Chapter 109: Operation Scorpius.
"Alright people listen up!" Cornel Carter said loudly as he approached the podium in briefing forty-eight.
Before him were of the Enclave's most highly trained and dangerous soldiers and another twenty of their Spectres who while not officially part of the ESF often worked closely with their teams to provide them active intel in the field.
The Spectres who were often referred to as the Spook Squad by ESF agents due to the highly clandestine nature of their work predominantly worked either alone or in pairs and their job while simple on paper was probably one of the most dangerous and intensive that the Enclave dealt with.
Their job was to infiltrate locations and organisations and to act as advanced recon and where needed spies gathering intel on organisations and potential targets to advance the Enclave agenda, whether that was locating valuable infrastructure or technology that the teams could move in and secure ahead of the main force to identifying targets of opportunity that either they or the ESF could take out weakening any potential opposition to Enclave control in an area.
To say the Spectres were tough and indeed dangerous was an understatement.
To see so many of them in one place was a supremely rare occurrence though the same was true of the ESF soldiers currently sat before him as well, usually at most you would see eight maybe twelve if the situation called for it but fifty of them was almost unheard of but orders had come down from both the Generals in command and from the Bio-Weapons division that a number of high priority operations needed handling immediately and in Carter's mind this was the quickest and most effective way to get the job done.
"Ok, you are most likely wondering why in the flying fuck so many of you are here today, hell half of you probably forgot that other teams even exist by now," Cornel Carter said getting a few half-hearted chuckles from the gathered operators.
"Well the answer to that is simple, our glorious leaders in their infinite wisdom have deemed it necessary to go after multiple targets all at once due to a recent incident and a couple of current ongoing situations, so please reach under your chairs and retrieve your briefing packs but do not open them yet, these packs are classified top priority and absolute secret anyone found divulging the contents to anyone outside of their assigned teams...well I'm sure I don't need to explain to you the penalty for treason given one of your jobs is to hunt down traitors," Carter said giving everyone a cheery smile that combined well with the hard glare he swept over the room to convey his point.
The Stoney faces in the gathered crowd told him that his point was loud and clear so he continued, "There are going to be four operations going live and there for the room has been divided into four, one-quarter of you will be assigned to Operation Gladius, another to Operation Beachhead, the third to Operation Glass Eye and the final quarter to Operation Scorpius," he continued clicking a metal control button on the podium which fired up a projector that lit the wall behind him up to show the names and colour assignment of each of the operations, Gladius was red, Beachhead blue, Glass Eye green and Scorpius yellow.
"Each of these operations is of dire importance to command so it is imperative they are met with success hence why all of you are here, you will be given access to all the resources you will need to complete these tasks and I cannot impress upon you all enough the importance of haste in these matters command wanted this done yesterday and right now they are so far up my arse about getting them done that I have a new appreciation of what a sock puppet feels like," Carter said getting a few more chuckles this time.
"You are the best of the best of what this country and indeed this organisation has to offer, I have personally assured command and indeed the paranoid walking talking lab coats over at the Bio-Weapons division that you guys are not only the best at what you do but will get these objectives completed so quickly they'll barely have time to sign your requisition forms before you're handing the gear back in and grabbing some well earned R ," Carter said getting some cheers at that one.
"Alright here's the line-up, Captin Brown you're in charge of Gladius, Captin Summers you've got Beachhead, Captin Penfold you have Glass Eye and Captin Lanner you have Scorpius, each of you has been assigned a briefing room for your team to go over the details, a card to which was strapped to the back of your briefing pack, don't fucking lose it and the packs stay here they do not leave those rooms and you are NOT to discuss the details with any other person outside of your assigned teams, alright people lets get this shit done, dismissed," Carter said snapping into a crisp salute which every person in the room returned before they all spilt up and began filing out of the rooms to their briefing rooms.
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Captin Lanner looked down at the small plastic card now held in his hand, it was gold with a large black 4 printed on one side, "Guess that means we have room four," he said to the soldiers and Spectres now gathered around him as they walked out into the corridor of the oil rig that served as one of the Enclave's secure command posts.
They used to only have one of these facilities but recent pushes from the Brotherhood of Steel on the mainland had caused the command to reevaluate the position of having a few of these places dotted around the coastline of the US because they were remarkably easy to defend from incoming threats as they could only come from air or sea and visibility was good in every direction around the platform allowing for a full round defence to be easily set up.
Lanner pressed the card to the reader next to the door with a large white 4 printed on it and the little LED on the reader changed from red to green with an audible click to show the locks were now disengaged.
He held the door open while his guys filed in and found themselves some seats around the large oval-shaped table in the centre of the room before allowing it to swing shut behind him with an equally audible click as it relocked.
As he looked around he saw the three ESF teams one of which was his own and five Spectre operators all seated and now looking at him expectantly, "Alright people lets pop these packs open and see what our glorious leaders need of us this time and why so many of us are needed, must be pretty big if they feel that we need three ESF teams and five Spectres to get it done though," he said striding to the head of the table to take his seat before opening his own pack.
Inside the pack were a series of printouts and pictures as well as satalite photography and what appeared to be a briefing holotape, he reached out and popped open the holo player drive which was set into the table a foot from him before inserting the tape and closing the drive.
On a screen mounted next to the door the tape began to show images of what appeared to be a rather large Radscorpian or so he thought as it swiftly became clear that this was no normal Radscorpian.
"Greetings yellow team this you see here is Homo Sapius Scorpius now I am sure you are all fully aware of and indeed probably well acquainted with the humble Radscorpians which are commonly found all throughout the wasteland that is currently the mainland US, but I highly doubt you have seen one of these before," the unknown female voice narrating the briefing said while images flicked from Radscorpians to what looked like some kind of armoured human at first until they realised that not only did it appear to have four arms but a long tail with a stinger attached.
The quality of the images was not great but it quite clearly showed a whole group of the figures whose upper arms appeared to have large armoured pincers instead of hands which the lower arms had somewhat familiar hands though they appeared to only have two large fingers along with a thumb.
Their heads were humanesque though they appeared to have what appeared to be multiple sets of eyes along with mandibles around their mouths, their legs were also much larger than those of a normal human and covered in a series of armoured plates while their most defining feature was the long multisegmented tails they all had protruding out of their rear ends that was tipped with a large and vicious looking stinger.
"What intel we have on these elusive creatures was liberated from the Brotherhood of Steel who lost a patrol to them and is contained with your briefing packs, but from what we can tell the creatures have up and moved from their original location at the edge of the Mojave to an area near Boston where they were recently sighted by a different part of the Brotherhood, we believe the reason for this mass exodus and migration was due to fear of reprisals from the Brotherhood so in an effort to escape them they crossed an incredible amount of distance in order to elude them, which indicates a very high degree of intelligence in that they left their original habitat and sought out one vastly different in order to throw off their pursuers, we have great interest in these creatures for our Bio Weapons program so it is your job to not only locate them but to capture as many living and unharmed specimens as it is possible to extract," the female voice said before abruptly cutting off.
"We're going hunting for human scorpions?" one of the members of his team a Latino woman by the name of Rosita said raising an eyebrow at him.
"Hey I don't give out the jobs I just get the glorious job of making them happen," Lanner said with a shrug.
"These fuckers must pack quite a punch if they feel that twelves of us and five of these guys are needed to bag and tag them," a surly man by the name of Capper said looking at one of the printed-out pictures of the scorpion hybrids closely.
"Well we know they took out a Brotherhood patrol and as much as we take the piss out of those meatheads they don't go anywhere without packing some serious hardware so if they can not only ambush but take out a heavily armoured and armed patrol then yeah my guess is they are not a threat to be taken lightly," Lanner said looking at the map with the suspected last know the position of the hybrids ringed on it in red, the terrain appeared to be far to the north of the Boston area in the mountains, lots of caves there so good terrain for them to hide in.
"Captin if I may?" one of the Spectres said gesturing to the paperwork and Lanner looked up to see a woman in her mid-twenties with a hard expression on her face and a sharp intelligent look in her eyes.
"Of course go ahead Spectre..." he said fishing for her name at the end of the sentence.
"Cromwell sir," she said picking up the large map of the area that had been in the side of the pack and unfurling it before walking across to a whiteboard and affixing it with some tape to it.
"Well the way I see it there are multiple settlements in this area so the locals are bound to have gotten some kind of glimpses of these creatures, I highly doubt that a group this large moved in and went unseen, the intel says the group is possibly made up of over three hundred individuals which is a sizable force which for my money explains the team size here today, I would recommend deploying a FOB here to this old satalite facility, it should have the infrastructure we need to set up area wide comms as well as to get one of our guys on SIGINT duty so they can possibly crack into and listen in on the local Brotherhood comms, while the rest of us canvas the local settlements for any other intel, meanwhile you ESF guys can set up a QRF from here so that we can respond at a moments notice," the Spectre said pointing to various points of interest on the map.
Lanner nodded his head while scratching his chin, "Hmm a sound plan it would also be a good idea to possibly lay out hands on some Sentrybots to help us hold the facility as from what I've read lately there has been a rather large increase in Supermutant activity in the area, it might also be worth looking into what local assets we have in the area and pumping them for any actionable intel," he said causing Capper to nod her head causing her long black braids to sway with the motion of her head.
"A sound strategy, though I do think we need to address the real elephant in the room here," she said and Lanner looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
"Oh? And what elephant is that exactly?" he asked feigning innocence as he wanted to see exactly how much she knew about what was currently happening down in the Boston arena.
"The situation involving a pair of escaped bioweapons an MIA ESF team though to be fair at this stage it's most probable that they are KIA and the fact that we are going to be operating within that arena," she said taking Lanner aback by how blunt she was about it, these Spectres really did take their intel gathering very seriously even within the Enclave itself.
He sighed heavily and nodded, there was no point in denying it as rumours had been flowing around the ESF quarters ever since the distress beacon had been received, this was the first ESf team to ever not only fail in their mission but essentially get wiped out to a man, even the two bioweapons that had been assigned to the team were unaccounted for though whether they themselves were responsible by going rogue or if the entire team had been wiped out by the two they were hunting had not yet been ascertained.
"Yes there's no point in denying it as knowing you lot you've probably had more intel on it than I do and I was in the comms room when the call came in, the team is officially MIA but given that we've lost all the tracker signals including the one's assigned to the two bioweapons assigned to them essentially means that they can reasonably be assumed to be KIA or they'd have called in by now, each team operates on a very strict set of SOP's so if they were compromised and scattered they would have used any available radio relay to send out a signal though we do have their last known co-ordinates," Lanner said.
Capper nodded her head and actually seemed to relax, "Well it seems that we can work together Captin Lanner, you were right of course when you said that we probably have more intel on the fate of the team as it was our people that were dispatched immediately after the call came in but I wished to see if you would speak frankly and honestly with us about it or whether your regimental pride would make you attempt to either downplay it or conceal the truth but you were frank and you were honest about it, so I do believe we can build a good working relationship between your people and mine on this," she said.
Lanner felt his guts clench as it looked like his instincts had once again been spot on, "Well care to share those details on our missing team?" he asked and Capper glanced at her fellow Spectres all of which seemed to share the glance as well as the nod that started with one and spread to the others.
"Killed in action every last one of them, the only bodies we haven't been able to find and recover are those of the two bio weapons and of Corperal Fuller though from what we read in the commanding officer's report he was killed in a place the locals call the Glowing Sea which is a radioactive wasteland far to the south of the area, apparently he was working undercover within a local resistance group who call themselves the Railroad and are opposed to the slavery of the Synthetics the Institute produce, from what we've read from details they somehow recovered from the Rialroad he got into a fight with some Deathclaws and his armour got compromised and it detonated the fusion cores casuing a complete loss, the rest of the team appear to have gotten into a fire fight with the Brotherhood of Steel and got themselves cornered though from what our people report they took a good number of them with them in the end, now wheather the Brotherhood took the bodies of the bio weapons or whether they escaped is still currently up for debate our people within the Brotherhood itself are currently investigating but they have to be cautious not to compromise themselves," she said.
Lanner sighed heavily and nodded, the news that it was the Brotherhood angered him but at the same time it was a risk every ESF operative took any time they went out into the field, though it did give him some comfort to know that the team had given the Brotherhood a bloody nose on their way out and had gone down fighting, it was pretty much all one could ask these days.
"Alright, so I guess this is essentially leading on to the two loose bioweapons still operating in the arena?" Lanner said and Capper nodded.
"Yes and what isn't common knowledge is the size of their team we aren't just dealing with just two of them anymore, as we've tracked them across the country they've grown quite a following and in influence, it seems that number Seven has quite the talent for both diplomacy and drawing people to him, I can fully understand why command is very keen to recapture him, but his power is nothing to be underestimated the reports I have read and the pictures I have seen detail that he is very capable of unleashing quite a level of destruction when he so inclined, do not believe for one second that your power armour will protect you from him if we encounter him we must act swiftly and decisively so it is my opinion that alongside our plan for dealing with our primary target, we have a secondary plan just in case we encounter him or his team," Capper said.
Lanner nodded and sat forwards in his seat, "What do you propose?" he asked and Capper began to outline her ideas for dealing with the illusive Seven and Three should they be encountered in the field which to be fair Lanner hoped would not happen.
After working out the minutia of the details for hours the team finally had a working set of plans to go with and he had a long list of requisitions to take to the quartermaster which once they were fulfilled they would be underway.
So once he got through arguing with the quartermaster which half the time felt like haggling at one of the scrap markets at the many settlements littered throughout the wasteland that was the US he got the gear his team needed and they were finally assembled at the landing pads where their two vertibirds were waiting for them.
As they were loading up Lanner could see the other teams loading into their own vertibirds and he couldn't help but be a little awed at the spectacle as forty-eight of the most highly trained operatives in the country and twenty of the best intelligence operatives the world had to offer were loading up to launch a massive assault on Boston, it was quite the sight to behold.
Lanner loaded his two vertibirds up with six ESf operatives per bird and two Spectres in one and three in the other which given the third member was Capper she rode in his.
He noted that unlike his soldiers not one of the Spectrees wore power armour or even uniforms they were dressed completely in civilian clothes, Capper herself was dressed like a caravan guard in a brown leather duster and a thick wollen jumper along with faded jeans.
Their weapons were a non-standard issue as well, while the ESF soldiers all carried a mixture of plasma and coil guns they carried simple but well-maintained ballistics, Capper herself was carrying an assault rifle that looked to be of Russian descent but still looked like it had only just come off the production line though it did have a few aftermarket additions, like a laser targeter and a suppressor.
"Any idea what the other teams are up to?" Lanner asked looking at Capper and for once the Spectre just shrugged.
"I'll give them this command sure played this one close to their chest though I have my suspicions, if I had to hazard a guess one team will be setting up a more permanent foothold in the region especially as the Brotherhood has moved in and made themselves at home and command will not be happy about that so they'll want to push them out of the area, another thing that will be peaking their intrest is all the sightings and reports of Synthetics so good that they can pass for human, they will most certianly wish to get their hands on tech like that, the other team will most likely be tasked with tracking down number Seven and Three and their people as well as our two missing bio weapons," Capper said leaning back in her seat.
"Hey Captain I think the landing zone is hot," the pilot called suddenly and Lanner leaned out of the side door to look forwards and sure enough even from here he could see the large green shapes scurrying around all over the old satalite station.
"Alright people looks like we're going in hot, Spectres you're on the door guns the rest of you unhook and get ready for a hot drop," Lanner said checking his plasma minigun and putting on his helmet while Capper and another of her people got on the door guns.
Lanner instructed the pilot to relay to the other vertibird following to them what was happening then once they received an acknowledgement they did a flyby in which he and his people jumped out of the doorways.
The feeling of the freefall sent Lanner's stomach into his throat as he shot towards the ground feet first, this went against every single human instinct he had as he was essentially falling like a fucking brick from the sky but that was one of the power armour's party pieces.
Lanner slammed into the ground with a massive boom as the armour's shock dampening did its job and absorbed the impact allowing him to instantly stride out of the small crate his boots had made in the already crack and ageing cement ready to engage the enemy.
There was a whole series of booms all around him as the remainder of his team all hit the ground all around him and almost immediately he heard the sounds of shots being fired as they encountered resistance from the entrenched super mutants.
Directly ahead of him a door burst open from the side of the main building and the sight that emerged from it was the stuff of nightmares.
Lanner instantly recognised the deep green skin and mish-mashed armour made from leather and various bits of metal that had been hammered into shapes like pauldrons, though they still did little to stop the stream of high-speed plasma shot that spewed out of the multitude of spinning barrels on the end of Lanner's minigun.
Before the mutant was even halfway out of the door the stream of plasma had burned its way right through him and into the next one directly behind him causing both of them to slump forwards and out of the door into a smoking heap.
From above him, Lanner could hear the droning roar of the door-mounted miniguns being put to good use by the Spectres in providing covering fire allowing the ESF to advance into the compound in order to secure the buildings.
"Stack up on me!" Lanner yelled and a couple of his team joined onto him as he pushed in through the doorway that still held the two dead bodies wedged in it.
The inside of the station was pretty badly trashed thanks to the mutants having taken up residence though thankfully they didn't seem to have bothered to have tried to force their way into the more sensitive areas of the station seemingly happy to just take over the main floor and kitchens.
It didn't take them long to flush out and eliminate the remaining mutants who rather than dig in and try to pin them down simply charged at the heavily armed soldiers with reckless abandon screaming at them as they went down in a hail of gunfire.
"Alright looks like we're clear down here you are clear to land," Lanner said into his local comms to the vertibirds.
"Roger that captain putting down now I hope your guys are dragging those bodies out of there as I don't fancy our chances of handling it," Capper replied into the comms which roughly translated as the dirty work was being left to the ESF as per the norm.
It took far longer to get the satalite station cleaned up than it did to clear it but once the bodies had all been dragged outside and lit up with a plasma grenade which reduced them to nothing more than a pile of burning goo thanks to the insane heat the things produced the team set about powering up the station.
Thankfully it seemed to run on the type of generator that required fusion cores to run which given the large surplus of the things the team kept to keep their armour running, so they had plenty lying about so it didn't take them long to get the lights on and the computers running.
The screens had barely flickered into life when Capper's people were seated before them and hacking their way into the various systems, Lanner simply let them work as this was their area of expertise not his, so while Capper oversaw the efforts to reestablish comms with HQ he and his guys set about making the rest of the place both secure and more importantly livable.
"Alright take stock of that armoury we're damn lucky the green morons didn't manage to find a way to get this door open or we might have had quite a fight on our hands hitting the ground especially with that fucking thing laying around," Lanner said gesturing to the Fatman portable mini-nuke launcher which was just sat on a shelf complete with at least ten shells for it.
He'd seen first-hand what one of those things could do when he'd seen mutants wipe an entire town off the face of the Earth with one after the residents fought them off from coming and stealing people to eat.
Just one of those things had turned the entire town into nothing more than a smoking ruin and he also knew that the mutants also had no compunctions about priming the shells and running right at people with them in a suicide rush.
"Looks like we not only got lucky once but twice with the stupidity of those big green fucks eh?" Capper said after letting out a low whistle when she saw the Fatman on the shelf.
"Yeah wouldn't have wanted to be fighting that fucking thing in close quarters power armour or no power armour," Lanner said hooking his thumb in a gesture to the large shoulder-mounted weapon.
"Well we've got lucky on our end too, the dish system is still operational and after a little realigning we have real-time comms with hq, I took the liberty of informing them of our status," she said.
"Alright, so I assume you'll be sending your people out into the field now right?" Lanner said referring back to their plans and she nodded.
"Yes and as planned I will remain here to maintain the comms as well as to act as SIGINT my people have already identified what we believe to be the Brotherhood communication frequencies so I'm going to work on cracking their encryption while you guys do your thing," she said.
"Alright I'll send the scout teams out and see what they dig up and once we have something then we can move on it," Lanner said in agreement before Capper saluted and turned on her heel to head back to the comms station which Lanner actually found odd, that was the first time he'd actually seen her use any kind of military doctrine, they sure were an odd lot these Spectres.
He split the ESF team into three chunks as planned which is how they were far more used to operating, team one was to be the QRF or Quick Reaction Force which would remain at the station ready to respond to any threat while also protecting their FOB, teams one and two would head out to scout the likely areas where hybrids maybe hold up for any sign they were in the area.
So as the teams and the Spectres headed out Lanner and his team settled in to aid Capper in the comms room which they'd turned into a command station with maps and satalite images of the region mounted on old cork boards along the walls, they left the majority of the security work to the two sentry bots that he'd managed to wrangle out of the quartermaster for the task.
So this left one ESF team, one Spectre and two pilots operational in the station, though as none of his team understood fuck all about cracking encryption there wasn't a lot they could do until Capper struck lucky and managed to break through the encryption, that's when things began to get interesting.
There were numerous frequencies the Brotherhood used to communicate so it took Capper a while to break through them even with her impressive and rather odd-looking little bag of tricks which to the untrained eye looked little more than a pipboy with a load of wires and antennas jammed onto it, but in reality was a top of the line and very sophisticated cypher system, so once she cleared one she would assign it to a work station withing the comms station and Lanner set one of his guys to monitor it for anything they could use.
"Looks like the Brotherhood is engaged in some kind of ground war with some kind of non-human locals, though by the looks of it, these guys aren't mutants or anything we've seen before, they are smart and are using highly sophisticated tactics," Capper said drawing a ring around an area on the map which indicated the hot region.
"Our hybrids?" Lanner asked and Capper shook her head.
"No from what I managed to ascertain these guys are some kind of avian species and are apparently incredibly good at guerilla tactics and sabotage, they've managed to fight the Brotherhood to a standstill but from another source, I managed to intercept one of their Paladins held some kind of meeting with ambassadors from them with some third group acting like an intermideriy, though given the channels used for these I believe it's not an officially sanctioned mission or peace talk, could be some dissension in the ranks over there, might be something we can use though I've already put out the word to one of our people within the Brotherhood heirarchy to see if they can get any word for us on it," she said.
"Interesting any word on who this third party is?" Lanner asked and Capper smiled at him knowingly.
"You have a keen ear there Captin, this caught my attention as well, now who do we know who has a habit of siding with non-humans and has enough power that they can force the Brotherhood to the negotiating table?" she asked and Lanner's eyebrow went up.
"Think it's really him?" he asked and she shrugged.
"No confirmation but even if it's not him in person I get the feeling this is his doing, it fits the MO I've read, and it has his hallmarks written all over it, so if we can get a lead on this third party then we might finally have a lead on Seven, that would score us some major brownie points with command me thinks," she said with a somewhat smug smile creeping onto her face.
"Agreed, keep on it Capper if we can point the search team in the right direction it'll be a major boon to us," he said.
"Anything from the scout teams yet?" Capper asked glancing at the map at the two search regions and Lanner shook his head.
"No they checked in but they haven't found anything to indicate they were ever there they are moving to conduct a deeper search so they may drop out of comms if they have to head underground, what about your people?" he said.
"They have reached their assigned settlements and are currently questioning the people there but nothing so far, these guys sure are good at staying under the radar where ever they are," she said.
"Well, I suppose that's understandable given the fact they know they're being hunted and probably not just by us," he replied.
She raised an eyebrow in response to that, "Who else would be after them?" she asked.
"Well the Brotherhood for one didn't the briefing pack say that the original intel came from intercepts from them? They are not known for their love of non-human species," he said and Capper nodded thoughtfully.
"Very true though to be fair I think the Brotherhood currently has its hands full down here, hell I'm amazed they found the time or manpower to take out that other ESF team," she said.
"Sometimes the dumb get lucky," Lanner said bitterly.
"Don't underestimate them, captain that would be a mistake, they are ridged in their methods but we cannot deny their effectiveness of them," Capper said and Lanner sighed heavily.
"Yeah I know I guess I'm just a little bitter about it, those were my people and no soldier lies to hear of the failure of his regiment especially one with such a proud history as the ESF," he said and Capper nodded in understanding.
"Understandable, alright I think we should get some rest, we've got a lot of work coming our way and it will do none of us any good if we go into this half-arsed, especially given the players in this region are already proven dangerous and hostile to us, we need to bring our A game otherwise we're going to end up just like that other team," she said and Lanner nodded.
"Alright people dismissed go get some rack time and we'll all meet back here at first light, lets hope tomorrow will bring us some fortune," he said and with that, the team broke and headed for the newly cleaned up bunk room leaving Lanner to sit there at the table by himself looking at the maps, he couldn't help but wonder where were they all hiding?