DC WASTELAND RISING

[Maharg67]

TEN

 

Vance and the Family, now with many new members, moved carefully along a deep Subway tunnel of a kind they had not seen before. It was far less damaged, it had next to no excess radiation and so far they had met no feral ghouls in it. Also the train lines were not the standard type double rails but were monorails.

 

How they had found it was because Vance himself had picked up the subtle scent of blood and had traced it to what looked like a simple but large storage utility room in the normal Subway System. His amazing vampire nose had then led him to the secret door which was a whole machine that swung to one side to reveal a sliding hatch in the ground. They had carefully closed up everything behind them to stop anything nasty or the BofS following them.

 

Just beyond the clever machine hatch, the machine functioned normal to help with the disguise, they found a chamber with two fairly new dead Enclave soldiers. The two had been stripped naked but the Family fed on them as they had no qualms about doing so to Enclavers.

 

With them came robots including a couple of MrPortys that were like MrHandys but with special carrying canisters. These could be opened or taken out of the robot altogether. There were three eyebots and a single MrGutsy all bobbing along with the fast, quietly moving humans.

 

Jasmine had given the Family the robots, a big supply of bloodpacks and other goodies. More importantly she had given them warning that the Brotherhood of Steel was moving into Arefu and was sending its people to Megaton to live. With that information had come the warning that Karl had sent a message to the BofS to betray the Family in exchange for liberty and profit. Vance had killed the would be shopkeeper quickly and mercifully in his sleep but not just because of this: Karl had been doing other dark things such as when he had killed the brahmins at Arefu and had threatened Brianna when she would not have him as a ‘customer’ to her special services.

 

The Family had now fully accepted Jasmine because she had come to understand that they, like the ghouls, were a special kind of mutation. They were also caused by a mixture of exposure to both FEV and high radiation. They were faster, stronger and had better damage resistance than normal humans but more so after feeding on blood.

 

Vance was fearful for the future of his people. He sensed that a big war was coming, one perhaps even bigger than the one between the BofS and the Enclave had been. He sensed that fear would cause people to see the vampires firstly as a threat. Yet as he paced along the concrete side-path away from the active monorail line, he was also wondering how he could get the big powers in the DC Wastelands to accept the Family. If the Family could serve as fast moving, amazingly quiet and perceptive scouts in the darkness, perhaps they could serve such as Reilly’s Rangers because they seemed more accepting of such as ghouls, especially since some had helped Reilly to survive in Underworld.

 

Somehow, since they had met Jasmine, the vampires had grown more physically, mentally and psychically powerful. That is when they had met Jasmine after her weird near death experience in the Project Purity control room. They had sensed the growing transformation of Jasmine into something new but not totally unique.

 

Holly spoke as she ran smoothly next to him in the same sort of scout power armour that they all now wore though Vance still had his cloak, hat and the special pack on his back. “Soon we must rest and feed on blood, Vance.”

 

Vance nodded. “So far we have come only a kilometre or so along mostly basic monorail tunnel but I fear that this network being active, that soon enough we may encounter security roboremotes, robots and turrets.”

 

That was when they heard the soft chiming sounds floating from the distance ahead of them. They picked it up with their enhanced sense of hearing as it seemed to send cold hot shivers running through them. The chimes seemed designed to be heard by such as vampires.

 

Then they heard the approach of a monorail vehicle and the lot of them crouched against the wall instinctively. They were exposed but, as each could sense, none of them could sense danger. The humming noise grew and then the monorail engine hummed past pulling carriages both enclosed and open as trays. To their surprise they saw Enclave soldiers, techs, workers, scientists and others. There were children amongst them and they seemed as methodical and disciplined as did the adults in their Enclave light power armour. There were passenger carriages filled with people, soldiers and weapons on trays, Enclave unique robots of varied kinds along with standard robots and much cargo.

 

The Family had ever only encountered the Enclave at a distance, thankfully, but had heard much of them. Now Vance could confirm his suspicion that he spoke of to Jasmine; that is that Enclave humans were different from other humans somehow though in a subtle fashion. Their minds thought differently. They were somehow programmed like androids or computers or robots were and not like normal humans.

 

Family members had once encountered a group of rampaging Garys. Garys were faster, stronger and harder to damage than normal humans. They also had an insane unified mentality so that they were many brains but one mind. What one Gary knew, all Garys knew. Holly had been there and had sensed the truth. The Garys had taken one look at the vampires and had fled. It seemed even these monsters had their limits of courage. Holly and the others had hunted and killed them, had fed on them, to stop the clones from torturing and killing others. It had also arisen that Garys were starting to kidnap women to carry them off for some purpose or other and the Family would stop this from happening.

 

Holly spoke with an edge of fear to her voice. “Enclave humans are clones both like and not like the Garys. This would explain just how dangerous the Enclave became if they had some kind of linked mentality.”

 

Vance shook his head. “Only a kind of central cause, a kind of joint subconscious purpose but it is a dark, hard one. These Enclavers are sociopathic in their ability to kill with out mercy. They assume their own natural superiority and wish to replace other humans that they see as primitives, mutants and unable to be truly civilized.” He looked ill. “What I sensed was more terrible because of its general human nature. Still these Enclave clones are divided in wanting to commit either immediate genocide of others or to do so of many in a slower more ‘humane’ manner. I do not know which of those ideas was worse?”

 

He gave a sour laugh. “And I have been so worried about the Family while the DC Wastelands, no the whole world, faces such dreadful threats as the Enclave, the super mutants and true raiders.”

 

True raiders? The Family had sensed that at the core of the raiders were true mutant berserkers. These were altered again to be more physically dangerous than normal humans but also to be naturally murderous sociopaths. They would have naturally been serial killers in Prewar Times and some may have actually existed just before the big ones fell.

 

Very soon another Enclave monotrain passed with many engines to pull it. It also had many carriages, many clones but also livestock in special carriages. The vampires sensed that these cattle, goats, horses, molerats and pigs were also cloned but this time to be passively controllable. This train was longer with things in some of the carriages that the vampires sensed were strange and terrible, were perhaps some kind of scientific project. There were also deathclaws that were part machine and other such monsters of kinds they had not even heard of before. There were a fair few children including teens and babies.

 

Twelve long trains passed the vampires, each with many people, livestock, equipment, supplies and other things. There were flatbed trucks with hovertanks, missile-launchers, vertibirds and other machines. There were tankers. There were odd bare steel carriages that the vampires winced at when they passed because of what they sensed.

 

Then came the last trains and each was more damaged than the one before it. They saw body-bags piled neatly on flatbeds. They saw burn marks and holes in armoured metal along with wounded Enclavers. There were more soldiers and battle robots plus weapons and powerful battle turrets.

 

The last Enclavers that passed were just a single engine and a single battle-carriage that looked very damaged. One big powerful autogun looked backwards but did not fire.

 

It was now clear that the Enclave, as dangerous as it was, was on the retreat from some other more powerful force.

 

The chiming came again.

 

The Family turned almost as one and went the other way. They were sensing now that there were those out there who were both like and yet unlike themselves. Caution was their way and so, for now at least, they chose to retreat.

 

Vance reached out to telepathically-empathically communicate with Jasmine. This was tricky and tiring but at this moment very necessary. He had promised to give her important information and now he had plenty to tell her. The Enclave was still strong in the DC Wastelands, though hidden well underground, and there seemed to be a brand new threat that even they were forced to flee from.

 

Continued in ELEVEN

[Maharg67]

ELEVEN

 

 

GNR Tower was in near panic mode. People were racing around from meeting to meeting. Committees and sub-committees were working hard to get answers to growing problems in different parts of the great hulking building. Communications were going madly. The GNR radio was broadcasting warning bulletins for folks to keep away from Central Washington and to leave it if they did not have very good business for being there.

 

Crisis One: the Brotherhood of Steel, despite being now supported by new Wastelander militia units, was losing ground in the National Mall Zone. The super mutants had been joined by far more of their own kind, far more centaurs and now hundreds of spider mutants. This included hulking behemoths. Now came low flying waspiders spitting toxic webbing to damage and bind victims before the waspiders fell upon them. Now also came super centaurs, the behemoth versions of centaurs. Now also came armies of feral ghouls racing before the super mutants as an expendable first attack.

 

But worst of all were the smart mutants. Some were human sized like human body builders while others were the size of the standard stupid mutant. What made them dangerous was that they were sharp, they used power-armour and they exotic new kinds of weapons called disintegrators that caused BofS soldiers to literally vanish with sharp flashes of bright purple red light. The only good thing about the amazingly powerful smart mutants in their powerful armour and horrific weapons was that there were only a relatively few of them and that their disintegrators had only a relatively short range.

 

The big mystery was where had they come from? The only answer that they could come up with was that they had boiled up out of the Subway System, out of manholes with covers exploding open and out of buildings from the basements.

 

Crisis Two: a large military force had been seen coming from the north. Reports were vague and inconsistent so far but it did not seem like a good development.

 

Crisis Three: The Enclave had large forces still in the DC Wastelands that were deep below in what seemed to be a more modern Subway Network of monorails. Word had come from Jasmine but she had refused to state where her information came from. He believed her, as did others, but some dared to doubt her word; these were people who had not met her.

 

3Dog was standing on the top of the tower with 2Kitty and at her feet were the two cats that were linked to her name. 3Dog had saved her that day when the settler convoy was attacked by strange beings and she had carried two kittens against her chest. The old but remarkably fit and healthy ginger cats were those kittens all grown up.

 

HUI Helibirds, helibirds being less powerful but easier to maintain ancestors of vertibirds, were on the big airpad top of the GNR building, but their rotors were still. Close to them were two faster, more powerful and sleeker looking Buzzbee vertibirds. A bigger JGG vertibird was in the process of taking off with supplies for the war-zone. The Jolly Grey Giant flying machines were the standard vertibird of the Enclave as earlier models were of the Brotherhood of Steel.

 

When a large government storage bunker had been found, a forgotten Post World War Two structure, it had been full of older style aircraft, trucks, armacars, tanks, more trucks, stores, more stores and some odd items. There were huge crates of SodaCola, a drink that was popular before NukaCola drove it out of business. There were huge crates full of SPAM. There were enough big band musical instruments to equip at least a dozen big bands. There were two big shipping crates full of fine silk stockings. There were record playing jukeboxes, movie reels of old time movies, a pink limousine, a shipping crate full of soldier’s magazines complete with centrefolds and even some inflatable fake tanks to fool the enemy.

 

Most importantly there were zazookas, a kind of improved bazooka weapon, with plenty of ammo good enough to punch through even a behemoth at close enough range. There were powerful semiautomatic rifles using the 7.62mm calibre. There were lots of Heavy Browning Machineguns using the infamous half inch (12.7mm) calibre. There was a whole lot of ammo.

 

There was much more and most of it had yet to be even identified let alone used.

 

And it had been found, bizarrely enough, just a fairly short distance from the GNR Tower itself. It had been found below the central part of Washington DC with out explanation of how or why it had been put there.

3Dog watched the trucks rumbling along a highway that not only carried goods from the bunker but which themselves came from the bunker. He did so with an odd thoughtful expression on his face.

 

2Kitty sighed and spoke then. “Okay, out with it. I have long accepted that you will not tell me much about your life before you met me but out with it as you promised you would when you had your fifty-first birthday.”

 

3Dog sighed again and he spoke. “I am not fifty-one years old as I pretended when I had my birthday last week. I am two hundred and fifty-two years old. I was not born vaguely somewhere in California in some hippy survivalist commune, though I spent many years there before it was destroyed. I was born in LunaVault-021 of the secret Lunar Colony that, as far as I know, still thrives on the moon. Yes I was born on the moon and lived there as an immortal of sorts until I was about a hundred when I was forced to flee the moon as a rebel. I was a rebel against the enforced orthodoxy of the Luna Federation. I gained my name 3Dog from struggling to survive when I landed in the frozen north of Alaska. The name comes from the saying ‘3Dog night’, that is a night so cold one needs to sleep with three huskies to stay warm.”

 

He sighed. “I walked on the moon many times. I went into space. I walked on the dark side of the moon. I was a scientific genius and I suppose I still might be. That is higher maths and physics.”

 

She frowned. “You are lousy at sums or keeping the books.”

 

3Dog smiled with good humour. “They are not the same. Higher mathematics is a whole different realm from basic maths or what you call accounting.”

 

She laughed. “I know that. I was poking fun at you.”

 

He stared at her in surprise. “Why do you seem so calm? You should be either freaking out because you believe me or because you think I have gone mad.”

 

But she only smiled. “Because I love and trust you. Anyway you have a great deal of knowledge and odd skills that now make sense. Also you speak in your sleep and I learned Esperanto just so I could understand what you were saying, oh my lovely Loony man. You had a nightmare in which you speak of a orbital shuttleboat coming into crash and you being unable to control it. You complained about tubefood and having to eat it in zero gravity while in space power armour. You speak of the damned 2001 Laws and Ways of Good Living that is one way the Luna Orthodoxy keeps tight order on your people. You addressed various higher equations and what you called the Counter Theory of Relativity or ‘why Einstein had only a half truth’.”

 

3Dog sighed in disappointment. “I hoped you would be blown away in wonderment.”

 

2Kitty hugged his arm against herself. “You ban me away in wonderment every day.”

 

To her surprise he blushed and then they hugged and kissed. Then he quietly slipped a ring on her finger. She smiled and then she took one of her rings and put it on his smallest finger though it had been on her middle finger.

 

Continued in TWELVE

[Maharg67]

TWELVE

 

 

The children in the big metal chamber as the Darkman emerged from the place in one corner next to a machine, shimmering into existence as if out of mid air. But the children had long learned it was just a trick, that a holographic projection hid a secret door in the corner of the room. They had even tried to open it, though fearfully, to see where the Darkman came from.

 

Black on black was the Darkman who stood in black Victorian gentleman’s gear from the top of his tophat down to his pointy shiny black shoes. His cloak had shiny blood red inner lining but that was only glimpsed sometimes. He wore modern looking wrap-around black sunglasses on his face but somehow this seemed normal on him. He held a finely made, lightly ornate and horribly decorated wooden walking-stick in one hand. On the middle finger of each hand was a black ring with a large blood red ruby that sparkled oddly at times.

 

The figure radiated evil, hatred and aggressive arrogance. Then he spoke and his voice was cold and somehow repulsive. “Children, children, children, we do seem to have a dilemma. I am very pleased that you did not speak the truth to these Mungos, especially to the one you call Jasmine. She is most dangerous and would take away your beloved Lamplight Caverns and fill it with clumsy nasty Mungos.”

 

But then he sighed, a sound like an escape of gas from his mouth, and then spoke again. “I see you have much of your stuff here in this room. Pack them and prepare to leave in one hour. Then I will return and you will come with me to a newer and better place where you can have fun with out any Mungos getting in the way.”

 

The children did not look happy. Bumble burst into tears. MacCready aimed his 7.62mm assault-rifle at the tophat wearing figure. Lucy sighed and shook her head. Princess pouted. There were many such reactions.

 

Joseph spoke. “Where are you really taking us?”

 

The Darkman laughed sourly and then he grinned large polished white fangs. “So your psychic side has emerged stronger now thanks, I suspect, partly due to Jasmine’s influence. I doubt Jasmine even knows what she is but that does not make her any less dangerous. Her kind is very annoying to deal with, very annoying. In truth I am going to use you in my nasty experiments until you die. I have set up a nice big maze filled with goodies and nasties. You will have to find the goods to survive and survive the nasties also to live. There will be all sorts of fun things happening as well. At least I will find them to be fun though you may not.”

 

Then he stared at MacCready in particular. “Your little toy gun will not hurt me, Little Mayor. Pack it away. You can use your gun in the Testing Maze for it will make the challenge better. Indeed amongst the goodies to be found will be more bullets for you assault-rifle.”

 

The Darkman began to approach them with softly padding feet and he lifted his walking-stick in a menacing fashion. “Aaahhh, something is not right. There are perhaps too many children. Mayor MacCready, Princess, Penny, Lucy, Squirrel, Sammy, Zip, Toffy, Farty, Knick-Knack, Knock-Knock, Noodle-Nob, Nancy, Sticky, Stocky… and who are you?”

 

The other little girl stood up and stepped forward in her smaller version of BofS standard power armour. She smiled up at the Darkman. “Jasmine is my name except that I am not that Jasmine but another Jasmine who wears child’s power armour and has this special gun. My name is Jas!” She held up an odd weapon with three different coloured lens-barrels. “The children knew I was here but did not really think about me too much because I influenced their minds. I have adapted the wonder machines so that they are better for the children and you can no longer deactivate them. Now they can dreamscape to a beautiful tropical island where they can play with talking animals and fairies.”

 

Mayor MacCready snorted. “I wanna go to a cowboy town and shoot down baddies and Indians.”

 

Lucy snorted right back. “Well I want to go to a nice town where I can be part of a good Mungo family where the adults won’t abandon the children.”

 

Jas sighed. “But not like Tranquillity Lane.”

 

“Aaahhh, the place run by the madman Braun.” The Darkman laughed just a little. “We used him and we have used many insane lesser geniuses like him. You found a way to free his victims by killing them and left poor Braun all alone trapped in Tranquillity Lane. Except he found a way to escape. Yes he escaped as a mind into the SSS02 System but left his body behind. The Enclave entered Vault-112 after you departed from there with your now dead daddy and they stripped the place bare of everything they could including the brainbots which they knocked out first. They even took the dead bodies.”

 

“But neither they or Braun get the souls of those poor mind controlled people who lived in Braun’s sadistic nightmares.” Jas stepped closer to the Darkman. “I would have tried to save them by letting them leave but you see Braun’s technological wonder damaged not only their brains but Braun’s brain as well. Braun didn’t know it at the time but they had become reliant on the machines to stay alive; I only learned it because I hacked the Vault-112 computer network-systems before I went into a capsule and to Tranquillity Lane. Even so they were slowly dying anyway. Sooner or later they would have ceased to live one by one and there would have been dead preserved bodies in the loungers, as Braun called them.”

 

The Darkman grinned. “Braun wanted his victims to suffer but we were the ones directing him in his madness and we fed off the dark psychic emanations that came from the suffering of his victims. Do my words surprise you, Jas, do they cause you discomfort?”

 

Jas shook her head. “You call yourself the Darkman but there are many more than one Darkman and you are one of the weakest of them. Why is that, you may ask yourself? Because you are a poor fake of a Darkman, a puppet, a projection that does not even know his true nature.”

 

The Darkman shuddered in rage and he pointed his walking-stick at her. He screamed. “I am the Darkman, the one and only true Darkman, and I will kill you.”

 

But Jas fired her gun and from it spat three pencil thin beams of energy being yellow-white, blue and green. The Darkman screamed and perished, sparkling and shimmering to then simply vanish.

 

Zip sat up and let loose a stream of nervous words. “What is that? What is this? What is everything that is going on? Did you kill the Darkman? I was dozing. I was dreaming about pink rabbits. Do you like pink rabbits? Has anybody got some NukaCola?”

 

Jas sighed. “Zip, I think you are going on a free NukaCola diet from now on.”

 

Zip did not look happy at the idea but the other children did. Lucy sighed and gave Zip a quick hug. Jas smiled at the children.

 

At that moment a large hole exploded open in one wall and through it came three Sisters of Steel in now very dirty power armour. They carried portable digging machines of the kind used to help make fortifications such as ditches and small bunker chambers. But the three sappers showed no hostility to the children.

 

Then Cran herself stepped through and removed her helmet. She looked at the children and then at Jas. Then she spoke. “Jasmine will not come here because she says it is better for her varied selves not to directly meet unless they have to do so. All of this is way over my head but that’s the DC Wastelands for you.”

 

Jas turned and spoke to Cran. “I assure you there are much stranger places on this world than the DC Wastelands. You wonder at my nature but so do I. Now is not the time to getting answers to such things when we have more pressing problems to deal with and puzzles to solve.”

 

Cran was ogling the wonder machines. “They look promising. We need more resources.”

 

The younger version of Jasmine nodded and began to explain the various functions of the strange machines.

 

 

Continued in THIRTEEN

[Maharg67]

THIRTEEN

 

 

Brothers of Steel fell back fighting. As each section retreated two other sections gave them covering fire with precision training. The brigade was being pushed back towards Lincoln Memorial Complex complete with the actual memorial, the museum and the other structures. These fighters wore standard power armour unlike light infantry or scout infantry.

 

This was not the only action going on. In other areas fighting was raging. The ruins had fragmented the war zone into seperated subzones but so far neither friendly or enemy forces had been truly cut off from their own. The sounds of other fighting drifted to them including that of vertibirds and helibirds in action. All the vertijets from Rivet City had either been downed or so badly damaged they could no longer function; the smart mutants had learned from the massacre of their kind that had taken place outside of Vault-87.

 

There were helibirds and vertibirds picking them up in that area but also a small field hospital and a whole lot of fortifications. A whole lot of ex-slaves had settled there and now were part of the fighting.

 

A howitzer rocket exploded and caused an atomic car, a wreck with destabilized atomics, to explode terribly. The chain reaction caused two more atomic sedan wrecks to blow. Thankfully the explosion only heated the BofS armour a little as the soldiers all dropped to avoid flying shrapnel.

 

20mm autoguns blew apart rushing feral ghouls and super mutants. Claymore mines shredded super mutants of all kinds including spider mutants and those new low flying waspiders thanks to their clever placement. Super centaurs, monstrous armoured versions of their smaller cousins, thrust aside wrecks and their great tentacles whipped out with enough force to thrust right through an armoured soldier. Behemoths lumbered along with their own cannons which seemed designed to both fire shells and to be used as massive clubs.

 

The smart mutants came also, charging in a well planned and smart manner quite different from the others. Many carried disintegrators but early reports that all smart mutants had these had thankfully turned out to be false. Most of the body builder human sized and bigger smart mutants had better type stupid mutant guns.

 

Snipers, both BofS and Wastelander volunteers, picked off as many of the super mutants as they could. They fired down from buildings overlooking the scene of battle. They used powerful hunting rifles or military sniperguns or even such as rocket launchers. But even these were being forced to retreat as super mutants began infiltrating buildings, with spider mutants clambering quickly up the outside of these structures.

 

The super mutants were going to soon dominate much of Central Washington if the course of battle did not turn.

 

Continued in FOURTEEN

[Maharg67]

FOURTEEN

 

 

7.62mm and 12.7mm bullets ripped into the first wave of feral ghouls that came howling towards the subway station barricades. The ferals were coming in a barely organised fashion which meant amazingly well organised for feral ghouls. The Clanhunters were shooting the bullets with adapted weapons and used laser weapons also but fewer of these. They also used hunter power armour that was lighter and more flexible than BofS standard power armour but just as tough. These gave less enhancement of strength but more enhanced speed than BofS SPA.

 

The Knights of Atom chose to use exotic energy weapons like pulse-swords shaped as longswords, broadswords and shortswords. Their armour was also exotic energy stuff vaguely of the style of Medieval knights and they used large round shields as deflector weapons. The energy devices were powered by the KofA themselves because of their own unique nature. For these humans glowed as did the ‘glowing ghouls’ but they somehow remained human. They had also learned to channel their power into various devices, and not just weapons. The pulses, slicing and deflecting uses of this power destroyed ghouls as easily as it did other creatures.

 

But there were relatively few glowing humans for though they lived as long as ghouls, they could not reproduce.

 

Psyabalists were psychic mutants in exotic leather, metal and bone armours using psychic biocrystals harvested from the Deeping Caverns, an amazingly large and complicated cave system dotted with bunkers and other structures used as dumping grounds for radioactive wastes, toxins and stranger things. An isolated part of the Lamplight Caverns fringed part of the Deeping Caverns but were not as deep.

 

Yet most there were typical humans and ghouls with a sprinkling of vampires thrown in and a fair few nocturnal albino humans. Subway Guards in powerful armour of varied kinds using varied weapons. Militia and volunteers using what they could. Hunting rifles were common and powerful crossbows. There were fighting robots, mostly salvaged and reprogrammed Subway Protectrons, firing off weapons at the enemy.

 

Gunny Anderson muttered as he crouched behind a barricade made up of bits of rubble, metal garbage bins and sandbags. “You think now the old fools will change their minds and make an alliance with the Surfacers?” The Subway Guard Captain was infamous for his ability with a minigun and he was using one now with deadly efficiency. “We need them as much as we need them and if that means exposing our precious secrets to them, then so be it.”

 

The Paladin of Atom was glowing softly through a polarised visor. She turned exotic eyes upon him and spoke. “The Knights of Atom have already put this view before the High Elder Council. A vote is to be held in about one hour and it is likely that Prime Elder Canking will both be out voted and forced to surrender his position due to increasing proof of his corruption and perhaps treason of some kind.”

 

“The vampire ghouls?” Gunny scowled. “A very nasty combination of powers and a very nasty temperament. Word is he tried to communicate with them.”

 

Sir Sivane shook her helmeted head. “Not with them but through the vampire ghouls to the evil that lurks in Vault-87, that controls the super mutants with only a few exceptions.”

 

“Sanctuary!” The bulky power armour clad Captain nodded. “Yes, I know of Sanctuary. Smart mutants go there who wish to escape the Darkman influence. So do ghouls, vampires, ex-slaves, androids and many others. Do not like at me so. I have never revealed this secret to any but you, now, and you already know it.”

 

She shook her head. “Not really! The High Elders do not trust us KofA as much as most assume. I probably know as much as you do, more or less. Why are we Knights of Atom, the Psycabalists and the Hunterclan most often at the forefront of fighting these new attackers? Because the High Elders want us to be weakened in our power and influence in the Subway Union. They expected we would be left to fight alone but they have made a major mistake. As you can see both your people and the militias came to our aid and many Subwayers now are angry with the High Elders for not supporting the fight by sending in the Subway Union Defence Force units.”

 

She stopped and frowned hard. “The chiming noises. The vampire ghouls admit the noises and use them partly to control the feral ghouls.”

 

Gunny scowled. “I wish I could get at one of them now.”

 

But she shook her head. “Your kind are good at killing standard monsters but such as the vampire ghouls are most deadly. I have killed eighteen of them and twice came close to be killed myself.”

 

Gunny arched his eyebrows in surprise. “You are deadlier than a dozen of my best soldiers and myself combined. I suppose these vampire ghouls look most horrific.”

 

But again she shook her head. “They look amazingly beautiful until they die and then they look incredibly horrific before their bodies crumble into ash. They sing the chiming music and it sounds both hauntingly beautiful and perilous. They only fear the Darkmen and most of all the one and true Darkman that lies at the rotten core of all those false Darkmen. You must have heard this before.”

 

Gunny raised his minigun, let off a burst of 7.62mm bullets, and ripped apart a row of five rushing feral ghouls. The way he used the bulky weapon was almost poetic.

 

Then he spoke. “Yes but also differing accounts of what goes on so much of the time I don’t know what to believe.”

 

Then came another wave of feral ghouls but this time they came with a very new and nasty surprise. Amongst them came suicide bombers with bombs strapped to their bodies. Most died but one reached a battlement position of unarmoured militia and exploding to hurl dead bodies in all directions.

 

The Knight of Atom cried out in rage, lifted her glowing longsword and unleashed a glowing beam of destruction that caused over a dozen feral ghouls to disintegrate.

 

Continued in FIFTEEN

[Maharg67]

FIFTEEN

 

 

GNR Tower was being abandoned by all civilians. The folks of Radio Town were moving to the newly found bunker because it had proven to be far larger than first thought. It was in fact a bunker-complex of many bunkers and not all had been found as yet. A newly found bunker was designed to easily accommodate over a thousand people. The new bunker was going to house the moved Radio Town and the new GNR Station.

 

The move was because the enemy was getting closer and because the super mutants seemed to want something that was in the GNR Tower. Attacks against it had come both over ground and, for the first time, from beneath. Only the many booby-traps in the basement levels had stopped the second attack. Radio Town had its own militia and there were many BofS soldiers at the GNR Tower now but the tower was now deemed too vulnerable to use.

 

3Dog had mixed feeling about the move because the old GNR Tower had both good and bad memories attached to it. Yet as he walked through the concrete and metal corridors of the World War Two vintage bunker, it was in remarkably good condition, he had a good feeling about this place. He also had a very odd feeling about this place.

 

3Dog was pushing a trolley full of holotapes, compact audio tapes, stacks of vanilla files, stationary, cans of coffee powder and much more of the stuff that kept any radio station functioning well.

 

2Kitty was pushing a similar cart next to him for the hallway was quite wide and high though it was one of the smaller ones of the bunker-complex. Her trolley was full of Prewar books, posters, publicity T-shirts, a garden gnome, two teddy-bears and other stuff including on top of it the two ginger cats. The felines were curled up comfortably with each other like kittens.

 

She smiled at him through her amazing glasses. “I feel the oddness about this place also. It is an old bunker-complex full of old stuff and yet I wonder when it was filled, when it was last used. The network-systems are working like the primitive telephone-intercoms, the old type tape-recorders, the movie theatre chambers, the old PA system and an amazing big old electromechanical computer in one of the rooms. One theory is that the United States Federal Government in World War Two war most worried about Hizzler and his super weapons. They built this and other secret bunker-complexes to deal with any major attack on the mainland of the USA.”

 

3Dog did not sound convinced. “Sounds like BofS Scribe thinking. When the Martians invaded Great Britain back in the 1890s the USFG built bunkers. They built bunkers in World War One, in the United States Civil War and even during the South East Asian War. But all of those bunkers were less secret than the government hoped they were. In my wanderings through these remains of the old United States, I visited many a settled and abandoned, often dangerous, bunker. That included World War Two bunkers but this one feels different.”

 

3Kitty nodded. “Perhaps there were other bunkers built through out the history of the USA that actually were secret, that you never got to enter in your travels.”

 

“Well, I suppose.” He grinned mildly at her. “Certainly the Enclave seemed to come out of nowhere. We used to think that the Prewar USFG would rely on the old Subway Networks even to move the President but BofS scouts found the monorail networks linking the White House underground to the Adams Air Force Base. Now we know there are other monorail subway tunnels down there and that the Enclave is down there along with some other threat. I suppose there could be all sorts of things hidden down under ground.”

 

2Kitty sighed. “Not only bad things, I hope.”

 

They came to a lobby chamber, a crossroads of four hallways complete with a bank of four elevators, two smaller for people and two larger for freight. There was a half circular reception security desk there with a mechanical typewriter, an intercomphone, big old metal filing cabinets, an old fashioned water-cooler and even a couple of leather padded office chairs.

 

It was empty and yet cleaned thanks to the work of robots sent through the bunker to do just that.

 

3Dog nodded and took out a sheet of paper to look at a print-out layout of the three level bunker they were in. He studied it for a moment and then he spoke. “One level down and we will be at the old time recording radio studio. Some of the others should be down there already. We can either risk using a freight elevator or go along further to use the rampways.”

 

But 2Kitty was looking around with an odd expression on her face. The two cats, a female and a tom, stood up and looked around with alert curiosity and yet they did not seem to be alarmed.

 

Then there was a shimmer and everything changed. They became phantom like and they were in a busy World War Two scene. American GIs in body-armour and carrying semiautomatic rifles were looking all tense and worried. An officer in body-armour vest but with a cap was pacing back and forth in worry. The insignia on the caps and shoulders was an altered one of the Brotherhood of Steel.

 

Then came a woman in a white labcoat in a brisk walk. She halted, old and beautiful with much character in her features and wisdom in her eyes. She spoke then in English with a well pronounced Irish accent. “Project Leap Forward is prepared. The Brotherhood of Steel can now begin operations that will hopefully allow us to both escape from the Enclave and the darkness that is coming. The BofS has operated in secret for over a thousand years now and finally it seems we are in reach of our real goal. What news do you have for me, Marshal Lyons?”

 

The officer turned and nodded gravely. He indeed had many of the features of the Lyons lineage now that one had a closer focus on him. He spoke with a commanding voice. “Those who betrayed us to the Enclave have paid for their folly and we have struck the Enclave with a series of precise counter attacks. Our units are moving to preplanned locations along with varied packages and parcels.”

 

He went on talking. “It is now confirmed with a raid that penetrated an Enclave bunker in Death Valley. Those new Enclavers are some kind of clone with a very dark sharp attitude to use so called normal humans. They suspect that we are enhanced and augmented but do not know the details of this any more than we know the details of their cloning processes or other secrets we have an inkling of. The images that came back from the Death Valley site were truly sickening with experiments done not only on captured animals and American citizens but even on Enclave normal humans now deemed expendable by the new clones. We rescued many of those older type of Enclavers who happily told us what they could and some have joined our cause after Sarsha and her people vetted them. Others were released because who would believe them or have the proof to be able to prove it to the public? A few we terminated.”

 

The scientist shook her head. “I would neither if I was one of them. I must return to the project. We are making final adjustments to the jumperships. I have a feeling that you have more to tell me. I sense you have more to tell.”

 

He nodded. “A Darkman corpse was found in the laboratories at the building complex above the hidden base, a legitamit research and development base for water regulation in desert climates. We have no idea what killed it and it vanished away before we could investigate it further. Our secret allies appear to still be assisting us. Oh, we again confirmed that Nazi secret technologies and knowledge, previously stolen from a crashed UFO in war time France and then warped into new forms, are being used and studied by the Enclave. We destroyed the Death Valley base as we departed, putting many a suffering lifeform out of its misery. We brought with us data on many projects and general research including something about super soldiers using something called Forced Evolutionary Virus of FEV.”

 

The scientist nodded. “I am grateful for that. Now I must go.”

 

She turned and hurried off.

 

With another shimmer all returned to normal.

 

3Dog looked around in astonishment. “How was that projected?”

 

2Kitty stroked her cats as if to make sure they were okay though they were calm enough. “It was projected into our minds. I do not know how I know this but I do. I am not sure what we should tell others. If the Brotherhood of Steel that we know of are aware that their organization actually goes way back before they were supposedly formed in Postwar America, then they may fear us having that secret.”

 

The DJ shook his head in wonder. “So both the BofS and the Enclave existed as far back as World War Two as did those Darkmen that Jasmine sent us a warning about. That Marshal Lyons spoke of the BofS having operated in secret for over a thousand years. I wonder what else is or has gone on that we don’t know about. Still, I have always wondered about that. Fighting the good fight is getting very complicated.”

 

They used the elevator to go down to the studio rooms where the Fre Triplets were doing a security sweep of the surrounding area, where Jogs was checking out old fashioned equipment to see how useful it might be and DJ Bot was assisting Jogs with some of its robotic devices. World War Two vintage big reel tape recorders would do fine to record much material and ease the strain on the shortage of more modern recording materials. Hundreds of old style records would play on the air waves with music, radio plays, comic moments, game shows and much else.

 

Knowing what they now knew, the two of them grabbed some coffee and went into the archives room full with big metal filing cabinets and sets of metal shelves full almost to overflowing with boxes and accordion boxes full of more files. There were also newspapers, magazines, journals, books and other published items. There were also many miscellaneous items. The archives chamber was very big and then, to their astonishment, the two found a second even bigger chamber also full of stuff but with a large archival work area at one end. This time there were also fairly large reels of black microfilm that could be used on rows of big bulky microfilm readers.

 

Thankfully there was a microfilm and a plastic card catalogue, both of them being large but very well organised. Unthankfully it turned out that many items were not catalogued, especially some of the most interesting ones, except in a very loose reference manner. Notes indicated that a crisis of some kind was forcing archives clerks to rush what they were doing.

 

It was 2Kitty who realised that the catalogued term Evalcen actually referred to the Enclave. She found a file referring with many neatly plastic enclosed WW2 newspaper articles and notes referring to them. The articles were from various important and also smart newspapers and none were front pagers. All referred quietly to the creation of something called the United States Research and Development Enclave. The USRDE was officially created to develop counter technologies to Nazi super weapons. Most articles went along with this line but two questioned the amazing amount of secrecy that went with this new agency and the small but important contradictions found in official reports of the agency. More amazingly than this was that one of these newspapers, it was called the Mystery Chronicle, dared to suggest that this agency was not new at all and was actually predated by something simply called the Enclave that had probably been created back in the very late 1800s during the short lived but violent Martian Invasion.

 

A last article had a black white photograph of a burned out double storey building with a headline stating that in a terrible incident the Mystery Chronicle newspaper and all of its staff had perished in a terrible fire. Nothing remained including any of the archives.

 

But then there was a precisely typed note stating that the Mystery Chronicle people, including families, had been safely brought to that base including archives and much else. This included those who had led the newspaper like Skully the woman and Muldis her male companion plus five crazy investigative reporters known as the Solo Gunmen though two were actually women.

 

3Dog and 2Kitty wondered how they would both run the newly moved GNR Station and solve these newly found mysteries.

 

 

Continued in SIXTEEN

[dezdimona]

I'm diggin this,great read

[Maharg67]

Thank you, Dezdimona! lol

 

SIXTEEN

 

 

The battlebuggy smashed through the light barricade with Ironsides Mercenaries inside firing off guns at the super mutants around them. The fast powerful machine was well armoured thanks to its atomic motor and bullets exploded off its side. The machine swerved, skidded a little, straightened out and then smashed into a group of stupid mutants to send them flying like skittles in a bowling lane.

 

Ironsides battlebuggies roared into action against the super mutant outpost about twenty Ks (kilometres) from Arefu. They had scouted the area well first and came in hard and fast along two good condition stretches of highway. Even as they did, snipers were picking off stupid mutants.

 

Marshal Ironsides himself was there, a man who was fitted into a robotic lower section, who once would have been in a wheel chair. He hovered over the ground and his upper half was in light power armour as were all the mercs. He fired an M60 general purpose machinegun, once common in the USDF, and pumped out 7.62mm bullets.

 

A stupid mutant screamed out stupidities as he charged at the Marshal swinging a heavy shredder, a device like a chain saw. The Marshal grinned, the hoverchair shot upwards and a hidden spike shot out and thrust right through the SM’s chest. The SM shuddered, cried out and dropped dead. The spike withdrew, all bloody, and slid back into its compartment.

 

The action was fast, hard and bloody.

 

More Ironsides came in fast but on foot now as the battlebuggies had smashed open the SM defences. The five fast moving machines circled the actual battlement surrounded outpost and fired in at the last standing defenders.

 

The last stupid mutant fell.

 

The Ironsides surged into the central part of the outpost and halted in shock. They had expected to find a normal outpost site with some blood and gore, some goodies to loot and the usual stuff found with stupid mutants. Even Marshal Ironsides was shocked as he floated there and looked into the hole that the SMs had dug up.

 

It was a horizontally placed VaultTec vault door, huge and armoured, and on it was ‘Vault-301’.

 

Marshal Ironsides knew of six Vaults in the DC Wastelands being 87, 92, 101, 106, 108 and 112. Vault-74 was a part vault with much of it blocked off. Other vaults seemed just to be crazy stories of the kind that were only too common in the DC Wastelands.

 

Each vault seemed to be the basis of some kind of sick experiment. Vault-87 was the super mutants created by FEV. Vault-92 was the white noise insanity. Vault-101 was never fully worked out but may have been the Overseer’s extreme power. Vault-106 was the drug induced insanity. Vault-108 was a hostility forming environment complete with psychopathic physically enhanced Gary clones. Vault-112 was reported to be full of Braun’s sick psychic virtual reality project with hundreds of victims in special status capsules innocently called loungers; Vault-112 had been stripped bare by the Enclave and Wastelanders had moved in to start a new settlement there. What Vault-74 had been meant for was not known.

 

But what was Vault-301 and what was its ‘experiment’ if there was one. He had a dark suspicion that he really did not want to know and another that, due to shortages of people, that the Ironsides Mercenaries would be ‘asked’ to solve the mystery.

 

He spoke to his people. “Get hold of the other Ironsides units and have them get themselves here ASAP. Set up the special long range secured radio communications equipment. I will need to speak with the new HQ at GNR Tower.”

 

Continued in SEVENTEEN

[Maharg67]

Jasmine in the Lamplight Caverns and also now her other self, Jas the girl child. What is Jasmine and what is she becoming?

 

3Dog in the new bunker-complex fairly close to the GNR Tower tying to juggle various goals. What is 3Dog?

 

Who and what is the Mysterious Stranger?

 

Where and what now is Professor Altman?

 

What and where is the Darkman? How many of him are there and where and what is the true Darkman?

 

Just who are the Subwayers and where did they come from?

 

What are the ghoul vampires and where did they come from?

 

What of the new super mutants and where are they coming from? Super centaurs, spider mutants, smart mutants both human sized and bigger and waspiders.

 

What is Vault-301 when the number of VaultTec Vaults was never supposed to have reached that high?

 

What is <SSS01> mean?

 

What of 3Dog and 2Kitty's experience, the flash from the past, and what did it mean?

 

???

[Maharg67]

SEVENTEEN

 

 

The Lincoln Memorial Centre was surrounded by the enemy after they struck with amazing speed and surprise to encircle it. Brotherhood of Steel soldiers, the ex-slaves and other Wastelander militia soldiers were putting up a good fight. It helped that energy fields and weapons could be powered by the fusion globe reactor in-below the complex.

 

Big laser cannons fired off sizzling beams of light that sliced through charging ranks of super mutants as if they were thin paper. Some WW2 vintage weapons had been delivered to the site and crude heat-beamers melted stupid mutant after stupid mutant. The heat-beamers were crude copies of the weapons that the Martian Invaders had used in the 1890s when their comet-ships had landed mainly in the British Isles.

 

Cannon shells, shells and shotgun shells were used with much care as possible. 40mm AAguns blew the swarms of waspiders right out of the air and great holes even in pounding behemoths. But the enemy had cannons also and a big laser cannon turret exploded dramatically, its single gunner dying instantly.

 

Major Ajax scowled. He was not even sure how he had come to be in charge of the defence of the LMC. What he did know was the proudly seated statue of President Lincoln was covered in protective material, that the semi-underground museum had proven to be amazingly useful and that there more people sheltering in the place than could be supplied even with basic food and medicine or even purified water. No aircraft could get to the LMC now and no supplies. There were also no medivacs taking place which meant the small make-shift hospital was getting crowded with wounded and even dying people that could not be helped.

 

Ajax was wearing Prewar combat armour taken from a National Guard Depot half buried under a bigger collapsed building. He was just a scavenger, a Wasteland nobody, who had put on the outfit, loaded up his brahmin, and had on a sudden urge headed off to fight at LMC. He never been a soldier let alone an officer and had not really thought about the ranking symbols on his uniform. Then in the chaos of the sudden attack he was swept into being in command. Strangely enough he had turned out to be a fine commander.

 

He spoke to his second command, a wiry middle aged woman named Talleo Tallman. “Did you get through to HQ at GNR Towers? We need some idea of when they can send reinforcements to break through the enemy encirclement.”

 

Talleo nodded. She had just come in from the radio chamber down some stairs from where he crouched looking at the bleak situation. She gave him and odd smile. Talleo wore the National Guard uniform of the new USDF. “Your rank has been confirmed, Major Ajax. Of course I knew you were not a soldier but now the people need you and, to my surprise, you are a very good officer. If anybody asks you became a major of the United States Defence Force about a month ago. If they ask for details, state they are classified. Any superior officer should know not to ask. How is it that you know how to command people so well?”

 

He shrugged. “Remember the settlement of Tank Springs just out from the ruins of Germantown?”

 

Talleo nodded. “Prospered for a while because its people found some underground water tanks full of very low radded water. Then the super mutants hit it fast and hard. There were no survivors.”

 

He shook his head. “There was one survivor. That is me, Mayor Alan Ajax, who killed five super mutants before being left for dead. I suppose all those who were taken were turned into super mutants though I am not sure what they would have done with the children.”

 

The lieutenant nodded. “The settlement was rebuilt and the water tanks reclaimed by the Rebirthers.”

 

He scowled. “I heard! Tough self righteous eco-religious fanatics in strange coloured power armour that they have never been seen out of. Can’t really be angry with them; they built a wonderful monument to the people of Tank Springs and kept the old name for the settlement out of respect for my people. But you know all this. I was a scavenger and trader for years; got pretty good at reading people.”

 

The tough looked woman nodded. “I am a security-intelligence officer for the Brotherhood of Steel. We heard that you saw something of interest happen in the settlement when the super mutants assumed you to be dead.”

 

Ajax frowned hard at her. “Yes, I surely did. The Darkman came there in his weird Victorian gentleman outfit. I can still feel the cold of him like something was trying to suck my very spirit out of my body. He waited there for a time. The stupid mutants were frightened off him, that was clear, but suddenly one attacked him. He was bigger, broader than the Darkman by far but the evil entity just ripped that stupid mutant into bloody bits with his hands. I had never seen anything so bad before and never want to see its like again. Somehow the Darkman kept the stupid mutant alive and in extreme agony until the very end and then sucked the life energies out of his victim.”

 

The commander turned to observe a black war-machine moving towards his battlements. It was a monstrous robotic destructor designed to demolish moderate sized structures quickly and efficiently. It had crude armour welded to it and weapons emplaced into it. Stupid mutants were running behind it and close to it. Even as he watched it crushed a standard sized stupid mutant and kept going as if the death meant nothing at all.

 

Ajax then went on talking. “The Darkman had a visitor. The visitor came in a small fast vertibird of the kind known as a Buzzbee. Only he left the flying machine. I have a photographic memory when it comes to faces and it took time to find out who the man was. It turned out to be Head Scribe Rothchild. He was disguised in a typical Wastelander outfit so at first I couldn’t quite place him. Then I remembered meeting him briefly when I took some valuable hitech to sell at the Citadel.”

 

The woman scowled. Then she muttered something nasty in fluent German. Then she spoke again in English. “Don’t take this personally but you know too much.” She raised a silencer equipped 9mm semiautomatic pistol and aimed it at him. “You should know that I am a freelance assassin and wouldn’t care to spit on those damned Brothers of Steel. The Darkman will reward me well for this.”

 

Ajax sighed. “You should know I once saw your face on a wanted poster put up by the Regulators. The Darkman will kill you once you are no longer useful by sucking away your life energies.”

 

She suddenly grunted in pain, blood flowed out of her mouth and she collapsed to the concrete floor. Of course she was dead. The young woman who stood there was the perfect image of a dumb blonde bimbo, sexy and adorable, tight in her fatigues, showing much cleavage and with big blue eyes.

 

Ajax sighed. “Yes, I thought there was something about you that didn't make sense. Do you believe what I said, Sarsha, about the great Rothchild?”

 

Sarsha nodded. "Yes we believe you. I am a security-intelligence officer for the newly reconstructed FBI. Go on and be Major Ajax. As soon as it can be arranged we are taking you to the GNR Tower with us."

 

He frowned. "Not before I finish what I started here. I figure it was you lot who set me up as commander here and as a target for that assassin but I have a job to do and I intend to finish it.

 

To his complete surprise she went over and kissed him.

 

Continued in EIGHTEEN