The ponderous bulk of the Portable Mining Unit strained against its moorings in the back of the Falcon dropship as the pilot sent the flying conveyance careening across the sky. The dropship's rotating thrusters spat in conflicting directions, sending the ship down towards the ground at a steep angle.
The pilot had also seen fit to add a spin to the manoeuvre, corkscrewing the Falcon like a drill-bit on high speed.
Inside the passenger bay an irate Somah was screaming bloody murder into comms, the servos of her power armour whining as her grip on the support rails and the magnetic clamps build into the boots kept the power-armoured Engineer from being flung from her spot and into the rows of Wastelanders strapped into their seats on each side of the bay.
"Augustine?! Smiles, you psycho! Slow down before you crash the damn ship!"
"Are we under fire?" Ishmael asked, worriedly fiddling with the jetpack built into the back of his own power armour. The Mechanist was beside him, also in power armour and clutching at his boss's pauldron just behind the Brahmin skull, half to keep himself steady as the dropship dived into another wild turn and half to stop his boss from flying away from him.
"No can do, Somah," a ghoulish voice rasped through comms, in a cheerful voice more at home at a well-stocked bar than flying a dropship, "Ain't you ever heard of evasive manoeuvres? Gotta keep the SAM batteries off our tail, ya'hear? Can't lock onto us if I don't stay still long enough for them to have the chance."
"There aren't any SAM batteries you paranoid flyboy! This is a deserted alien planet, and the fucking dropship is cloaked!"
Joshua covertly made the sign of the cross, but otherwise remained silent as the ship plummeted another hundred feet and pulled out of the dive in a sharp arc that made the bottoms fall out of their collective bodies.
"That's just what the aliens want you to think! Solar radiation from the Galactic Core meant we couldn't scan the surface right! Let down your guard for a second and bam! You're a fireball crashing down over the Pacific ocean!"
"The Pacific Ocean is a thousand lightyears away you crazy bastard and there are no SAM batteries!" Desmond yelled into comms, even his unflappable exterior cracking as his stomach bobbed up and down somewhere in the general vicinity of his throat.
ED-E was wailing like a child in his characteristic mix of warbling and alarmed beeping, latched onto the Courier's shoulder with every iota of self-preservation its robotic sentience could generate.
"Smiles," the calming and ethereal voice of Jason Bright transmitted from flight control on the Zeta filled their ears, "There is no need to fly so recklessly. Trust to the creations of Christopher and comply with your passenger's demands, please."
There was a deep silence, then the dropship stabilised and levelled out, engines filling the bay with their soft purr. The sound of multiple throats relieving themselves of breathes they had not seen fit to release until that moment mingled with sound of Somah swearing bloody murder.
Her fist loosened around the safety handle she had locked it around, which she realise was now deformed from her manic death-grip.
"But Jason, we got a canyon coming up that I can fly through to mask us from the ground! I can make that run in my sleep. I won't even scratch the paintwork that much, promise!"
Lantaya was sitting, petrified in her seat, biotics blossoming outwards as she imagined that Falcon slamming at speed into the side of an unforgiving rockface. Could she form a barrier with her biotics strong enough to save her?
The possibility was remote at best.
"Smiles, I have the utmost trust in your abilities as a pilot, but in this instance you must listen to your passengers."
"Well, okay then," Smiles rasped through comms, "How about it then, gang?"
His gravelly voice actually had the gall to sound hopefully optimistic.
"No!" Every voice in the back of the dropship chorused at once. Even the Courier sounded less than enthused with the prospect.
The Wanderer was slightly more matter of fact with his denial, being deep within Omega Protocols and simply expressing a preference for a course of action more likely to end with the ship safely upon the ground.
Only Toshiro remained silent, sitting serenely in his seat, strapped in and seemingly oblivious or uncaring of the prospect of death.
The demonic visage of the Oni that decorated his faceplate made him look like a creature who was above mortality, above petty fear.
Though Lantaya fancied she noticed his fist clenching a bit harder than normal during one of the many barrel-rolls.
"Not just no but fuck no!" Somah snapped like a dry twig.
"Alright then you fucking pussies, I don't think we have enough panties on this tub for the lot of you. Wouldn't know a professional flier if he landed on you," the ghoul astronaut grumbled to himself, leaving the comms active for just long enough for everyone to hear.
Someone laughed. It sounded like the Courier.
When the Falcon swept in over the sand below them and hovered like a hummingbird before descending gently to the surface in a perfectly executed landing, Somah wasted no time at all draining the atmosphere from the rear compartment and popping the hatch while the dropship was still several-dozen metres up.
This planet had no breathable atmosphere and a high-pressure differential between the inside of the Falcon and the outside. They needed to equalise it by sucking out the inside of the passenger bay before disembarkation.
They piled out as if this was the hottest LZ they had ever disembarked on, setting up a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perimeter in record time, motivated exclusively by the desire to be off the flying deathtrap of a dropship before Augustine Smiles got it into his ghoulish skull to do a canyon run for the giggles.
All three power armoured figures braced themselves behind the Mobile Mining Extractor and pushed it violently down the ramp until its tracks bit into sand.
It was capable of moving itself, but far too slowly for their tastes. They wanted off the hell-ride immediately.
"Zeta Control, all passengers safely disembarked," Smiles rasped through comms with a general air of a job well-done, "Chalk another successful flight up for me. Whooo-weee! Smiles, everybody! If ya'll excuse me, I've got a canyon to time a run through!"
The Falcon rumbled like a freight train and rotated before shooting off back the way it came, skimming the surface of the sandy dunes and sending up tidal waves of dust to mark its course.
On the exterior of the Falcon there was a massive yellow smiley-face spraypainted onto the very bottom of its armour-plated hull. It grinned out at the alien planet with a sinister kind of joviality, one eye slightly shinier than the rest, because rather than a spraypainted black dot, it was actually the black lens of one of the exterior cameras.
As the rear loading ramp lifted back up and locked in place, the dropship shimmered and faded from sight once again, marked out only by the drifting sand its thrusters tossed up. In a moment, that too petered out as it lifted up far enough for its passing not to disturb its surroundings.
He left the ground team staring after him with white knuckles, panting like they had just run a marathon.
Butch took a knee in the sand of Klendagon and drove his hand into it as if he could hold on to the planet's surface and stop himself from being pulled away in the departing dropship's wake.
"How is that guy allowed to fly?!"
The Tunnel Snake reached under his leather greaser jacket that he wore over his armoured carapace in order to grasp desperately at the prized Deathclaw necklace, carved with his identification number. The number that identified him as a founding member of the Capital Wasteland Tunnel Snakes.
It centred him enough for his hands to stop shaking.
"His erratic flying notwithstanding," the Wanderer replied in the toneless voice of Omega Protocol, standing with axehead-shaped helmet scanning the horizon around them, "His timing, evasive manoeuvres and time-on-target were those of a consummate expert."
"Would rather face the terrors of the Divide again, than face him one second more," Ulysses intoned, his hands upon his knees and those visibly shaking.
Of all of them, he had the least experience flying.
"I don't know about all of you, but for the trip back, I'm requesting that Jason sends Sally down. I trust her not to kill us," Somah said, distracting herself from her own mortality by bringing the Portable Mining Unit's engine online.
Of those who were so effected by the trip down, the Courier recovered his full faculties first and joined Toshiro and the Wanderer in gazing around them.
They stood in the middle of a dune sea, an almost endless expanse of rusty sand, reminiscent of the surface of Mars. The only features that stood out against the horizon were the gently rolling dunes and what looked like a forest standing out against the sky to their right.
Joshua and Ulysses approached as ED-E cautiously left the perceived safety of the Courier's shoulder and levitated upwards, warbling as the tiny robot reached out with its onboard sensors. The Frumentarii bent at the knee and scooped up a handful of coarse red sand, letting it run between the synth-muscle that encased his fingers like a wash of thick, rusty blood.
Lani wasn't far behind, standing not far off with Raul and Boone. Close enough that the short-range radio auto-connected and she could hear their conversation.
"Sea of Blood," Ulysses remarked as he lifted his helmet faceplate to regard the dunes stretching off into the distance, like waves upon a vast ocean. "Your Spirits give clearer council than they do the common man."
"Who's to say this is the sea o' blood they were talkin' about?" The Courier rejoined with a wry chuckle. He had his rifle, a heavily customised version of the GuR3 with a wooden exterior wrap on the stock and around the barrel, courtesy of Harold and Bob, cradled in his arms. An odd choice of construction material in a world of composite metals and advanced polymers.
When asked why he'd selected such an inferior material, the old Wastelander had replied that, 'if it were once livin', it makes a better home for a weapon's spirit.'
Lantaya had scoffed, then remembered the odd moment when the Courier had handed her Randall Clark's rifle before their trip to the Divide. She had stopped scoffing a moment after.
"How many seas of blood do you expect to find on this trip?" Joshua enquired.
"Many as I can, ain't a good answer?" The Courier smirked beneath his faceplate, "The Spirits are always mighty feckin' vague 'bout details like this. An' when ye think they're bein' clear, they really ain't. Yer just not readin' the signs right, see?"
"Know the feeling," Boone murmured, almost to himself. Raul sniggered.
The Courier turned his head to regard his two friends and cried out in mock outrage, "Wha', now yer doubtin' me too? For shame, lads. An' after everythin' I've done for ye as well! Make yerself useful an' go up top those dunes over there an' have a look through yer scope at tha' forest in the distance. Keep in contact over radio!"
Boone and Raul wandered off, the former unslinging the GuMR2 rifle from his back and letting it hang on the three-point sling. The longer version of the standard GuR3 gauss rifle was a designated marksman variant, equipped with better optics and designed to throw a round at increased speeds.
And when even that might be insufficient, on his back was a long canvas gun-bag that housed the truly massive AMRS – Anti-Material Railgun System. Just in case they ran into a heavy armoured vehicle or alien on this deserted planet. To a wastelander who was used to Behemoths, Deathclaws and giant bugs as everyday annoyances, everyday carry became something a bit more extensive than a pistol and a flashlight.
Raul just kept a hand close to his hip holsters and the handcannons housed within. Across his back, another type of rifle swung on a second sling. A lever-action gauss gun of the Mechanic's own design.
"The Matter Extractor prefers solid ground to set up and start pulling up the bedrock," Somah transmitted to all available radios, bypassing the close proximity requirement to reach the waiting ears of the Wanderer and the Courier, those who were de facto in charge of the operation.
"Find me and the Mechanist a place to set up and we'll start sucking up matter. Our estimated load is just over a ton without taxing the Falcon, but if you all would rather take the teleporter back up to the Zeta then we can stretch that out to about one-point-five."
She had the PMU moving now, the treads biting into sand and moving the heavy piece of mining equipment along after her at a sedate pace.
It was almost as tall as the power-armoured engineer, a blocky device with a flat top and removable panels on both sides to access the internals and the manual controls. It also had ladders leading up the rear and the front to easily access the top covers.
"Tell us what you need and we will scout out the surrounding landscape for a suitable location," the Wanderer replied, all business.
Lani considered the offer of a teleportation as Somah and the Mechanist conferred. Even the extreme vertigo that travelling by teleporter provoked was better than another wild ride in the Falcon. A thought struck her, but she didn't voice it immediately.
The Mechanist was speaking now and it seemed rude to cut across him.
"It will need to be solid ground, minimal sand cover. We'll take a seismograph and a GPR scan next to satisfy safety concerns…."
"Safety?" Butch scoffed, recalling the many dangerous experiments that R&D had cooked up in the comparatively short time the group had been together, "Since when do you guys care about safety?"
Scott replied with a shrug that made his servos whine loudly, "We already had a couple of accidents back on Terra Nova. Destabilized the rock strata and sank about fifty square metres of earth into a sinkhole. And I won't mention the weapons testing. That's why we're wearing these."
The Mechanist tapped the exterior of his own suit with a soft clang. Essentially, it was the Ironsides suit scaled up, with a power armour frame to support the extra weight. His suit was hunchbacked, where it bore the weight of a portable Matter Recombinator that he could use to make tools or munitions of an appropriate size if required.
Portable though it may have been, the machine which looked somewhat similar in general shape to the PMU, still added half the weight of the suit again to his towering form, sinking his servo-enhanced boots into the sand like feet sinking into swamp mud.
"After that we'll bolt the Mining Unit down and deploy the extractor proper. We'll probably be a few hours down here, so feel free to take a long walk."
"Why not just teleport the Matter Extractor down to the planet's surface? Surely, it must be easier than bringing it down on the Falcon?" The Matriarch directed the enquiry towards Somah and the Mechanist, they being the two most likely to know. So, it was surprising to her when Desmond Lockhart was the one to answer.
"Mass effect fields adversely affect the teleporters. The Matter Extractor incorporates a large amount of Eezo in its design, negating the mass of the extracted raw matter in order to keep the device mobile."
"Among other things," Somah cut in, "We don't know yet if it is the mass effect fields or the Eezo itself that causes the issue."
"Yes, we do know, darling. It's the mass effect fields. It's perfectly bloody obvious. The accidents only happened when we tried to teleport directly out of the Engineering Bay where the Matter Recombinators are!"
Lantaya's eyes found Desmond in the throng of wastelanders, picking out his faceplate among the many. His armour was distinctive for being one of the only suits without the excessive graffiti or spray-paint. He wore no additional clothing over the top of his synth-muscle jumpsuit.
His armour, combat webbing, mag-carrier and other assorted kit was matte black and all-business, rather like those of the Lone Wanderer.
"You don't 'know'. We haven't run conclusive tests, yet. Until we run the proper tests, we don't 'know' anything. You just suspect. And the Matter Forges are stuffed with Eezo!"
"Which generate the fields, you shrew!"
"That's my point! Eezo generates the fields, so it's the Eezo throwing off the teleporter!"
"Jesus Christ, no! If Eezo isn't exposed to an electric current," Desmond not-so patiently explained while he wrung his hands in her direction like a professor trying to explain something to someone who he was beginning to suspect was a total fool, "then the element zero is in an inactive state and doesn't generate the damn fields!"
"I know that already, you pre-war fossil!"
"And it makes a fucking difference, so pay attention! If we can teleport inactive Eezo then it isn't the Eezo that is the problem, it's the mass effect fields themselves!"
"You still haven't tested that," Somah maintained stubbornly.
Desmond threw up his hands as if despairing of ever making progress, "It makes perfect theoretical sense!"
"Theoretically."
"I don't need an uneducated junkrat mechanic from the arse end of America lecturing more on the scientific method, you rube! I was educated at Eton you bloody plebian!"
"Everyone, stop!"
The argument ceased as Lantaya physically interposed herself between the two of them, holding a hand outstretched to forestall the two wastelanders from pulling weapons and blasting one another to chunky giblets.
The sand here was the colour of old blood, rust red. She didn't particularly feel like letting them freshen up the contrast and more importantly…
"No-one has seen fit to explain exactly what is wrong with the teleporters!"
This drew everyone up short. Lantaya tried to catch the Wanderer's eyes, he being the one who usually explained technical matters to her when time permitted. Then she remembered that he was currently under Omega Protocols and was about as useful for scientific enquiry as a nuclear bomb.
She returned her attention to the rest of the party.
"What," Somah asked with some surprise, "You didn't hear about that? Engineering was running tests to calculate projected power draw on the teleporter back on Terra Nova. The crate we sent through and the bots carrying it appeared on the other end half-buried in the deck-plating."
"And it wasn't a calculation error," the Mechanist stressed from where he was fiddling with the side-panel on the PMU. He waved a wrench to punctuate the point, the implement looking like a child's toy in his massive, power-armoured hand.
"If you'd bothered to write down any of those calculations down, we wouldn't have had to spend so much time verifying!"
"I write everything down now, don't I?"
"An old etcher-sketch recovered from Waste Disposal isn't meant for important process notes!"
"That was only one time! One time! And it was Stiggs who found it, not me," he added in a distinctly childish undertone.
"Focus, children!" The Matriarch cut in once again.
As it happened, bringing the best and brightest the human race had to offer together for an important mission wasn't the hardest part. The hardest part was ensuring they all got along.
"Why did the crate appear inside the deck plating?"
There was an indrawn breath as several voices prepared to offer input at once.
"Desmond," she turned to him and ignored the rest, "You said that the mass effect fields disrupting the process made perfect theoretical sense. In what way?"
But the former Intelligence Operative waved her off with a studied lack of deference and a signal to all that he was done trying to explain complex physics to uncultured rubes.
"Not bloody likely I'm going to explain all of this to all of you. Better things to do. I'm heading off in this direction here," he indicated a lonely ditch between two massive dunes and started plodding off in that direction, "If I find a place for the junkyard scavengers to set up the Extractor, I'll call it in via the comms. Otherwise, don't bother me."
They watched him go, up until the point where he activated his armours stealth generator and vanished from sight. All that remained to reveal his location was the red outline that their helmets supplied on the inner display screen.
"Fat lot of use that old, white cracker is," Somah shot scathingly at his retreating back before turning back to Lantaya with an explanation ready, "The Transportalponder works by folding spacetime to bring two locations close enough together that we can punch a hole in its fabric and hop on through from point A to point B, right?"
Lani nodded cautiously, still slightly uncomfortable with the prospect. It had unsettled her when the Wanderer first explained it to her on the Zeta and that feeling had only increased as she got to know humanity better. The fact that this clinically insane race was casually folding spacetime like a used towel on the outskirts of the universe was concerning, to say the least.
"Well 'theoretically'," the engineer said with the utmost stress placed upon the word as if it was important to her that Lantaya knew she was right and Desmond was wrong, "In line with Einstein's 'Theory' of Relativity, objects of large enough mass alter the curve of spacetime like a heavy weight being rolled into the centre of an outstretched sheet of fabric. It bends down where the weight is resting. So when we introduce an element that can alter mass…"
"Element Zero also alters spacetime and throws off the Teleporter?" Lantaya postulated, refusing to say Transportalponder.
She briefly wondered how Somah knew all this. She was, as Desmond so bluntly put it, a wasteland 'junkrat' after all. Not a scientist, just a talented mechanic.
But she restrained her query, fearing it would not be politic to infer her incompetence when she clearly knew what she was talking about.
"Theoretically!" This time it was the Mechanist that supplied the favourite word of the day, "All we know for sure is, when we have Element Zero in large quantities around the teleporter, at either end of a connection, things we send through end up appearing in odd places. Like through a wall."
"Isn't there some outward indication that the location is off?"
"Nope," Somah said with cheery indifference, "You've been through the Transportalponder. It's just a shiny portal. You can't see the other end of the connection. You just step through and suddenly the atoms of your feet are fused in-between the atoms of a solid metal deckplate. You should have heard Doctor Dala reminiscing the original testing phase."
"They had a lot of accidents, I take it?"
"Apparently, the Brains are still finding old bones stuck in the walls to this day."
The Mechanist shook his helmeted head wryly, "I can't believe Stiggs is trying to sleep with that psycho."
"Only trying?" Somah scoffed. This prompted a great many of the people present to grimace as the implication settled in.
"You know, Scott," Butch said, pulling all of them back to the present, "Letters told me about a saying. Something about glass houses and stones. Maybe the retired superhero shouldn't be hucking stones right about now, you dig?"
The more combat-oriented members of the trip had lined up and had been watching the drama like spectators at a baseball match. The Courier tapped the screen of his Pip-Boy, a newer model with a thinner screen and less-intrusive glove, in the universal gesture of those pressed for time.
"Are ye all done, now? 'Cause I've got a Road full o' stars to find an' a cave to blow up. If I feckin' wanted to listen to ye eggheads arguin' then I'd spend more time in R&D."
"Just give us a spot and we'll get to extracting," the Mechanist said, managing to look slightly abashed even covered in several inches of solid metal and ceramic.
"'Bout bloody time," the Courier said, though his mock anger had no edge to it. He'd enjoyed the show as much as everyone else had. ED-E hovered over his right shoulder, occasionally darting up higher to catch a glimpse of something far in the distance, but always returning to his master like a faithful puppy.
"In the interest of extending our ground cover and maintaining operational effectiveness, we should split up into groups of assets who are used to cooperating with one another," the Wanderer stated in a clipped monotone.
Butch, seemingly expecting the order, fell in behind the Wanderer as he had done a thousand times before in happier times. Jericho followed soon after, along with Clover and Charon.
Toshiro had never left the Wanderer's side and simply maintained his watchful vigil over the cyborg's right shoulder.
"In other words, all my west coast lads in one corner, all ye east coast lads in another. I'm takin' Lani, though. Fair is fair. Ye got Toshiro an' Jericho already."
"I do," Omega confirmed with a curt nod. Project Preliator, the Enhancement Program that would sooner or later be rolled out to all wastelanders aboard the Zeta.
If humanity couldn't field as many soldiers as the rest of the galaxy, then the only option was to create better soldiers. And to fill their repertoire with every dirty trick that humanity's checkered past could provide. Which was an extensive list, to say the least.
The Courier turned away, heading off towards the dune with a long stride and feet practised to the job of traversing sandy terrain. Lantaya, Ulysses and Joshua followed close at hand. Almost without thinking, the three wastelanders fell in beside one another with ED-E floating overhead.
Ulysses and Six slowed slightly to allow the slightly shorter Joshua Graham to keep pace with the two giant men. Lantaya herself had to alternate between jogging and walking to stay close.
Her Guppy rattled ever so slightly against her armour and she tightened the three-point sling until it wasn't quite so loose.
At length, Ulysses spoke, his absurd baritone rumbling through comms.
"Wander the long Roads between stars, away from the sands of Mojave, searching for the Why of things. Thought to find shining cities, a power to rival that of America. Is this all there is to see? More sand."
Ulysses stopped for a brief moment to scoop up a generous handful of the planet's surface, holding it in the palm of his hand as he continued to walk. He studied it intently, as if expecting to see something remarkable in the benign mound of ground rock-dust.
The Courier and Joshua's helmets alternated between glancing around them with the ever-present vigilance of the wastelander and looking to their companion for a conclusion to his thought. They were used to his ways, his oddly meandering speech and extreme statements.
Ulysses clenched his fist and turned it sideways, slowing letting the rusty red substance dribble into the ground as he walked. It drifted and swirled like smoke, or a red mist.
"The sands of Mojave hold up the weight of Nations, hold down the memory of a sleeping America. Buried under the wastes. Can see no Nations here, under or above this sand. Or buried too deep now for my eyes to see. For ears to hear their Ghosts."
"Not all planets harbour life, Ulysses," Lantaya answered as best she could, it being difficult at times to tell what exactly the former Frumentarii was thinking, "If this planet ever did, it was long, long ago, before stellar drift brought it so close to the galactic core. As it is, this world was scorched clean by solar radiation millennia ago."
Ulysses considered this silently, trying to fit it in to his fundamentally tribal view of the world. "Is this the fate of all worlds? Bathed in the heat of a thousand suns, like nuclear fire. The footsteps of the Old-World Giants drowned out by a power, older than time, older than History."
The weary old Matriarch considered this line of thought and felt both unfathomably old and so young and insignificant in comparison to the life-cycle of a galaxy. She was standing on a dead world, that might once have contained life and splendour in times so long past that not even echoes remained.
"Yes," she ultimately decided, "In the grand scheme of things, that is the fate of all worlds as the universe slowly contracts and succumbs to heat-death. It will draw in the individual planets, they will get scorched clean by proximity to the heat of dying stars, then it will all cool until there is nothing but cold rock floating in space."
"First yer 'live an' yer hot, then yer cold, then yer not," the Courier hummed in a sing-song voice. Their eyes found him checking the underbarrel grenade launcher he had managed to secure onto the bottom of his rifle; slightly more difficult due to the wooden housing of his barrel, but achievable for someone of his resourcefulness.
He reached up and brushed his hand over the curled and articulated metal legs that ED-E had attached to his new body, causing the robot to warble and open them just enough to allow his hand access to his smooth underside.
Ulysses digested this, slowly and with no outward indication of his thoughts behind the armour that encased him. Finally, he spoke.
"Old-World died in the fire of Giants they unleashed. The New World grew from the ashes. History survived. America sleeps under the ruins, ghosts whispering in the dark. Seen the end, once. Another should make no difference. History survives, ghosts cannot be put down easily."
"That is a very hopeful sentiment, Ulysses," Lantaya said with infinite friendliness in her conciliatory voice, "But however powerful the great warheads that levelled your world were, they are nothing in comparison to what I describe…"
She mustered her creative acumen and continued in a low voice.
"…. Imagine, the galaxy shrinking down to the size and dimensions of the galactic core, a lonely pinprick in the centre of an endless blackness. And in this circle of light there is nothing but dying stars venting radiation, stars going supernova, burnt husks of rock that used to be planets, black holes sucking in the resulting debris. A place where nothing can survive. An utter wasteland."
"That's where ye need to find yerself a new word, Lani," the Courier said with a grin evident in the sound of his voice as he took his hand away from ED-E underside, "Whenever someone says, 'wasteland', all I can ever think is, 'home'."
The Matriarch lapsed into silence. She didn't bother to reiterate that the constitutive difference between the scattered remnants of humanity surviving the ruins of their own bombed and radiation impregnated world and the chances of surviving the long run-up to the inevitable heat-death of the universe was considerable.
The Courier probably already knew that. As did Ulysses and Joshua Graham.
But they weren't the sort of people who shrank from impossible odds. When confronted with the inevitable, all they could do was cower in the face of it or stand up straight and try to face it down as they had with everything else. And the prospect of cowering disgusted them.
So, bravery in the face of inevitable defeat it was. Survivalists knew that they couldn't survive indefinitely. They just marked off another day on the calendar and measured their success by the number of times they did it.
"Terra Nova, however," Joshua spoke for the first time in a tone of voice that belied the seriousness of conversation up until that point, "seems to me to be our new promised land. It seems ungrateful to begin contemplation of trials we have yet to face, when we have not properly considered our good fortune. To find such a world, so close by to our own. Separated only by the Arcturus Rift."
Lani had to admit, it was fortunate. But in the long term, even if they had not found Terra Nova, it would have meant little to humanity. With their technology they could conceivably terraform Mars into a world capable of supporting life on a grand scale.
The near-miraculous technology of the GECK and the Matter Recombinator was as functional a tool in this regard as a knife was to cutting. Tailor made and an almost certain prospect.
In the distance, they saw a figure fade into view behind the faint outline that had denoted his presence up until now. Raul sitting up where he had lain down on the slope of a dune to cross his legs and arms and engage in his almost habitual pastime of napping.
The old ghoul had deactivated his cloak to give them a better idea of the two-man sniper team's position. Further up the slope, another faint outline peeping over the lip must have been Boone. The sniper remained prone and cloaked.
"Good fortune…." Ulysses said in answer to Joshua, "All the years spent marching under the flag of the Legion, crushing tribes in the name of Caesar, in the name of the Bull. Never seen a land so green, full of life. Tribes could grow fat on those lands. Maybe, one day become a Nation to rival America. A Nation I might lay my flag upon."
"You, too, have seen a vision of a better tomorrow. This does not surprise me, Frumentarii. You were always one to pay close attention to the possibilities that the future presents us."
Ulysses chuckled dryly as the Courier returned Raul's wave and continued walking towards the two scouts, listening intently to the other two-thirds of the Three Unwise Men. Lantaya also waved, thinking it polite. Raul, seemingly satisfied with the niceties, lay back down and propped his helmeted head up on his crossed arms.
La fiesta was still on.
"How better to serve the Bull?" Ulysses' words, ever flowing, followed his chuckle, "Saw the future that Caesar offered his Legionaries. Only that. Only a sea of Legion boots, marching from East to West, unending."
"And what do you see now?"
"America, reborn. Names may change, the ghost remains to be woken. My tribe lives on still in Zion. The Twisted Hairs. When we have seen these stars, communed with their ghosts and judged the Nations among the Endless Black, I will lead my tribe to Terra Nova. Will build the Nation I searched for, lay my flag upon it. History will remember us, until History itself dies the day the Matriarch prophesises."
It was a boast of awe-inspiring scale and scope that bordered upon the absurd.
Lantaya quietly disbelieved but held her own council. Instead, she left it to one of the others to break the silence. But neither the Burned Man nor the Courier chimed in for a few minutes of hurried marching through the sand towards the two outlines on the dune.
Then the radio crackled as they came into range.
"…got this itch, mi amigo. Right down in the small of my back and I can't ever reach it. Damn thing only ever shows up when I've got a full suit of armour on and I can't take it off."
"Uhh-huh," Boone grunted in reply.
"Can't take the helmet off to eat a sweet, either. Got these little jelly-things that the medic lady from the Tunnel Snakes knows how to make. Tastes of sugar and something sour. Makes my tongue tinge."
"Mmmm," Boone said, expressively.
"Reminds me of before the War. We had sweats like 'em from a stand in Mexico City. Mi hermana pequeña, my little Rafaela, she loved them. Always made me take her to the stands when I went into town to fix up cars. Never knew how they made the sour stuff they put on them."
"Yeah."
"But that medic from the Tunnel Snakes, Silver, she says its crystalised acid. Acid, can you believe that mi amigo? Never thought of it. Didn't know you could get acid in crystals. Thought it only came in liquids."
This time, Boone neglected to reply at all. Presumably, he had run out of non-committal grunts.
"What are ye seein' on the horizon, Boone?"
Raul angled his helmet up to look at the approaching ground once more, "Hey, Boss. Just a whole bunch of stone pillars."
The old ghoul shifted his weight and the bandoliers of custom-tooled projectiles for his handcannons shifted and caught the light of the blazing sun. Lantaya turned her head and stared up into the sky, seeing the distant ball of fire up above as her visor darkened automatically to spare her eyes.
Klendagon was on the outside of the particular solar system they currently inhabited, but a remnant of a greenhouse effect and the proximity with the galactic core meant the average temperature was slightly higher than it should be.
The Courier bounded up the dune, leaving large divots in the sand with his boots until his head was just about to break the lip of the slope. Then he went down on his belly and crawled up next to the faint outline in the sand that denoted the presence of his closest friend, his rifle barrel leading the way.
ED-E landed neck to him and skuttled like a coyote up the ridge to lie next to him, round sensor arrays popping out from the surface of his sturdy metal exterior to peep over the lip in curious fascination.
He and the Courier both shimmered into invisibility and the two men and one robot could only be distinguished by the shape they left in the surface of the sandy dune and the outline on the helmet visors.
"How are you, Raul? We did not get a chance to speak aboard the dropship," Lani asked companionably.
The ghoul propped himself up, the sling of his lever-action gauss rifle slipping slightly from the grove between his shoulder plate and the steep slope of his neck. He pulled it back into place, the sling moulding his jacket into the groove and outlining the shape of the underlying armoured plating.
"Muy bien, mi abuela azul," he rasped with a hint of playfulness unique to the extremely old, "These fancy suits they made us wear are great. Can hardly feel my joints grinding together anymore. And los medicos are saying they can fix it so I don't feel pain in my bones no more. More than a poor, old mechanic from Mexico City could have expected at my age."
"I'm glad to know that they haven't overlooked you in all the confusion," Lani said. She meant it, too. Raul was a very humble, immensely kind-hearted old man with an unfortunate appearance. He deserved some relief from his constant state of discomfort.
"Who is Rafaela? I heard you talking about her as we walked up."
The ghoul paused.
"She was my sister. My little sister, sí?"
Was.
Lantaya had listened to enough Wasteland autobiographies at this point to know the significance of 'was' spoken in that reluctant tone of voice.
"I'm sorry, Raul."
"Why, abuela? It wasn't your fault. And los cabrones whose fault it was are long dead. Even if I hadn't found them, one of the benefits of being a ghoul, sí? You outlive all your enemies, one way or another."
And that was that.
Lantaya wasn't sure she would ever meet a Wastelander who dwelt upon the tragedy of their life. They all seemed quietly resigned, as if grief was a burden upon those who listened to it.
The Ghost of Mexico City turned away from her to focus on the two shimmering figures that slid down the slope, fading back into sight. The Courier and Boone stood up straight and let their rifles rest on the sling in an off-side drop.
"We 'ave a stone forest up ahead. Ground looks mostly solid, so we'll sweep through it an' see if we can't find a spot for the engineers. Advance staggered, aye? An' keep yer cloakin' active. No sense not to."
The group followed the Courier over the lip of the dune, all of them fading from sight as they enabled the Ironsides integrated stealth system, lifted with adaptation from the harnesses employed by the Tunnel Snakes.
They advanced in a line, spaced out as skirmishers typically do to prevent explosives from inflicting massed casualties. At the Courier's command, ED-E swooped off over the sand to scope out their destination in silence.
As they crested the hill, Lantaya zoomed in with the enhanced optics housed in the Ironsides combat helmet.
It was indeed a stone forest.
Pillars of red sandstone of varying heights and thicknesses, some of them sporting arches between one another that two men could traverse, walking abreast of one-another.
The dunes ended at the edge of this wide-ranging natural phenomenon, piling up against the natural barrier the pillars presented.
"This reminds me of the canyons of Zion," Joshua commented as they began crossing the wide-open space between the high dune Boone had used as a sniper's perch and the facsimile of a forest.
"It is very likely an example of wind erosion," Lantaya theorised as they moved closer and closer, allowing her easier examination of the formations.
"Wind erosion?" Joshua enquired.
"Sandstorms pick up sand which is then blown across the surface of the ground over tens-of-thousands of years, gradually grinding down the stone until the softer strata are reduced to more sand and the harder veins of stone are exposed. This formation likely took millions of years to form from storm after storm."
"Stone trees growing from stone ground," Ulysses rumbled through the comms, "In a Sea of Blood. How many died to stain this land red? Where do we go to seek a road of stars?"
"Don't know about you, boss, but I'm not too clear on this whole 'road of stars' thing," Raul registered a tentative objection as they reached the edge of the forest, and he lifted a hand to tap the side of a stone pillar with his knuckle.
"And why you think you've gotta blow up a cave on some floating rock in the middle of nowhere because it happened in a dream."
"Good question," Boone grunted into the comms.
"'Cause that's what I'm feelin' in my gut. Don't know if I'm gonna need the explosives I packed, don't know why exactly the Spirits are pointin' me here, but I know there is somethin' out here they want me to see."
"In a sea of blood, near a stone forest, at the end of a road filled with stars," Lantaya sought to clarify, keeping the scepticism from her voice with some effort. Then thought better of it.
"Well," she admitted at length, "I suppose if you were seeking a road filled with stars, you might as well look in the middle of a sea of blood, near a stone forest."
"An' a cave in the ground filled with chains. Don't be forgettin' that now. Ain't a trivial detail if my gut tells me right."
"And you always listen to your gut, boss? I wouldn't trust my gut if it was filled with people I ate. Imagine they might hold a grudge," Raul retorted.
By some unspoken agreement they had drawn to a halt at the edge of the stone forest, staring at the red pillars in mute fascination. Joshua was now the furthest forward, having passed the first outlying pillars and continued on inside the labyrinth of rusty stone. Ulysses followed shortly afterwards, proceeded by the Courier, Boone and Raul.
Lantaya could tell from the outline her visor highlighted him with that the Courier was tapping on his Pip-Boy screen. She spared him only passing attention, keeping her weapon up and scanning their rear. They expected no company, but the last person in formation always watched the rear.
She had learned this on Earth.
And lessons learned there tended to stick in the deepest reaches of your mind, where they would be unlikely to get dislodged.
"Mechanist, Somah…. ED-E sees a nice ol' spot for ye an' yer little crawler. Plenty o' natural cover and a flat patch o' solid stone ground with little sand cover. Transmittin' ye the location data, now."
The comms crackled and Somah replied, "Great. Might take us a while to get there. The Matter Extractor keeps sliding on these dunes, the fat bitch. Hey, Scott, mind giving me a hand here? Jam yourself into the back and push!"
There was a great deal of grunting over comms as their group continued on through the forest, still relaxed and at ease. Then Ishmael came on comms, "Courier, have your bot send me pictures of the area. I'll get our team of scribes there and then you can go and do…"
There was a disdainful pause, during which Ishmael Ashur made his scepticism for the West-Coast wastelander and his tribal-hokum evident. It seemed that this former Brotherhood warlord also possessed the gift of making silence speak for itself.
"… whatever it is you do."
"An' I do so love it," the Courier fired back, "If I find somethin' to eat, I'll save ye some. I'd love to have ye over for dinner."
With the Courier, that could be a friendly invitation or a grievous threat.
"ED-E, send the man his pictures then fly up an' tell us what's further up ahead."
The warbling reply came through comms. Second later Ishmael spoke up once more, "Receiving. Looks good, Courier. I'll get the Matter Extractor there and have the scribes set it up."
Six cut the connection with Ashur and continued on looking through ED-E's electronic eyes, scanning the area from a vantage point several dozen feet in the air.
While he did so, the rest of the team spread out and formed something approximating a loose perimeter. They split their attention between examining the peculiar shapes that wind erosion had produced from the rock around them, fiddling with their Pip-Boys and monitoring their surroundings.
Lantaya glanced back the way they came, her eyes picking out the lonely trail of footprints they had left in the sand behind them.
She wondered how many footprints there were on the surface of this world, right at this moment?
Excluding the Wanderer's team who had headed off somewhere to their…
She checked the compass application on her Pip-Boy screen.
… to their Northwest, the footprints they had left were probably the only markings of their kind on this entire planet.
She looked up, her eyes narrowing behind her visor as a brief crunching of boot on rock announced Craig Boone's short runup and jump to catch the lip of a low-hanging arch with his fingertips. He had slung his GuMR2 and now muscled up to the high ground, his sniper's mind always looking for a suitable location to put effective fire on target.
Lani turned her attention back to their surroundings, gently cradling her Guppy.
"Hey, smoothskins!"
Augustine Smiles abruptly contacted them through comms, sounding just as cheerful as ever. "Just to let you know, Zeta is moving into close proximity to the planet to get a better read with the scanners. Jason is saying we'll have a comprehensive scan for you to orient yourselves by in the next thirty minutes. Until then, if you need a scan just let me know and I'll swing on by! Smiles, everybody!"
Not seven seconds passed before another voice joined them on the comms.
"Smiles," Desmond Lockheart rasped out, "Did you, by chance, already fly a route through that canyon you spotted?"
"Sure did. Wasn't as fun as I thought it would be. The damn thing is too damn big to be much of a challenge. Looks like the Grand Canyon back home, only a bit bigger. So big we spotted it from orbit, even with scanner interference from the core."
"That it is," Desmond said, He was standing at the edge of the massive geological formation in question and staring down into its depths. The height was staggering, and the view was something out of a fairy tale. "How close to the bottom did you go?"
"Not far down. Why? You want me to try another run through? Won't be much fun…"
"That's exactly what I want. But this time, scan the cliff face and the valley floor. Material composition and visual snapshots. And try to get decent bloody resolution on the snapshots, you crazy flyboy. Reduce speed and keep low."
"Lockheart, my team and I are approaching your location from your rear. What are you seeing in the valley?" The Wanderer enquired, calmly.
The former secret agent chuckled inside his helmet and zoomed in as much as his visor would allow. Even with it set to max zoom, the distance to the bottom of the canyon was still so far away that he could only make out a blurred picture.
"Hate to fucking admit it, kid, but I think I might have found that 'road of stars' paddy was looking for."
In the distance, Smiles brought around the cloaked Falcon around for a pass, easing off the throttle to give the sinister smiling face painted on his belly a clearer picture of the valley floor.
"Beginning flyby, ground team."
The Falcon drifted like a ghost through the canyon, the reduced speed helping to keep the decibels to a minimum. Desmond would hardly have noticed its passage if not for the indicator on his visor that showed a blurry red outline pass by far below him, sending ripples across the sandy canyon floor.
On the belly of the Falcon, the smiling face winked repeatedly as the lens snapped ultra-high-definition pictures of the valley floor and scanners bounced beams and waves of various descriptions across the stone cliff-faces like an invisible volley of pinballs.
Smiles flew the valley bottom for ten seconds, taking full-spectrum scans of the stretch that Desmond was interested in before pulling out in a step climb that barely avoided clipping the lip of the valley.
He roared over the stone forest, hitting the throttle hard to regain speed and shaking the pillars below with the sonic boom as the Falcon accelerated past the sound barrier. Boone crouched lower as it passed over his sniper's perch.
"Who-wee! Now that was more like it. Transmitting what I got now. Tell me if you want me to make another pass! Pretty sure I can roll this bird a few times and get a snapshot of your face looking down into the valley! Would make a good postcard, smoothskins!"
They ignored him.
"Shoot us a copy o' that too, Lockheart,"
The agent did one better and copied the feed to all of them, but Lantaya and the Courier already had their Pip-Boys active and had the pleasure of seeing it first. It took Lantaya a moment work out what it was she was seeing.
For that moment, she thought that the crazy pilot had sent them pictures of the night sky, perhaps mistaking pictures from one of the other planets they had passed on their way to this one.
But there was too much rust-red mixed in with the patches of deep onyx black.
She laughed in disbelief.
The Matriarch laughed because the bottom of the valley was filled with what looked like twinkling lights, running the length of the canyon like a road whose surfacing had been cut from the fabric of the galaxy.
A road filled with distant stars.