neck. Are they dead?"

"I'll make extra sure before we leave." I swept her up in a tight hug. "What the hell were you thinking? You're not untouchable, you know?"

"I wasn't, really," she replied. "I just knew that if I was gonna go out, I wanted to have the last word."

"You have to be more careful," I pleaded with her. "Things won't always go your way."

"I'll try, Harkness," she said. "For now, let's finish these bastards off so we can go home. I'm really getting sick of camping."

I cut the control chips out of all three assassins and burned the bodies just to be sure they were truly dead. Elle made sure there were no survivors, looting everything she could carry as an afterthought, and when we were both finished with our grim tasks, we converged at the front gate of the now empty encampment.

"I fucking hate Talon Company!" Elle sneered, spitting on the ground just outside the gate. "Good riddance!"

I laughed at her vehemence. "Let's get out of here before life decides to throw anything else at us."