"Anyone feel like climbing?" Butch asked with profound sarcasm. The assembled wastelanders stood at the edge of the massive canyon. You could have fit all of Zion National Park into this scar on the face of the planet and it would hardly have touched the sides.
The Wanderer had edged closer to the lip of the precipice than anyone else had felt comfortable doing and was aiming his AER16 into the canyon to let the attached rangefinder give him a rough idea of how deep it actually was. Some two-hundred feet up the canyon lip, Boone was doing the same from another elevated perch at a spot where the forest of stone pillars and the edge of the canyon coincided.
He had his rifle locked into his shoulder and was pointing it down at as low an angle as he could manage without brushing the lip of the drop with the rangefinder's beam.
The NCR First Recon sniper hadn't felt brave enough to advance as close as the Wanderer, further up the canyon, had. So he took his reading at an angle and left his sharpshooter's mind, so practised at the calculation of angles and trajectories and arcs do the rest.
He scribbled in his dope book with a short, stubby pencil, his mouth moving underneath his helmet.
"Two miles deep," he finally concluded as he closed his tiny DOPE notebook and tucked the pencil and it into a belt pouch.
"Between two-thousand and eighty-seven metres and two-thousand and sixty-five, variable by point of measurement," the Wanderer amended with little feeling, his positronic brain calculating the distance down to the centimetre but scaling it back for ease of communication.
Boone huffed and continued scanning the floor of the valley for targets, but mostly to look at the distant twinkling lights. "Cheater," the sniper muttered to himself.
The two groups were clustered together in two separate places along the canyon lip, sometimes staring into the valley below, sometimes tapping on their Pip-Boy screens to read the results of the scans that Smiles had sent them.
Joshua, Ulysses and the Courier were standing in a line, closer to the lip than most of the others, not as close as the Wanderer.
"Did wind cut this as well, Matriarch?" Ulysses asked, blandly, his arms crossed over his chest rig, duster flapping in the air currents that formed this close to the edge. His mark was a splash of colour in the uniformly rust red surroundings.
The Matriarch didn't respond, too engrossed to pay much attention.
The Courier snorted and elbowed Joshua in the ribs, "Hey, Burned Man. Dare ye to jump."
Joshua's head creaked around towards his friend and even through the toughened, Matter Forged plating of the headgear, anyone could tell he was caught somewhere between amusement and irritation.
"I have already done something similar," he informed Six in an unreadable tone, "Might I dare you to set yourself on fire and toss yourself in? We can compare our experiences."
The sound of the Courier's laughter echoed through comms.
The good Matriarch T'Rali stood lent up against a convenient pillar, the same one that currently supported their sniper, while she hurriedly trawled through the data transmitted by Smiles and his circling Falcon.
More specifically, the material composition of the valley floor. She was so engrossed that even when a curious ED-E skittered up to the edge and peered far enough that the little bot toppled over with a warbling squeal, she ignored her surroundings in favour of the Pip-Boy.
ED-E reappeared a moment later, hovered back over the lip of the drop with a relieved warble. He returned to the safety of the Courier's shoulder, where his master absentmindedly played with his hooked, claw-like legs.
"Matriarch," Desmond rasped through comms, "Reading the output from the scans the flyboy took, now. I'll assume you've seen the relevant detail that has me curious."
"Yes," she agreed as her mind cycled through a hundred possibilities and kept on arriving at the same likelihood, "I'm seeing it. I think I know what is causing those lights down there."
There was a moment, an elongated pause where everyone listening in on comms awaited the conclusion with bated breath.
"Well honey," Clover purred in her always silken, always deceptively inviting voice, "Don't leave us in suspense. I'm sure we're all dying to know."
The human woman punctuated the word 'dying' by bending over at her shapely waist as deeply as her form-fitting combat rig would allow and scooping up a stone that she then proceeded to throw out into the canyon. It soundlessly plummeted towards the floor.
"It's a reflection," Desmond said from nearby the curious former-slave.
"Reflection from what?" Jericho asked, getting a bit impatient with the dramatic pauses.
"Glass," Lantaya finally gave a simple, concise answer. "It's light reflecting off of large deposits of glass."
"If you all want a closer look I can swing my baby around and give you all a lift to the bottom!" Augustine Smiles offered them hopefully.
Ulysses turned back from the edge and turned his head towards the small group of figures he could see further down the edge of the canyon.
"King of Snakes. Asked if wished climbing the face of this cliff. Wind plucking the flag upon my back and death waiting below, as Death awaited on the day the Bull set the Burned Man alight. Tossed him into legend."
He took a breath.
"Answer is yes. Wish to climb."
Butch belly-laughed so hard that Jericho had to pull his oftentimes-boss away from the edge, which cut off the laughter before it could really get going.
"Well, you don't need to get poetical about it," an aggrieved Smiles protested over the comms.
"If we try climbin' this feckin' bastard," the Courier spoke up as he kicked a wave of red sand over the edge with his boot, "We'll still be doin' it when the sun goes down an' the engineers are done extractin' matter fer the forges. An' that's if our hands don't get tired halfway down, see? Then we're just scrambled Deathclaw eggs."
Ulysses sighed, deeply.
"Must we place lives in the hands of madmen? What future is there for History to remember if it is written like this?"
"Don't be like that, you big pussy!" Smiles rasped like sandpaper as he brought the Falcon around and back towards the ground team, "I've never had a crash that I couldn't walk away from! Even my worst only cracked open the plane's reactor and made all my skin start falling off!"
Ulysses turned his helmet towards Six. Silently imploring.
"Shite, he's right. Yer bein' a pussy, lad. Get in the damn Falcon. Ye won't regret it, see? But halfway down that cliff-face, you'd be regrettin' doin' otherwise."
Ulysses got on the Falcon.
By the time they reached the floor of the Valley after a dizzying series of corkscrews during the course of the almost ninety-degree dive straight down the cliff-face, they were all regretting not having broken out the ropes and climbing pegs.
They hadn't bothered to pressurise the back of the dropship and when the loading ramp came down, they beat their previous record for disembarking and setting up perimeter. Ulysses fell to his knees in the sand and drove his hands deep into the rust red earth, pulling them out with fists full and streams of it falling between the fingers.
His arms had joined his legs in their efforts to do an impression of a hound dog on Elvis Night at the King's. His helmet turned towards the Courier, who was recovering from his brief period of hyperventilation.
"Blame lies at your feet, Courier Six. Will hold you to account for the evils you've done."
"Feck off."
Ulysses dropped the two streams of sand from his fists, letting the white knuckles concealed under his synth-muscle jumpsuit relax.
"You see that?" Smiles cried out over the comms in a triumphant yell, "Now, if I can pull off a manoeuvre like that and not crash, why are you all still acting like a bunch of pussies?"
Jericho, who had taken about as much as a man of his temperament could take in good humour, pulled his AEP10 laser pistol and went back towards the loading ramp and the cockpit access hatch in the back of the compartment.
Wisely, Smiles made the decision to lift off.
The yellow smiley-face emblazoned on the belly of the craft gave them a parting grin as Jericho involuntarily held up an arm to shield his face from the buffeting sand. The loading hatch began to close as it rocketed away.
"I'll come back when you're in a better mood!" The alarmed pilot informed them as the Falcon hit supersonic speeds with a loud boom.
"If I see you flying the ship for pickup," Jericho yelled into comms, "I'll gut you, you crazy fucking zombie!"
"Will hold him down for your knife," Ulysses offered.
But Ulysses momentarily distracted by a shimmer at his feet, an area that he was becoming particularly well-acquainted with due to his being on his knees in the coarse red sand.
It was a patch of smooth, almost gemlike ruby stone, strewn with red sand and peeking up through it like the head of a curious molerat.
He reached out as everyone around him collected themselves, feelings of vertigo momentarily forgotten. With hands now steady, he brushed away the sand from on top of the formation. It was a rich crimson, sinking down into the uppermost layer of grit. He began digging around it, trying to uncover the full extent of the marvel, but the deeper he dug, the larger it became, until he realised that the stone was the size of a small boulder.
"Have you found something, Ulysses?"
Joshua Graham strode up beside him and knelt, the barrel of his weapon protruding from over the top of his right shoulder. He stilled when he saw what Ulysses had already partially excavated. Digging his own fingers into the sand, he probed the extent of the giant hunk of glass, until he too understood the extent of its size.
"The wonders of creation."
"The land bleeds, wash with dried blood. Here, the wound scabs, dries and hardens into stone," Ulysses proclaimed. He looked about himself, sharp eyes picking out an increasing number of crimson red chunks protruding from the sand, red stone camouflaged by a background of red sand.
"Something made this world bleed. What could cut the land so deep? Have Giants waded this far across the Endless Black?"
The other wastelanders slowly realised that their companions had made a discovery and slowly crowded around to get a closer look.
Boone and Charon alone stayed circling the perimeter with weapons at the ready. Though even they glanced towards the occasional chunk of crimson stone and zoomed in with their helmet optics, before returning their attention to the world around them.
The Courier was edged aside as Lantaya and Desmond pushed through the press, ED-E warbling on his shoulder.
Ulysses remained kneeling by the stone, but looked up and behind him at the two most likely to know what this strange phenomenon was.
Lantaya knelt beside him and tapped the crimson surface with a knuckle, experimentally.
"Largest impactite I've ever seen," Desmond comments cooly, circling around to the other side and examining it from a new perspective. He flicked his Pip-Boy screen to active and began tapping keys on the touchscreen's surface, looking between it and the crimson rock alternately.
"The same," Lani replied, before looking around them at the massive walls of the canyon, rising up on either side of the valley like towering tsunamis on the horizon. "Which makes the location and context profoundly troubling."
Before Jericho could let out another exclamation about everyone being so damn cryptic for no good reason, an ethereal voice interrupted their contemplations.
"Courier, Augustine has told me that a few of your ground team threatened to gut him if he returned to retrieve you from the planet's surface."
The Courier sighed and keyed his comms, "Aye, that we did, Jason. 'Ave ye got a spare pilot? I don't think I'll be able to stop from joinin' them if I see that fuckin' smiley-face one more time."
There was a pause.
"I understand, Six. Smiles can be difficult. I suspect a more… stable man might not have joined us upon the Great Journey. He seems to delight in danger. A predilection that made him invaluable as the pilot of one of our rockets. I will send down Francine for your extraction, instead."
Privately, the Courier ducked out of the press and keyed his comms to single channel.
"Nah, don't do that. First fuckin' time I've ever seen Uly scared for his skin. Send the crazy fecker down, just tell 'im not to leave the cockpit door unsealed, right?"
"I'm not sure that would be wise…"
"Gotta go, Bright. Remember, send 'im down. If he's as much o' a bloody adrenaline junkie as that, he won't be able to resist, see?"
The Courier closed the channel and ambled back into the press, his helmet and thick beard conspiring to conceal the cheeky grin on his lips. Lani and Desmond was now part of the way through the explanation which Jericho, and indeed everyone, had been eager to receive.
"…. Is usually the result of an asteroid impact on the surface of a planet. The stone and soil around the carter becomes superheated and fused together in amalgamations of melted stone. But, in the event that an impact occurs in a sandy region, you get debris like this."
She slapped the side of the crimson chunk of glass with the flat of her hand.
"A giant chunk of glass."
"You get glass from big ass rocks hitting planets?" Butch asked incredulously, "What are people going to make windows out of when they run out of that shit?"
They all looked at him. He returned the gaze. It was difficult to say whether he was genuinely in earnest or not. Judging from his stance and body language, he had been serious.
"Butch," Lantaya said gently, "Just because you can get glass from asteroid impacts, does not mean all glass is a result of an asteroid impact. You can make glass by melting sand in a hot fire."
The leader of the Tunnel Snakes cocked his head to the side like a puppy, "Shit, really? Melted sand, huh?"
Oblivious to the looks he was receiving; he tapped the stock of his rifle in a random rhythm. "That's pretty cool. Learn something new every day."
The Wanderer glanced around them, expressionless helmet likely concealing an equally expressionless face. The processes of his positronic brain seemed to be unusually occupied with the valley walls and the long expanse of the valley floor.
His black eyes, beneath the helmet, twirled inside the metal sockets inset into his skull.
"So, It's a space rock?" Jericho said, automatically reaching up to scratch his scraggy beard then taking his hand away as he realised it was buried underneath the armoured helmet, "Why not just say that, huh? This rock got hit by an asteroid and left a lot of shiny rocks lying around. Ain't got nothing to do with spirits or bleeding planets or the fucking glory of god's creation. It's just a stupid space rock."
Three sets of eyes narrowed in Jericho's direction, but let it slide. It wasn't as if sceptics were an unknown quantity to them.
"Give the man a prize," Desmond snarked in amusement at the shot fired across the boughs of the Three Unwise Men, "But, this wasn't caused by an asteroid impact. Asteroids typically get pulled in by the gravity well of a planet and fall directly onto the surface of a world. They leave a wide, circular crater. Bowl shaped."
For the first time, all assembled took a look around them and saw the massive canyon in an entirely new light. Previously, it was the product of an entirely natural series of geological movements. Now, the context had changed…
"The formation we are seeing here is a glancing blow. Which means that the object that impacted was travelling at a fast enough rate to carve a trench across the surface and skip off back into space."
"This is the impact scar from a weapon," The Wanderer spoke up as his internal processes spat out the answer to his calculations.
Lantaya nodded, "Exactly. A purposefully accelerated mass accelerator round is the only thing I can think of that would cut a trench this long and this deep and then still retain enough speed to skip back out into space."
"Who's to say it skipped out?" Desmond asked, "It could be buried at one end of the canyon, under several bloody tons of displaced rock."
The former intelligence agent nudged the impactite with his boot to punctuate the point.
"Then someone must have really wanted to teach someone else on this planet a lesson," Clover said with a hint of amusement.
"No," the Wanderer disagreed as he returned his attention to the rock, "If shelling a stationary target on the surface of the planet was the objective, the round would have been fired straight down to minimise intervening ground cover. Whatever this projectile was fired at, this planet was not it. This was likely a stray round."
Lantaya considered this and had to admit that it was a reasonable theory. She had been relatively concerned that this had constituted proof of a deliberate shelling from orbit by an alien race, but if it had been an unfortunate accident, it was a good deal less concerning.
Combined with the apparent age of the trench, it was unlikely that there was a race of aliens running around who would destroy an entire world to destroy a valuable ground target.
… present company excepted, of course.
"Talk about unlucky. I've caught rounds meant for someone else before," Jericho chuckled at the prospect as Clover shuffled closer to the Wanderer and inserted herself further into his personal space, "But this is some serious firepower. Like being hit by a stray mini nuke. Hate to have been standing on the surface when this came through. Was this what turned this shithole into a shithole to begin with?"
"Yeah," Butch added as the idea caught in the back of his mind, "Like what killed off all the dinosaurs?"
He received another barrage of looks.
"You know what happened to the dinosaurs, but not how glass is made?" Raul rasped in an amused voice.
"Sure. Dinosaurs are cool, man. I remember Mister Brotch teaching us about those things. He even had pictures. I liked the brontosaurus. They were fucking huge man, ya know? Shame they all had to die like that."
Everyone in a position to know what dinosaurs were, nodded in agreement.
Dinosaurs were pretty baller.
"What the hell are… dinosaurs?" Clover asked from her spot, leaned up against her former Master.
"Big lizards. Kinda like a Deathclaw," Charon rasped.
"Shit. Good riddance I say," Clover said dismissively.
"Made of plaster and wooden boards," Boone added.
"Were not!" Butch shot back.
"They were," Boone said in his soft yet cool voice, "Had one as a sniper's perch back in Novac."
"You had a sniper's perch inside a dinosaur?" Butch asked, impressed despite suspecting that it wasn't a real dinosaur in question, "I want to shoot a gun from inside a giant dinosaur…"
"Back on topic, please," Lantaya said with an aggrieved tone, only slightly assuaged by the surprise of hearing Charon talk for the first time in several weeks. And on such a bizarre topic to boot.
She glanced at the Courier and gestured to the crimson glass with an open hand, "Is this what your spirits wanted us to see? An impact trench from a mass accelerator?"
Privately, now that the significance of the place had been quantified as a benign case of misdirected fire, a lot of the mystique that the Courier's odd behaviour had provoked on the Zeta was dispelled.
So what if he said he saw a sea of blood in his dream and a road filled with twinkling stars and this turned out to be the case in reality?
The long-range sensors aboard Zeta might not have been functioning due to the background solar radiation, but the viewports in Observation or elsewhere would have been capable of providing him with a view of the surface. And the impact trench was more than visible from orbit. All of this might have been some of the shrewd theatre that the Courier seemed so fond of, nothing more than a pretence to cultivate his image.
The Courier returned her gaze behind the impassive mask of his helmet, protruding and bulbous forehead with slanted surfaces, making him look like a being with eyes twice the normal size.
If such a being had eyes at all.
He brushed aside his hanging duster in a casual gesture, clearing enough space to hook his thumb into the belt-loops of the pants he wore over the synth-muscle suit, and below the harnessing and armoured plating that covered his torso.
It revealed the glint of a Legion Denarius he had welded onto the surface of his armoured carapace, the head of Caesar displayed face-up. He had defaced it with a sharp implement, carving a rough line through the visage.
A statement of achievement. A boast. Very like the Courier.
Something not her own brushed against the back of her mind, requesting entrance. Another memory?
So far from the wastelands and the many triggers that prompted the memories to surface, it had been some time since her last.
"So, we taking the fancy space rock with us?" Jericho slapped his armoured hands together and ambled forwards, limping slightly from his painful muscle grafts, "Fuckin' thing is the size of boulder. I know half-a-dozen merchants in the wastes who'd pay caps for this. Sell it cheap and they'll crack it open and sell it on as gemstone. Turn a tidy profit."
"Hell, yeah Jericho. Now you're thinking," Clover said as she darted away from the Wanderer's side with slight reluctance and slid into the depression cut by their earlier digging, "You dig one side, I'll get the other. Let's see just how girthy big boy here turns out to be."
T'Rali stood up and backed away to give them room to work, casting mental tendrils into the depths of her brain and dragging the memory forwards and into the light of her conscious mind. Her eyes flicked back and forth as the sand seemed to wash across her vision, coating her visor and blocking it out.
The last thing she say was the Wanderer, as utterly still and devoid of emotion from the sudden absence of lithe and willing former slave-girl pressed up against him as he had been by her advances, continued to calculate internally.
Under Omega Protocols, she thought, what he had in mind was almost certainly combat related.
The sand washed away from her visor in a hail of rust red clumps, revealing a vision of greenery.
An old man stood with a dead body's hair bunched in his fist, head hauled back and a waiting knife at a point just above the jugular. A boy, how old she could not tell as she was still only passingly familiar with how quickly humans aged, knelt in front of the corpse.
His bright grey eyes, fixed on the almost identical eyes of the old man, told her who both of them were.
The boy was the Courier, younger that she had ever seen before in these memories. The old man was his father, the man who he would someday kill in cold blood and cannibalise at his father's request.
She hadn't gotten around to asking the Courier about this, she remembered. Because how did you broach such a topic?
Lantaya shifted her weight and for the first time, realised that her mind had integrated the Courier's memories well enough for her to be embodied inside the vision. It reminded her of the Nightmare…. Or the Dream. It seemed real. Almost convincingly so. She stepped cautiously forwards as the Courier's father began talking.
He did so in the strange, lyrical language of the Courier's people. In Irish.
Or, at least, a version of it that had been bent and twisted by centuries of linguistic evolution in the post-apocalypse.
"Are you ready, boy?"
The young Courier nodded, eagerly. His hands, soaked in blood, fisted themselves in the leaf-strewn ground. His own clothes were damp in patches from the blood, rapidly drying in the temperate air. Looking up, she saw the sky was clear blue and filled with lazily drifting clouds.
The knife jabbed once, quick and clean into the side of the neck. A surge of blood issues forth, trickling down the side of the dead man's flesh. The Courier rose up and locked his lips around the wound, sucking on it like a calf suckling a Brahmin's teat. He breathed out and in through his nose in loud rushes of air, his small chest expanding and contracting as the liquid flowed down his throat and into him, filling him up with the lifeblood of the slain.
Lantaya circled around the boy, looking down at the juvenile version of the alien man she knew and cataloguing the differences between the two.
Predictably, nowhere near as huge, nor as tough or grizzled.
The boy lacked the confidence she had come to associate with him, the air of restrained animalistic fury, the knowing glance that made her rebellious heart believe that he truly did know of things beyond mortal comprehension.
This boy looked fragile, possessed of a painfully evident eagerness to please.
Intellectually, she knew that she shouldn't be surprised. But she was, nevertheless.
Leaning in, she realised that the patches of blood on his clothes were not just from the dead man. Some were clearly his own, oozing from gashes in his side and upon his arms.
Defensive wounds, such as those she had seen on Huntresses training with the short blades that were so symbolic of their profession. And on the dead killed by Legion soldiers at Fort Defiance.
They were rapidly closing up as the Courier's peculiar biology converted the human blood he ingested into a fast-acting coagulant and healing elixir.
The Father pulled the body back, making the back of the arched corpse crunch slightly as he separated it from the lips of the boy. The Courier tried to follow it, still eager for more; his lips were stained crimson like a child who had found a stick of lipstick and had haphazardly tried some on.
"Enough, boy. Good, but enough. Better than how you treated the first one you killed."
The Courier's tongue snaked out and moistened his lips, trying to suck up the red liquid that coated them. He curled his lips into his mouth and sucked, like a man who had just taken a bite out of a lemon. The wet sounds of fluid, saliva and blood, being swallowed down was audible in the silent field.
"Can I eat some, da?"
"Not yet, boy. Questions first."
The grey-haired man began sawing at the bodies ears, taking them off the skull near the very root of the appendage. More blood flowed, soaking the calloused fingers and the wooden hilt of the knife.
"Why do we hunt them? Why not deer or wild sheep?"
"Because the spirits tell us to," the young boy answered with the brevity and simplicity of youth. His mouth watered as he eyed the blood-soaked side of the dead man's head.
"Yes. But why?"
"Because eating other people makes us stronger."
The old man nodded again, flipping the body over and starting on the nose. Cartilage crunched against metal.
"You're avoiding telling the story, boy. Am I going to have to leave you alone with the Cailleach again? Maybe that old hag can teach you to remember our clan's history, aye?"
The boy's attention was pried away from the delectable feast in front of him and shot to his father. Cailleach echoed in Lantaya's ephemeral ears, bringing to mind the image of an old women with teethless gums and cackling laughter. So old that her skin was dried leather and her back was bowed under the weight of a burden that no-one could see.
After all, you couldn't see time pass. The weight she bore was likewise invisible.
"No, da! I know the story, I know it!"
"Then speak. Why do we hunt people? Why not a deer?"
"Because deer are prey. They are weak. We become what we eat, take in strength through the blood and the flesh."
The Courier's youthful voice stumbled through the words, obviously recalled and repeated from some lesson taught to him long ago. Or, long ago for him, Lani thought. Even a week is a long time when you're still that young.
"Good. We eat what we can, but meat that eats meat is best. And why am I taking his ears and nose? Why the teeth?"
"Ears and nose for hearing and smelling. Teeth is for trophies! Take some of the dead to show we hunt well."
The boy crawled over and pulled a hastily-cleaned knife from a fold in his clothing, setting it on the ground before pulling apart the bloody clothes the man had died in and exposing the hairy expanse of underfed chest, reduced to muscle and not much more by privation.
The last of the teeth clinked into a wide patch of skin that the older man had expertly cut free from the body's back and tied into the rough shape of a pouch with platted hair taken from the scalp.
"You killed him, boy. I'll string these teeth for you and you can wear them with pride. Soon, you will be a man. And you can hunt on your own."
Lantaya watched the solemn yet pleased expression blossom over the young Courier's face, like the sun peeking through an overcast sky.
"Now," the older man said as he held the large knife out to the boy and pointed towards the body, "We have the ears and the nose. One last thing and we'll have the offering for the spirits."
The boy took the knife, holding the handle in both hands as it was sized for a larger person than he. He would grow into it, however. Lantaya knew this. The Courier had grown even taller than the man who spawned him, in the end.
She imagined that it made killing him all the easier.
"The eyes. You take them, then we make the offering."
"What about the heart, da?"
"Cut it out after. It ain't going anywhere. You can have some later."
Obediently, the boy began forcing is tiny fingers between the wall of the socket and the eye, popping them out like the contents of a zit. He raised then gently, just enough so he could cut the cord connecting them back into the skull with the knife.
It was done with infinite care and attention, so as to not burst the delicate eyes. They were offerings. They needed to be treated with respect.
The old man stood over the work, arms crossed and bloody digits tapping his forearm. He seemed to still.
Then he turned and looked directly at the Matriarch. His grey eyes seemed to meet hers.
Lani stilled as a chill ran up her spine and her fringe suddenly felt feverish.
"You don't belong here."
She immediately looked back over her shoulder, looking for the person he spoke to in the memory. But there was no-one there.
She turned back around and flinched backwards as he loomed close in her field of view, lips curled in a snarl and strong, weather-beaten hands reaching for her throat. His mouth opened wide and the voice roared.
"YOU DON'T BELONG HERE!"
Lantaya jerked back and came back into herself. She stood with arms held protectively up to break the lock that the illusion of her own imaginings had been about to set about her neck. Everyone was still gathered around the chunk of blood red impactite, watching as Clover and Jericho excavated around in.
They had made some progress.
No-one seemed to have noticed her odd gesture. She turned it into a gear-check, covering her feelings of unease through diligence. Internally, she grappled with the unknown, attempting to quantify it. This was the first time that a part of the Courier's memory had seen and interacted with her.
Something that shouldn't be possible. Memories were the past, already done. At the same time, memories were part of the mind. Was her unconscious mind rebelling against the foreign memories? Were the foreign memories rebelling against her?
All plausible options.
She turned her gaze to see the Courier. His helmet was turned towards her as if he knew what had just gone through her mind. His fingers were idly playing with a leather cord he had extracted from his belt pouches. It was strung with claws, teeth, fangs, and stingers of various sizes and shapes.
Some of them were unmistakably human, all were from predators. The Courier's trophies. She was certain that he had many such bands, than he had constructed one after another after another.
Though, she couldn't remember ever seeing him extract them. Or make a point of cutting off ears, eyes or noses.
Then again, he had never butchered a body in front of her.
Suddenly, the Courier went still. He cocked his helmet to the side, as if listening. Lani, almost involuntarily, copied his stance. He was sensing something, with his curiously heightened awareness of his surroundings. She recognised the look, the tenseness of his body and the wary set to his shoulders.
"Think I can get my hands underneath it," Jericho said as he motioned for Clover to get out of the hole in order to prevent her legs from being caught underneath the chunk of glass when he shifted it. He flexed his legs, the synth-muscle suit contracting around his body within like an extension to his own body.
The signals from his brain crackled along the shunt installed into his spinal column at the base of his neck and into the suit itself, making the suit respond to his whim along with the rest of his unnaturally enhanced musculature. They heard him grunt as he got his fingers hooked underneath the edge of the stone and lifted.
"Remember to use your biotics," Lantaya commanded in her teacher's tone of voice, the same one that she had been using on Jericho and Toshiro for the brief time they had been training to use the enhancements that the advanced Universal Neural Link made possible, with the small nodes of Eezo built into the suit's structure.
"Fucking know that" Jericho grunted, before levering the stone out with a rush of dislodged sand and flipping it up onto the solid ground above the hole.
He pushed it away from the lip and climbed out, grasping the side and throwing his leg up over the lip. "No need. Just a pebble and the suit can handle it. I'll use the biotics on something a little heavier than that."
"You need to practise," she reminded him, her attention flickering back to the Courier. He had knelt and was holding his hand to the ground, head still cocked to the side like a mongrel dog. Ulysses seemed to have picked up on the same disturbance that had caught his friend's attention or had noticed the Courier's curiosity and begun looking for the source.
He knelt and also laid his palm flat against the ground, before evidently finding that this was insufficient and laid the side of his helmet against the ground as if he intended to go to sleep.
"Do you both feel something?" Joshua enquired, his hand drifting to the rifle slung over his shoulder.
"Donna fuckin' know… feels like the Divide when the Tunneller's are fixin' on getting' frisky."
"Not just under the sand," Ulysses said with all the authority of a man who had spent a significantly longer time in the Divide, with its large underground warrens and collapsed boltholes, "Something overland this way comes."
"Could be the engineers up above," Jericho said as he gazed lovingly into the surface of his newly found treasure, the crimson impactite the size of Fawkes' torso, "They'll have gotten down to drilling, around about now."
"No, something burrows under the sand towards us. And something comes over the sand, rolling at speed, faster than Denver hounds at full loop… faster than a Deathclaw charging down its prey."
He removed his helmet from the ground and motioned them all away with an urgent appeal apparent in the jerking of his shoulder, "Go, hide among the rocks and sand. Cover our tracks. Best we see what comes before it sees us!"
The Courier and Ulysses turned and bolting for the boulders and scree at the very root of the cliffs on either side, Boone and Joshua following soon after with a professional, albeit hasty attempt at erasing the worst of the tracks they left in the ankle-deep sand.
ED-E rising straight up with a squeal of his sound emitters, rippling and fading from sight as the stealth generator cloaked his form.
Jericho and Clover cursed and were about to push the stone back into the hole when Clover, placed a hand on his shoulder and jumped down into the hole. "What the hell are you doing you crazy bitch?"
"Trust me, this'll be good. Fill in the hole on top of me!"
The raider cursed and eyed over his shoulder. Nothing was in sight, yet. He imagined that he saw a dusty smudge on the horizon, heralding the approach of something out of sight, coming across the bottom of the canyon at speed.
"Your fucking funeral! Charon, held me with this. Toshiro…?"
The Samurai and Desmond were gone, vanished just as quickly as ED-E. Perhaps even quicker, as nobody had seen them leave. Their tracks vanished into the rough stone debris in the opposite direction of the direction the West Coasters had chosen to disappear.
"Kid…?"
The Wanderer was likewise absent from his view.
Lantaya and Charon remained, looking about them with relaxed surprise at how quickly and utterly the entire group of them had concealed themselves.
"A perfect chance to practise your biotics. Charon, I don't think you'll be required. Now, Jericho: you remember the biotic Push I taught you? Well, Push the sand back into the hole and cover her over."
Less than a minute later, area surrounding the lonely red impactite was as deserted as a graveyard, wafts of rusty sand drifting back and forth, puffs of wind blowing through the massive canyon like breath from the mouth of some massive creature.
Among the rock and scree, the Wastelanders crouch in silent contemplation of the dust haze approaching them.
"Flyboy, this is Desmond. Are you still up there?"
The ghoul checked the energy-levels on the P-36 plasma projector slung across his back, before returning it there and hefting the lightweight GuP1 PDW, experimentally tightening the suppressor mounted on the end. He sensed the passing of the Wanderer as the cybernetic wastelander drifted soundlessly through the concealment of the shattered boulders and scree that had come loose from the high peaks of the cliffs over the course of a million years of sand erosion.
The reply was far from immediate, but eventually the pilot registered his continued presence in the skies above them, "Ohh, now you want my help again, do we?"
"Keep the Falcon out of the canyon, but circle around our position in case we need close air support."
"I'm not hearing an apology."
"That's because you're not getting one. Do what you're told, mate. In case you've forgotten, I know where you sleep at night and you wouldn't be the first rebellious asset I've taken care of, flyboy."
"This is a hostile work environment…"
"So fucking what? This isn't a social club. Do your damn job."
Yet another voice chimed in questioningly on the comms.
"Wanderer. Somah, Scott and I are still up on the cliffs above you with the Portable Mining Unit. If needed, I can provide indirect mortar fire from the AGM mounted to my power armour," Ishmael offered in his typically curt yet compelling voice.
Lantaya took a moment to rifle through the internal rolodex of acronyms and contractions that R&D were so fond of. AGM coded for Automatic Grenade Mortar. Contrary terms but gave an idea of its function. She had been privy to some of the details of the design, having worked closely with many of the Workshop personnel. It was likely the 40mm variant, designed specifically for use with power armour.
She suddenly felt inclined to voice an objection.
"Can we take a moment to consider courses of action that don't require massed use of munitions?"
There was a long pause. Then the Courier replied.
"But, sure, if we have some big guns pointed at 'em, they'll be more likely to try bein' diplomatic, see? An' I didn't see any feckin' AGM on yer suit on the way down, Ashur."
"Scott is assembling one from the Matter Recombinator as we speak. Once it is bolted on I will be available for fire support.
"Whoever they are, they might react badly to being threatened," Lani tried again.
"Who doesn't?" Butch asked laconically.
The dust cloud was inching closer. ED-E warbled in their comms, a brief chain of beeps and squeaks that the Courier grunted in response to. "It's a bunch o' vehicles. Armoured. Few o' them have mounted guns."
"Operated inside or outside of the vehicle?" Desmond enquired.
"An airtight design would be required on a world without breathable atmosphere," the Wanderer contended as he set up further into the rocks and unslung his AER-16, flipping off the lens cover of his optic.
"He's got it in one, lads. Fully-enclosed. Two light an' small, one big an' heavy. Big lad is in the middle an' ridin' low in the sand. Takin' a peak through ED-E's camera now. Thank ye, ED-E."
ED-E beeped happily, his shimmering outline drifting high above their heads, optics zooming in on the small convoy headed towards them. He swooped further towards them, hoping to bring his scanners into play and feed his Master more information.
"Getting out the AMRS."
Boone propped his GuMR against the rock he crouch behind and unslung the massive Kevlar gun-bag, laying it down on its side with infinite care. He unzipped it and flipped up the cover, revealing the massive weapon system with it's dual-pronged rail, housed within a polymer frame.
He hefted it, checking the optic to make sure it hadn't been jostled too much during their trek. It was still zeroed true.
The marksman lifted it up and set it across the uneven summit of his cover, uncovering the lenses of the optics and directing the end of the railgun towards the approaching convoy. A red mist obscured his sight picture, but he could just make out the squat vehicles charging across the sand towards them.
"Zeta Control, this is the Wanderer. We have ground vehicles on the surface of the planet. Alien-made, unsure of the origin. The Zeta has been cloaked since our emergence in this system, correct?"
There was nothing but static for a long while, then Jason Bright's eery voice echoed in their helmets.
"Yes, Wanderer. I have spoken with Miss Sally and our stealth systems have been running continuously as specified."
"Did we close the connection back through the Relay when we emerged from transit?"
"Our actions have remained true to the prior course we agreed upon. If any foreign threat discovers us, they will not know where we came from."
"Are the scans of the planet we requested far from completion?"
A longer pause.
The vehicles were now close enough that ED-E was running an in-depth series of his own scans to determine the extent of its arms and armament.
"We will be close enough to the planet to overcome the background solar radiation in approximately five minutes. We will start the scan from the location of the PMU transponder and work our way outwards."
"Hey, Control? Pass on a message to Sergeant Doyle and the rest of my boys. Tell them to prep in case we need a quick reaction force," Butch said, displaying a level of forward thinking that Lantaya had forgotten he possessed.
"And tell Stiggs to roll out a few of those Wardogs we tested to Rook. And a Sentry Bot. One of the ones with the 60mm back-mount AGM and dual turbo-lasers."
"These fuckers are still a few minutes out, Boss. Want to plant a few mines?" Jericho asked.
"You already have," Clover said, her voice crystal clear through comms despite being buried under three feet of sand, "And I'd appreciate if you don't fire anything explosive my way. I think everyone likes my parts the way they are."
"Three times a day," Jericho remarked.
"Only three?" Clover purred, "Thank goodness I never took you to bed, Jericho."
"The feeling is mutual."
"You heard the woman. I think we've just invented tactical gravedigging," Butch joked.
Raul snorted.
"Are we really going to ambush them? We don't even know who they are yet!" Lani practically shouted into the comms.
"Fer fuck's sake, of course we ain't," the Courier snorted.
"We ain't?" Jericho asked in faux surprise, looking sideways at the cloaked outline of Charon, who had the chunky GuLMG2 set up on a bipod on the rock next to then.
A weapon that Raul liked to call the La Puta Madre.
The Mother Bitch.
The ghoul's outline in the HUD shrugged, as if it made no difference to him what the order of the day was. He had a P-36 plasma rifle slung across his back in case he needed something with a little less oomph.
"If they want to go past, we let 'em go past. If they want to stop an' check the place out, we let 'em stop an' check. Otherwise, we're leavin' them be an' trailin' them back to wherever it is they're camped out."
"Then we kill them?" Clover asked.
"No," Desmond said with a sly tone to his voice, "Then I go in and see what I can dig up. If they seem like a group of equitable gentlemen, then we'll approach them and see if we can open up a dialogue. That is Plan A."
"And Plan B is?" Lantaya asked.
"We fuckin' kill ever last one o' the buggers," the Courier stated with an indecent amount of dark expectation in his smooth, deep voice. He reached into his duster's inside pocket and took out a leather cheek-guard that he tied around the wooden stock of his rifle, then slipped a full MaxCharge ammo pack into a pouch on the side furthest from his cheek.
It sat there, ready for a quick switch if he needed to put a bullet through a hard target at short notice.
"Leave them to their own devices and pass silently along. Our object is to gather information without endangering human interests," the Wanderer stated cooly.
"Call that Plan C," the Courier replied. He brought up his Pip-Boy screen once more, the stealth field parting to allow him an unobstructed view of the touchscreen. "After all, if ye eat all the evidence, no-one can say nothin' to ya."
"A peaceful first contact with a new alien species is always preferable to violence," the Matriarch reinforced her point, taking another look over the lip of her boulder in an effort to get a better idea of the layout of their improvised ambush site, "I'm sure that my race at the very least will be sceptical of your for your past and present misdeeds. Can you make an effort to be slightly less…."
She struggled to look for a word that was diplomatic.
"…you," she finished with a deep sigh.
"Rest assured, Matriarch, the Courier is not quite as incapable of diplomacy as he tries to appear. He did not become King of New Vegas by shooting everyone who crossed his path," Joshua reassured. The Burned Man relocated from his spot next to Ulysses and moved at a low crouch further to his left, closer to the oncoming vehicles, aiming to be slightly behind and on the flank of the convoy if it drew to a halt.
The convoy was nearing their location at a startling pace. All three vehicles were now visible to the naked eye and the red haze that heralded them now rose into the sky like a column of rust particles.
Ishmael spoke through comms once again.
"40mm AGM is fabricated. We're putting it together now. I've told the Scribes to shut off the PMU for now. We don't want an energy signature giving our position away."
Butch keyed his comms and replied, "Good call, Ashur. Hold off on the AGM for now. We're aiming to let this Mirelurk loose unless it wants a fight."
ED-E chirruped and banked around as the convoy passed underneath the tiny robot, speeding up to keep pace with them as the three vehicles screamed into the middle of the ambush site.
They slowed down in plenty of time, specially adapted wheels biting into sand and keeping the heavy armoured vehicles from skidding. All three had turrets poking out the top, slowly tracking this way and that, scanning the surroundings like periscopes on a submarine.
Whoever was controlling them had evidently portioned out sectors to the vehicles in true professional fashion. Lead vehicle was watching only straight ahead, rear vehicle was watching backwards, and the larger vehicle in the middle was alternating between the left and right of the small convoy.
"Middle victor looks like a personnel carrier," Desmond rasped, sequestered in a crack between two large boulders and peering through his scope with interest, "See that loading ramp at the back and the sloped armour at the front? Looks a bit like an old commie BTR-80. It has rocket-caging around the turret."
Lantaya took a look of her own as the convoy slowed to a crawl through the centre of their two lines of waiting ambushers, taking in the 'rocket-cage'. It was a cage, predictably enough, put in place around the outside of the roughly circular turret.
Vehicle design wasn't her forte and the Wastelanders hadn't yet designed a fighting vehicle in R&D for her to have become familiar with the terminology.
"A rocket-cage?"
"The cage is there to catch and detonate a rocket prematurely," Desmond explained with the benefit of numerous decades of experience, "to prevent a shaped charge from breaching the outer armour. They put it around the turret because when you're driving towards a target at speed, the rocket will skip-off the sloped armour and the turret is the most vulnerable."
"Good thing we ain't using rockets," Boone grunted from behind the massive AMRS.
"They will have shields," Lani warned the marksman as the entire convoy finally drew to a complete stop. The foremost vehicle and the personnel carrier veered off in opposite directions and stopped level with one another at a ninety-degree angle, while the rearmost stopped dead, turret still pointing directly back.
It smacked of rehearsal, of the sort that was drilled into a soldier over long months of drilling. The manoeuvre had turned the three-vehicle convoy into a three-pointed star with a turret pointed in every direction, portioning out the perimeter security and protecting the loading ramp on the back of the personnel carrier.
ED-E, who had been hugging the convoy from the rear, curved left and around from a height of several dozen feet, scanners and camera working overtime to capture relevant details. He whined through comms and the Courier translated.
"ED-E is sayin' the shield is weaker 'round the turret, Craig."
"Acknowledged."
A side hatch swung outwards on the rearmost light vehicle with a heavy clang of reactive plating, showcasing the impressive depth of the armour. A half-second later, all three vehicles sprouted doors like a desert flower blooming with petals. The ramp on the personnel carrier dropped at speed, landing on the sandy ground with a harsh crunch of sand under metal.
And what emerged from the darkness within could easily have been mistaken for a human being. Bipedal, dressed in an armoured and pressurized suit with a rust-red camouflage pattern, the morphology was almost identical. They carried weapons, some readily in the hand, others had them mag-locked to their hips or backs.
The aliens dismounted in military fashion, setting up a robust perimeter security that left no gap in their three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of fire. The turrets continued to rotate across their assigned sectors, keeping the infantry covered.
"They look kinda disappointing," Butch commented blithely, zooming in with his scope and checking out the exterior of their suits.
"Anyone want to keep a girl informed? Where did they stop?" Clover asked from under the sand.
They could see her outline on their HUDs and Jericho was the one to give her orientation. "They're about thirty feet from you. In the direction your feet were pointing. They're coming at you from below, just how you're comfortable taking it."
The raider tapped Charon on the shoulder and indicated the massing troops forming up at the boarding ramp. "Move down the line a few feet. It'll give that pig you're hucking a better line on those fucks dismounting the carrier. Leave the vehicles to the AGM and Boone."
Charon hefted the LMG and folded the bipod in with a flick of the wrist, crab walking down the line to get a better field-of-fire.
Another pair of aliens dismounted after the human-like wave of foot-soldiers. These were much larger, also bipedal but sporting stubby tails and a hump-like protrusions on their sizeable torsos.
"Now that," Butch said in appreciation as he placed his sight on the squat helmet, "Is more like a fucking alien. How big is that sucker?"
"Fuckin' taller than me," the Courier chuckled.
"Feeling a little inferior, old man?" Clover needled casually, "Does the big bad alien make you feel all dainty and small?"
"I'll let ye watch when I cut one down to size, how 'bout that ya little hussy?"
"Ohh," Clover said with a sensual lilt, "Watching is fun and all, but I like being more…. Hands on."
The Courier chuckled and idly tapped the side of his underslung grenade launcher.
One 40mm grenade could conceivably take out the majority of these new aliens while they were still clustered at the bottom of the ramp. Or knock them around a bunch, depending on how good their armour was.
His fingers itched to do just that, but a whispering at the back of his unconscious mind kept the violent impulse from transforming into direct action.
"Do it. You know you want to," the stealth suit operating system whispered in his ears. His right eye twitched in time with the slight widening of his fixed smile behind the visor.
"Don't be teasin' me now, Spirit. Or I'll take ye back to the Big Empty an' leave ye there."
"They have four eyes. Look at their helmets," Lantaya noted with a scientific curiosity. The more numerous of the two new species, neither of which she recognised, sported helmets with four distinct eyelets, or less common, a helmet where the entire faceplate was clearly see-through. It seemed to be one-way in those few cases, however.
Most sported helmets with white, blank lenses seated in the eyeholes.
"What an unusual adaptation. Most species do not tend to develop a second, distinct set of ocular roots. It doesn't tend to be efficient."
"Prey species?" Desmond theorised, "Or a predator species who's prey was specialised for hiding. Those big ones seem to have eyes mounted on either side of their face, rather than both forwards-facing. That is a prey trait."
The Matriarch needed to look again at the two large aliens to confirm this. They did indeed have two sets of monocular eyes, one on each side of the head to increase their range of vision. This was evident by the placement of the eyelets on either side of the helmet.
"You're right," she said with alarm, making sure of what she was seeing before giving her agreement.
"If that is a prey species on whatever world those originate from, then I would hate to see the natural predators."
"Eyes staring in the darkness, white and sightless," Ulysses murmured. Lani's felt her jaw tighten. Another detail of the Courier's vision that had turned out to be true.
"Need to find the place where our Road leads down into the earth. A mouth swallowing the path ahead, like the jaws of a Yao Guai. There to find chains, blood that burns like liquid fire…."
He said this in a whisper, utterly incongruous in his deep voice. It still rumbled as if he had a frog caught in his throat, imbuing the words with a croak-like quality. Many ignored it, but Lani felt the pronouncement echo in her mind. With those parts filled with the memories from their brief mind-meld.
"Look a bit like Dinky the Dinosaur," Boone commented dryly of the larger aliens, bringing her out of her ponderings.
The Courier and Raul both laughed and the ghoul wheezed out, "Jump into its mouth then, mi amigo. Damn thing looks big enough to fit you with room to spare."
As the turrets rotated around, all of the wastelanders felt the slight unease that came from staring down the barrel of a high-calibre weapon. The creeping dread that the weapon would begin spitting fire in your direction, chewing through your armour to the soft, squishy flesh within.
"We sure these pendejos can't see us? If they're looking at us through optics mounted on the gun, they might have thermals or electro-mag," Raul asked as the wide-bore of the personnel carrier's main gun seemed to pause on his position for a heart-stopping moment.
The Wanderer reassured him, "Ambient temperature is far too high to pick out individual sources of heat. Solar radiation in this system is a pervasive force. Additionally, our synth-muscle suits are air-tight and internally-cooled. No thermal signatures should be visible externally."
"And electro-mag?" Butch asked.
"Doubtful they have it inbuilt into the standard optics on a personnel carrier."
"You have that shit built into your eyeballs, Chance," Butch said in the overly familiar tones he used whilst momentarily forgetting that he wasn't talking with his old friend, but merely a facsimile.
He seemed to remember halfway through his sentence and trailed off. He mastered himself and continued the line of enquiry, however, before anyone could notice.
"…And in all the helmets and drone sensors. How complicated can it be?"
"Reasonably," Desmond rasped in place of the Wanderer, "It's niche technology, greaser. No need to get your drawers in a knot."
The new aliens spread out and started pushing a line of men outwards, towards the spot where the Falcon had landed. The two towering Dinky the Dinosaur look-alikes clumped heavily alongside the small wash of four-eyed aliens, spaced in such a way that they cut the line into three distinct parts between and on either side of them.
Like partitions, striding ever onwards like bulky juggernauts.
"They're coming up on you, Clover," Butch informed their quite-literal plant with some concern, "Try not to move too much. You think they know we landed, or something? Can't be coincidence they show up in the exact same spot we touched down in the canyon, right?"
This last was directed to the group at large, meant more as a rhetorical question.
"Obviously," Desmond growled in typical ill-humour.
"Could have been a sensor picked us up when we cracked the hatch open to disembark. That doesn't explain why they didn't show up when we landed up top."
"If their base is located at the bottom of this canyon and they restrict the majority of the sensors to monitoring that select tract of AO," the Wanderer postulated, "that might explain the discrepancy."
"Courier, still feel a presence below the sand. Like the Tunnellers of the Divide, but larger. A power that makes the rock tremble, the sand shift. You feel it also?"
"Aye," the Courier agreed, keeping his rifle trained on the alien convoy as he held his hand palm down on the sand-strewn rock at his feet, "Can feel it, Uly. Ain't sure what I'm feelin'. Never felt anythin' that big underground before…"
"How big?" Lantaya asked.
"Larger than a Giant of the Divide. It burrows deep below us, in warrens like Temples to the Old World. Silos, long warrens. Tunneller, fire ant, mole rat. Bigger than all these."
The Asari explorer thought very carefully through every species of creature she had catalogued during her time wandering that galaxy; but she could think of nothing that large. Nothing that could survive on a world as devoid of life as this.
"Something that large would need a correspondingly large amount of sustenance," she voiced her thoughts out loud to those listening, "If what you feel is truly there, I doubt it is organic. There simply isn't enough organic life on this planet to feed such a monster."
"Mining equipment, perhaps?" Desmond suggested.
"Possibly. We'd need to wait on the scans from Zeta."
"No we ain't," the Courier said, suddenly going tense as though an electric impulse had run through him from the bottom of his booted feet to the top of his helmeted head.
"It comes," Ulysses stated, grimly.
They all shifted uncomfortably as the expectation set it. Hands adjusted themselves on the handles of weapons, optics scanned the surroundings.
Lantaya looked at the Courier and Ulysses, how they both had the palms of one hand laid flat upon the ground like a medic taking the temperature of a patient's fringe. Tentatively, she did so as well.
For a moment she could distinguish nothing. No change or trace of a vibration.
Then she felt it. Faint, but growing closer and closer at an exponential rate.
A stray pebble struck in a dimple in the rock began jiggling, ever so slightly.
The ground had begun to rumble.
In the canyon between the two lines of waiting human ambushers, the guards left by the vehicles rushed out into the open and began waving frantically at the line of aliens who were pushing out towards the spot where Smiles had landed the Falcon.
As they turned around to look back at him, they were just in time to see the massive head of a worm break the surface of the sand and flip one of the light-armoured vehicles like a cheap plastic toy.