Barb Howard gave her ex-husband and his sidekick several weeks before she went to investigate the vault where Vault-Tec had stashed her daughter, to see what havoc had been wreaked. The panic she felt when she realized that the vault had been opened five years before, the cryosleep cocoon she had left her baby in breached, Janey gone—and that insulting message.

Janey didn't mean it, she told herself. It was that woman—no, that synth's influence. Anyhow, it didn't matter. She had her Janine, who was perfect, even if she was at the most trying age, no longer a child, yet still so far from being a fully-fledged, responsible adult.

However, since she didn't have the same urgency as her ex, she took the opportunity to investigate further, or to have her people do so. She sat at the desk in the entry way, not wanting to see the room where Janey and the synth had lived.

Her first assistant sidled into the entry hall, coughed discreetly and said, "Um, ma'am? There are some…contradictions between the computer records here and those in the containment unit."

"Is it important?" she asked.

"I think so, ma'am."

"Summarize it for me," Barb Howard said.

"The containment unit records say the prototype courser came here, not in cryosleep, but as…a largely defleshed skeleton in a vat of bio-gel. That's the stuff they use to sustain and support robobrains in their tanks. It's enough to keep them alive, but… there is no bio-gel left in the vat. Just some residue. The vat's monitoring system is primitive, but… I think the courser's self-repair system was better than the Institute thought it was. I think…it absorbed the bio-gel and used it to regenerate its body.

"What's more, the Institute no longer exists, so we can't contact them for more information. The discrepancy between the computer records, as well as the fact that Vault-Tec had no reason to store their failures here…" Her assistant paused.

"Yes?" Barb Howard looked at the shrinking young woman.

"This is off the record, but they were trying to create a synth that was superior to their other synths. Maybe they went a little too far. Maybe…this prototype was smarter than they knew. Maybe it hacked into the system and changed the orders so it got sent here, instead of being destroyed."

"That's quite a lot of speculation," Barbara Howard said. "That would mean it was smarter than the scientists who made it. That's absurd."

"I'm not so sure," her assistant said. "At any rate, there was no earthquake, nor any cryosleep failure. I think…the synth woke the juvenile ghoul up on purpose."

"Did it, now?" Barb blinked. "Do you have an explanation for that, too?" she asked her assistant.

"I don't know," the young woman shrugged. "There is evidence that the synth was living here for some months on its own—the power usage, diminishing food and water supplies, waste output levels." Then she laughed, a bit pathetically. "Maybe the synth woke the little ghoul up because she was lonely."
-

The next caravan station didn't have a message for Roosevelt, at least not on the active rack. "After they've been there a year, we put any uncollected messages in the dead letter box," the woman in charge of the watering station said. "I just call it that. It's just a cardboard box I keep in the back. Give me some time, and I'll go through it."

"Thank you, Ma'am." Cooper Howard touched his hat, suppressing the Ghoul, who wanted to say a few pungent things.

"Don't go getting grumpy on me now," Lucy said as they walked away. "Hey, I know something we could do, if you want to learn more about Lana Hunter."

"And what's that?"

"Talk to the people who walked with her," the Vaultie replied, and pointed to the cluster of caravan workers in the rest area.

"Then I know what to do," Cooper Howard said, heading back to the food service area.
-

"Hi," Lucy said. "Want to share some beer?" she offered from the case her mentor had bought.

The caravan workers looked at them suspiciously. "Not unless you wanna tell us why you're getting this friendly."

"Uh, well, we're looking for anyone who ever escorted or worked a caravan with Lana Hunter—she came this way about five years ago, and probably went by a couple of times a year after then—." She began.

"Her? What you want with Mama?" asked one of the women.

"Mama?" Lucy asked.

"Yeah. She has a kid. We call her Mama." said another caravaner.

"Well, where can we find her, where does she live—stuff like that." Lucy tried.

"Why would we know that?" asked the first woman.

"Because somebody started this fire with a bounty poster that had her face on it," the Ghoul pointed out, prodding the curled up scraps of charred paper with the toe of his boot.

"Hey, anything that will burn is fair game," said another worker.

"Besides, we all know you the biggest baddest bounty hunter in New Calli, probably further," the first woman added.

"That's awful kind of you to say so," he smiled. "However, my interest in her has absolutely nothing to do with my profession. Her child—what does the kid look like? Is it a boy or a girl?"

The caravan workers looked at one another, then several spoke at once. "A little boy." "Blond and blue eyed." "A little carrot top." "No, it's a girl." "Are you kidding? It's a boy." "No idea, she never said, and you can't tell by clothes."

"Now there I just learned that Mama is well liked by the caravan community. That's good. I know you want to protect them. That's what I want too. Because the Bull is looking for her. You know, Ceasar's Legions?" The Ghoul made horns on his hat with his fingers.

"Yah. But what's your stake in this, Ghoul?"

He took a deep breath before Cooper Howard told the truth. "I'm her kid's father."

A/N: This week was not conducive to writing. However short this may be, I hope you enjoy it.