War of Realities in the DC Wastelands

[Maharg67]

FOURTEEN

THE MAN FROM SEARF

THE SAFE HOUSE IS NO LONGER SAFE

 

Alarms rang! The safe house was compromised. Some powerful and sophisticated force had detected him, had tracked him through the vast computerised network of network-systems of the District of Columbia. They were damaged, disorganised at various levels and parts had become isolated but more than one faction out there was attempting to repair, control and use the Compunetwork for various reasons of their own. He doubted that any enemy would approach the house soon but then again he would not dally too long. He had been over confident of his ability to probe with out being detected and had made mistakes of a kind that he would try hard not to repeat.

 

The big black eight wheeler machine was disguised cleverly as a 2075 mobile home owned by somebody who preferred a sleek black streamlining and low key decorative appearance. It was an ATV amphibious machine even as a disguise but in reality it was far more than it seemed to be.

 

The battlebuggy just fitted into a rear compartment. He took what he could use from the bunker and left the rest of it. He took from hidden compartments. He activated three androids and nine robots plus other hardware. The androids and three of the robots helped take items into the Blackfire, the real name of the type of machine.

 

The androids wore SEARF stealth armour suits, SASTs, but they were not true SEARF super soldiers for though having in many ways more capacity than standard humans, they were no match for real SEARF super-soldiers.

 

He placed the girl in the main room with the molerat and dogs. Another dog was sitting there but it was an animadroid that looked like an Alsatian (German Shepherd). The other dogs sniffed at it suspiciously and the molerat happily wandered over to say ‘hello’. The animadroid gave the molerat a friendly lick as Eddie’Jo had programmed the animal-android to do.

 

The super-soldier was grabbing up last moment maybe useful items when he sensed increasing-approaching danger. With a stack of children’s stuff in a box he raced into the fake mobile-home with robots and androids following with more maybe-useful stuff, much of it aimed at pleasing the girl.

 

The Blackfire would not go straight up to the area of the house but a big power slide door opened and revealed a tunnel mouth. A long dimly lit metallic tunnel snaked into the distance, showing just how much the President spent on the needs of SEARF. Rushing along it came zhouls, mindless ghouls with some mutated with claws, extended fangs and even barbed tails.

 

He gunned the machine right at them, smashing into them and crushing their dead bodies beneath his armoured vehicle. Behind them the power doors hummed quickly closed. More and more he crushed the zhouls as he sat in the driver’s chair but controlled it through cyberlinkage. He wondered how the zhouls had gotten into the secret and armoured tunnel but the answer came soon. A big side power door was open and on the other side was a partly collapsed utility tunnel. Zhouls were gathered there devouring dead zhouls and radroaches. They were feeding and satisfied for the moment so did not bother to attack.

 

The girl clambered into the front seat and did up the special arrangement of belts. Then he adjusted the chair so she could actually see what was happening.

 

There were no more zhouls and the tunnel went on. A clump of dead zhouls and a robotic lasergun turret showed why there were no more zhouls in that direction. Even they must have gotten to see the futility of dying for no gain.

 

Then they were going up slope and into a garage of another house. A power-door, disguised as a garage wall, slid closed behind them and moments later the big but surprisingly quiet machine was swinging out onto the street.

 

They were moving quite quickly along a street dotted with wrecks when something small and black zipped through the air, a robotic cruise-missile. The safe-house and its bunker both exploded savagely, hurling flames and debris, but mostly smoke and dust, up into the air.

 

Somebody had really been out to stop him from gaining access to certain parts of the Compunetwork.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

[Maharg67]

FIFTEEN

PASSING TIMES

:starwars:

 

 

Just over three months passed!

 

The battle of the Grand National Mall appeared to come to an end when the super/mutants suddenly withdrew, vanishing into the underground. The Orders of Steel and their allies found down there in the Subways the evidence that the super/mutants, both smart/mutants and stupid/mutants, had moved in large numbers through the underground ways. That is not just in the Subways but in the great Utility Network and even in various quasinatural and artificial cave systems created according to President James Patriot Jackson’s wishes. But there were those who were far from convinced this was the end of it and one was the powerful and influential Brother of Steel Elder Lyons.

 

Eddie’Jo and his companions in the Blackfire vehicle visited some smaller settlements, passed wandering groups of Brotherhood Outcasts with their robots and dealt with small bands of raiders, all of them gangers. They traded with the former and killed the latter. They managed to keep their disguise as wandering scavengers who had managed to get a mobile/home up and running. Only some gangers knew different and dead raiders don’t tell. By now he knew he was in what had been the old Delaware but which had been engulfed by the District of Columbia when President James Patriot Jackson had forced his big changes. Actually the area known as the new Delaware was now bigger than the old Delaware. At last they came to a new safe house, an unofficial one set up by SEARF that the mad president had not known about. This time it was a bunker beneath an old abandoned farm. On the way the group had grown a little.

 

The twins Aarie and Aaron, in LifeVault/101, were fascinated with their new discoveries. They passed on the knowledge to the rest of the rebel cell/network in the vault. Beatrice took the information in the form of a poem and passed them a copy of the birthday poem, which was her way of saying there was more to her clues than the importance of Sector/10. The twins began to wonder about the rebel network itself and who were the mysterious leaders who directed it from the shadows. The twins found much of their time taken up with training and studies plus work to do with a series of minor disasters that struck the vault. They tried but failed to get back to Charlie’s home base or his family.

 

Jack’O’Man and his people kept on ambushing slaver convoys but it got harder for the convoys became increasingly bigger and better armed. They also had to deal with platoons of Talon Mercenaries, some in light power armour but most in semipowered combat armour, doing search and destroy missions through the forest clad hills. The Antislavers knew the area better and had stronger reasons to fight but the Talon Mercenaries were a drainage on their resources. It did not help that the Regulators were forced to leave because of a sudden spike in violent crime in many areas of the DC/Wastelands.

 

At the big SuperDuperMart complex roughly north-north-east from the Republic of Dave, the bananadroids kept on dancing and the SEARF super/soldiers kept protecting the secret settlement there.

 

Captain Jane Eye kept skippering the UCCS Lucky Eddie on fishing trips but because of increasing dangers she now went out with two or more other fishing vessels plus a gunboat of the Union of Columbia River Guard.

 

Giant ants worshipped the strange baby girl and kept her safe in their underground nest. The baby was quietly happy.

 

Near Old Olney a deathclaw pack cared for its young and kept low, only hunting with care at night, because they sensed increasing threat in their area. After a while they moved into Old Olney itself as they sought safety in its great network of tunnels and great, surprisingly intact, complex of buildings.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

[species5478]

Battlebuggies, androids with stealth, giant ants...there's a little bit of everything in here.

[Maharg67]

Jus wait until the dragons, the Bunnies of Steel and the Clockwork Orange appears. Then it will be everything, well closer to it.

[Maharg67]

FIFTEEN

PASSING TIMES

 

Just over three months passed!

 

The battle of the Grand National Mall appeared to come to an end when the super-mutants suddenly withdrew, vanishing into the underground. The Orders of Steel and their allies found down there in the Subways the evidence that the super-mutants, both smart-mutants and stupid-mutants, had moved in large numbers through the underground ways. That is not just in the Subways but in the great Utility Network and even in various quasinatural and artificial cave systems created according to President James Patriot Jackson’s wishes. But there were those who were far from convinced this was the end of it and one was the powerful and influential Brotherhood of Steel Elder Lyons.

 

Eddie’Jo and his companions in the Blackfire vehicle visited some smaller settlements, passed wandering groups of Brotherhood Outcasts with their robots and dealt with small bands of raiders, all of them gangers. They traded with the former and killed the latter. They managed to keep their disguise as wandering scavengers who had managed to get a mobile-home up and running. Only some gangers knew different and dead raiders don’t tell. By now he knew he was in what had been the old Delaware but which had been engulfed by the District of Columbia when President James Patriot Jackson had forced his big changes. Actually the area known as the new Delaware was now bigger than the old Delaware. At last they came to a new safe house, an unofficial one set up by SEARF that the mad president had not known about. This time it was a bunker beneath an old abandoned farm. On the way the group had grown a little.

 

The twins Aarie and Aaron, in LifeVault-101, were fascinated with their new discoveries. They passed on the knowledge to the rest of the rebel cell-network in the vault. Beatrice took the information in the form of a poem and passed them a copy of the birthday poem, which was her way of saying there was more to her clues than the importance of Sector-10. The twins began to wonder about the rebel network itself and who were the mysterious leaders who directed it from the shadows. The twins found much of their time taken up with training and studies plus work to do with a series of minor disasters that struck the vault. They tried but failed to get back to Charlie’s home base or his family.

 

Jack’O’Man and his people kept on ambushing slaver convoys but it got harder for the convoys became increasingly bigger and better armed. They also had to deal with platoons of Talon Mercenaries, some in light power armour but most in semipowered combat armour, doing search and destroy missions through the forest clad hills. The Antislavers knew the area better and had stronger reasons to fight but the Talon Mercenaries were a drainage on their resources. It did not help that the Regulators were forced to leave because of a sudden spike in violent crime in many areas of the DC-Wastelands.

 

At the big SuperDuperMart complex roughly north-north-east from the Republic of Dave, the bananadroids kept on dancing and the SEARF super-soldiers kept protecting the secret settlement there.

 

Captain Jane Eye kept skippering the UCCS Lucky Eddie on fishing trips but because of increasing dangers she now went out with two or more other fishing vessels plus a gunboat of the Union of Columbia River Guard.

 

Giant ants worshipped the strange baby girl and kept her safe in their underground nest. The baby was quietly happy.

 

Near Old Olney a deathclaw pack cared for its young and kept low, only hunting with care at night, because they sensed increasing threat in their area. After a while they moved into Old Olney itself as they sought safety in its great network of tunnels and great, surprisingly intact, complex of buildings.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

Edited March 25, 2010 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

SIXTEEN

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS

UNCLE LEO TREKKING AND SINGING

 

Greyish clouds were filling the sky, coming in from the great Atlantic Ocean, and threatening to bring rain with them.

 

Uncle Leo was a most remarkable super-mutant, a great massemoth smaller than a behemoth but larger than a typical mutantor or even smaller smart-mutant. Yet he was not only calm he had a emanating calm about him that seemed to keep him out of danger and also those who came with him. Uncle Leo sang and the low beauty of his voice was another wonder when heard coming from such a figure. He had long ago abandoned armour and now wore a home made tunic and a robe, big rough sandals and a big wide brimmed hat. He had a backsack and a tall wooden staff.

 

He was followed by a collection of ghouls, semighouls, normies, molerats, molemice, two brahmin cows with packs, two packhorses, a squirrel, various birds and four super-mutants being a smart-mutant, two mutantors and a great hulking behemoth. There were also a whole lot of robots but no brainbots for they were actually cyborgs of a kind and rarely found out in the semiwilderness.

 

Uncle Leo sang as he led the others to what he sensed was safety. In the distance rose a small mountain shaped like a volcano even though it was no such thing. JPJ had ordered it done and so it was, a great fake volcano that could spit out great amounts of fireworks to fill the sky. At the base of the small mountain was a great sporting complex designed and built for Olympic Games that had never taken place. Multiple purpose domed arenas, low hulking team quarters, community centres and much else all built to look like beautiful polished marble. Now it looked like dirty marble with some cracks here and there.

 

In the distance moved a convoy of raider battlebuggies and bigger battlewagons. The raiders would have seen Uncle Leo and his group through binoculars or scanscopes but they did not approach. There was something about him they did not like and anyway he had a bad habit of converting raiders into peaceful lunkheads.

 

Then he saw the tourist centre to one side and the great low hulking shape of a SuperDuperMart partly covered by rubble, a partly crumbled large hotel, clubs, other shops, a museum and other structures.

 

But to one side of that lay an area laid greyish and horribly burned out of the ground, almost smooth, by a disintegrator super-weapon. It stretched out, a great bowl of a crater partly filled with beautiful blue water. There was life there, often mutated, of floating plant forests, slowly swimming plantimals, great fish and much else besides. Waterbirds were common there, tough ones able to survive the harsh predators. It was a great shallow bowl stretching into the distance.

 

Jutting from the very centre of that bowl was a massive monolithic structure of metallic grey stone. The disintegrator weapon had not got past its defences but nothing had entered or left the great structure since Doomsday. It was said that before the disintegrator weapon had hit it that the towering structure, relatively low hulking in appearance thanks to its width, had been mostly hidden underground.

 

Uncle Leo turned his people and started to lead them, he considered all of them to be his people, towards the SuperDuperMart that promised shelter sooner. He sensed friendly people and safety there though also some minor possible conflict.

 

Uncle Leo gave the great monolith a hard look for a moment. There was something about it that troubled him and he was rarely troubled. The monolith reminded him of a great hard tombstone hiding something menacing and quite evil.

 

It also reminded him of one President James Patriot Jackson, an evil super genius, charming enough to mesmerise millions of people, who he had known long ago before some force had turned Leo into Uncle Leo the super-mutant.

 

Briefly he wondered how Fawkes was doing back in LifeVault-087 and again regretted that he had not been able to rescue the other super-mutant. No, Uncle Leo had fled from the vault because of a powerful, dark presence that he had sensed there, an entity that had sought to do him great harm before he was ready to deal with it.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

 

SEVENTEEN

BETTER THAN TRANQUILLITY LANE

ROSE’AMA GOES FOR A RUN IN THE PARK

 

Rose’Ama ran past an old man curled up in rags, trying to shelter under a big old bush. She threw a Silver Dollar at him and the old man grinned in gratitude with a mouth that missed most of its teeth as he caught the coin expertly. The old man did not have to speak of his crime. His blotched red skin covered with small painful sores and the small red tattoos on him spoke of DISLOYALTY THOUGHT CRIME against President James Patriot Jackson and his regime.

 

She was youthful looking, beautiful and wore a tight jogging jumpsuit that accentuated the curves of her body. Her running shoes thudded on the concrete paving of the footpath that wound through the Grand Central Park of Utopiaburg Three of Utopia-City. She ran from shade into warm sunshine and back again. A squirrel darted along the branch of a tall tree dotted with great wonderful flowers.

 

It was so much like real existence that it was easy to forget at times that it was all an amazingly ‘real simulation’ based on a ‘constant quasireflection of reality’. Data had been stolen from Doctor Braun’s super virtual reality project that led to the creation of Tranquillity Lane and other VR scenarios. NeoDC, as it was sometimes called, was a more advanced version of Doctor Braun’s work thanks partly to the amazing genius of President James Patriot Jackson. It was vastly bigger, more sophisticated and more detailed.

 

‘A better reality than normal reality’ is how President James Patriot Jackson would put it in one of his monthly speeches to the good citizens of NeoDC. Many would have voiced a very different opinion to the President if they had dared to do so.

 

Better Than Life? A citizen could do some things that were impossible in real life but this depended on various factors such as built up credit, rank privileges and earned awards, rewards and bonuses. Yet mostly it was much like normal life. It could be harmful and frightening because of the President’s dark subconscious influences as he ruled this world directly from his own remarkable mind.

 

One had to be careful even in the beauty of such a big botanical park and its amazing variety of life. The old man had chosen well, a corner close to a police pagoda with a regular policebot patrol, but even there he was under some risk. Runners, joggers and walkers normally went in groups for mutual protection. They carried the few weapons that normal citizens could legally carry and any useful objects that were not classified as weapons, such as baseball bats. They might have staid away but life was administered by a series of official schedules.

 

Rose’Ama ran alone on purpose. She wished to attract danger and to study the danger that was attracted to her. She had quasireality mageware to back her up and hidden weapons plus defences. As a science-officer of the Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization, she was officially commissioned to carry out such studies. Not that the young woman liked to do such dangerous missions, far from it, but it paid well in credit as wages, allowances, bonuses and sometimes, awards or rewards. Anyway she wasn’t given a choice.

 

A party of joggers jogged past her and a man carrying a thick umbrella looked at her as if she was a fool but he also ogled her in what he assumed was a subtle manner.

 

She darted up around a big fountain spraying cool water up into the air and then heard the hooting laughter of clowns. It should have been pleasing, a happy sound, but it managed to sound quite evil. Clowns were creatures in that realm and they tended to go rogue, to mutate into monsters and to hunt for children in parks to terrify or worse.

 

What did this say about the President? Did he have a fear of clowns, even a hate of clowns, inherited from childhood experiences?

 

Rose’Ama reached into a hidden jumpsuit pocket and palmed a small mageware sphere. Then she saw the clowns. They were vulgar, hideous distortions of normal clowns. They had fangs and claws. They were surrounding a young mother and her pram with a child in it. The woman was quite hysterical but the little girl was not only calm she seemed to be holding the clowns at a distance somehow.

 

Rose’Ama knew at once that she would be making no official report about the girl and her ability to push away fiendish clowns. No, instead an unofficial report, a secret one, would be sent to the rebel cell-network.

 

Two clowns turned with bulging codpieces and glowing blood red noses, to face Rose’Ama. She hurled the mageware sphere and it struck a clown to explode. The clown screamed, shimmered and vaporised but so did three clowns close to it.

 

A clown screamed and came rushing at her from with the side with amazing speed and agility. The deformed ex-human slashed at her with long extended claws. Rose’Ama whirled with the attacker, avoiding the claws, and struck him with lightening fast punches. He died and vanished with a sparkling shimmer.

 

The last two clowns were no longer a threat, were no longer distorted or demented. Instead they were happy entertainers doing their best to make the girl happy. One juggled coloured objects that changed shape as they went through the air while the other made funny farting noises and held his big red nose. The child laughed in glee.

 

The mother was trying to compose herself with mixed results. “Thank you for assisting us but we can go it alone now.” It was obvious she was trying hard to cover up something.

 

Rose’Ama took the hand of the woman in an attempt to reassure her. “I need your cooperation in order to help conceal your daughter’s true nature. I serve as a science officer to the Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization but I am a freedom fighter. I have to make a report about the clowns. I will report that your daughter was very frightened. It means editing the audio-visuals in a special manner. Thankfully these kinds of reports are only considered secondary to the Security Network-System and I should easily be able to get past the basic examination that they normally go through. We need to smuggle you out of here and to NeoSanctuary.”

 

The other woman frowned but there was a look of desperate hope in her eyes. “I heard whispers of that but I only considered it to be a fantasy of the desperate.”

 

Rose’Ama smiled some more. “It is real and it needs people like your little girl as much as it wants to protect them, which is greatly.” She slipped a basic looking bizcards out of a pocket and passed it to the woman along with a dull plastic cred-card. “Go here and take only what you need plus a few extra things. The cred-card will give you a week’s access to 1,000cred. You need to spend it or transfer it by the end of the week.”

 

Rose’Ama kissed the little girl, felt the intense psychic power of this one, and found herself becoming linked to her. Then the mother, the girl in the pram and the two clowns went off, the clowns being most protective now of the mother and child.

 

Then she began the process of giving a report that was only half truth but a very convincing half truth.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

[Maharg67]

EIGHTEEN

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS

GUNFIGHT AT THE OK BARBERSHOP

 

Lucas drew his guns and fired but he was not foolish enough just to stand there. He dropped down into a crouch even as he aimed his RC-Specials, blasting away with .38 Magnum calibre bullets. The barbershop pole suffered a hole blasted in one side but the two raider spies took it each in the chest and guts. The recoil was heavy but Lucas was a Wastelander with generations of influence from the FEV and very tough survival of the fittest evolutionary forces. So were the raiders but they were also stupid, half drunk and over confident; or at least they had been.

 

The OK Barbershop was one of the row of shops, of buildings half dug into the side of the crater, that ran along Shop’To’Drop Wideway. Like the other shops it was just a fairly rough, mostly metallic box with a sloping roof over a small attic space and some faded coloured paint brushed over areas of it. But it was a favourite place for some old dudes to sit on the porch and grumble about young people while going on about how wonderful things used to be. Storm clouds were coming in from the Atlantic Ocean and bringing a promise of a rainstorm.

 

Not being stupid, the old dudes had abandoned their rocking-chairs and were hunkered low, all of them holding guns or knives.

 

The raiders’ bullet flew over him and, thankfully, struck nobody though one projectile came uncomfortably close to a diving Lucy West. The young lady landed on her front and let loose a very unladylike string of curses.

 

A third raider spy leapt from a higher Wideway of a big terraced balcony above the Sheriff to come down on him with a bowie style knife. But there were a whole lot of mingled shotgun, rifle and pistol shots so her riddled body hit the ground, lifeless, away from Lucas.

 

Raider spies had only been gangers and not those damned super-smartdrug enhanced monsters but that was bad enough. Gangers were moving in increasing numbers closer to Megaton and into the Springvale ruins as they fled from more powerful forces such as berserkers, ravers and reavers. Troubles elsewhere were starting to cause troubles more locally. It was the same through out much of the DC-Wastelands.

 

Moria Brown came out of Craterside Emporium, next to the Craterside Supplies run by her family, and stared in wonder at what was going on. She took out a small notebook from a pocket and wrote something down quickly with a stub of a pencil. The sheriff got to his feet and slipped his guns away. Then he began to check the fallen woman, the raider who was closest to him. Efficient and experienced, soon he had taken all of use from them except for the filthy underwear.

 

Soon turned out these raiders were members of the Redeye-Slashers, a large and fairly well organised raider gang. Reliable whispers were that they had taken over Springvale Senior High School as their base of operations and they were doing something secretive down in the basement levels of that big set of buildings. The raider spies had stupidly written this down in a crude and easily broken code on an old envelope. Apart from that there was the loot of guns, some Emergency Issue Coins, a packet of neobacco cigarettes, some ammo, four knives, steel knuckle-busters, a half empty packet of bubblegum, a bad smelling lucky rabbit’s foot, some keys, two stimpaks, a radaway, a faded torn 3Dphoto of an old woman, a gold ring, some neck-chains, one psycho, a baseball, two gold finger-ingots and four NukaBars (foodbars). The armour, clothes, footwear and other gear were heaped to one side. Photographs were taken of the dead faces, the fingerprints were taken and the bodies were hauled away to the morgue, such as it was. The bodies would most likely be buried quickly because of the lack of facilities in the morgue.

 

Something moved overhead in the sky, something fairly big, as a Sisterhood of Steel aeroship came gently into land between the outer and inner walls. That is on the wide horizontal ring of land around the crater but inside the outer wall. It was an aeroship thanks to its advanced, more efficient liftergas rather than an airship which would use old fashioned helium or hydrogen gas. It had a thick armoured hull, instrumentation and weapon turrets, portholes, hatches and other features. It was shaped like a saucer with two fins above and one below, all three being aft.

 

While the Orders of Steel and the Union of Columbia got on quite well enough, they were still wary of each other. The Sheriff wanted to know why the Sisterhood of Steel were bringing one of their few, valuable aeroships to Megaton and what was in it. Yet there was work to do with the raider spies. He had to take statements, fill out some basic forms, fill out a form for the Lawkeepers Network of Sheriffs, Regulators and Police, before he could investigate the aeroship’s arrival.

 

People were moving to prepare the settlement for coming hard weather. Shutters were coming down, tunnels were being lit up, the power windwheels were being tied down, structural integrity was being checked. Lights shone in the jet airliner section overhead, against the wings and the big fanjet engines. The buildings, rampways, wideways, smaller balconies, wheelways and other structures going up the sides of the great big teardrop shaped crater were all being prepared. Rainwater tanks would be filled including the big reserve tank buried at the bottom of the crater. Water flowing strongly down certain channels would provide hydroelectric power. Since the would be very low rad, very clean, people would take the opportunity to have baths and showers. Water would be used in a lavish way for a short time that normally people would not dare do.

 

If too much water fell into the crater, big old flood hatches would have to be opened to let excess water flow down into the big cave system below Megaton. Down there was a fast flowing underground river, caverns and other spaces that were very tricky to get down to or through. Sometimes Megatonfolk went down to explore and to look for goodies or just to get water in harsh hot dry conditions. Sometimes they did not all come back or any of them at all. There were monsters down there, both known and more mysterious of nature.

 

Confessor Cromwell bustled up to halt in front of the sheriff. Lucas sighed inwardly for he did not much like the pompous old fool. Cromwell may have meant well but he tended to be patronising as he assumed that he had some great spiritual insight that made him somehow wiser and smarter than others. He huffed in his lightly stained robes. “Sheriff, this is terrible, terrible. As you know we of the Holy Following of Atom, we who follow his humble but majestic path to glorious heavenly enlightenment and salvation, wish to draw more folks into our following. How can we do this if they do not feel safe here? Really, sheriff, must you resort to violence this way? I say no!”

 

Lucas sighed. “Confessor Cromwell, the raiders were spying seeking to learn more of Megaton’s latest changes so as to better infiltrate, invade and conquer us. If we did not stop them then your precious followers would suffer most likely terror, torture and death. We attempted to capture them, offered them a chance to surrender, but they chose to shoot it out and they died. Please go back to your church, your bomb its cradle, your podium, and leave me in peace.”

 

Cromwell frowned. “The mayor will here about this.”

 

Lucas grinned at looked up at the front of the aircraft way above where Mayor Rodney Brown, great uncle to Moira Brown, lived as a recluse with his telescopes, his robots and a huge collection of glossy 3Dphoto pornography. Doc Church would visit him about once a month to make sure he was okay and to play chess with him. Moira Brown would go up with supplies and stay up for a night or two; there were whispers that she served him in various more personal ways despite their blood relationship.

 

Then he looked around at the big three level Church of Atom where many Followers (Children) of Atom actually lived as well as meditating, praying, working and doing what ever else they did there. The structure plunged deep into the side of the crater. It was an open secret that at least half the followers were just Wastelanders seeking a place to stay and that Cromwell knew this but let them stay anyway; it was one of the few things that Sheriff Lucas Simms actually liked about the priest with his bizarre religion. The big building also sheltered dogs, cats, brahmins, goats, chickens and other animals in the lowest level.

 

The other man turned and stormed off. As for the loot from the raiders, it was going to go into the ‘community chest’, actually an underground storeroom, where it would hopefully be distributed in the fairest manner. That is except for the guns and ammo that would go to the armoury or, in some cases, to a workshop to be fixed up or recycled.

 

Three of his five human deputies were there, two of them being part-timers. He had them, two protectron robots, four eyebots patrolling around the outer wall and four deputy dogs. They and eight volunteer deputies were not enough even if he had a back-up of his deputy sheriff who looked after the jail, the assistant sheriff who did the administration and a deputy parrot who cussed at everybody. Megaton had over a hundred thousand people but the damned Megaton Town Council still refused to fund an increase in his resources.

 

He sighed and went back to work.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

Edited March 25, 2010 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

NINETEEN

TWINS IN LIFEVAULT-101

EXPLORING THE VENTILATION SHAFTS

 

 

 

The twins returned to Charlie’s secret base of operations only to find that it was stripped of everything useful, anything of interest, and abandoned. Even the status storage capsules with the dead brainabugs were gone. There were signs that others had searched the chamber after it had been abandoned but no real clues to who had done so or why.

 

But they did pick up faint psychic impressions that indicated humans in armour like those of the Special Patrols. They were drawn to a slightly loose grate style hatch in the ceiling and were soon crawling quickly along a fairly wide ventilation shaft. They picked up the smell of radroaches and other types of radbugs. Radroaches were bad enough but there were worse things out that way.

 

They had investigated the brainabugs further and had come to the conclusion that the creatures were but one part of a bigger and more complicated technological operation. The brainabugs helped to link human brains with some sort of specialised network-systems. The vault’s scientific databanks did mention certain experiments carried out in the 2060s that used a mixture of gen-engineered organisms and advanced hardware, software and firmware to link human mentalities deeply into full sensory linkage with various kinds of simulations. The public databanks did not carry enough details and the restricted ones were very hard to get into. So they hacked their way into the restricted databanks in a couple of minutes, anyway, only to find the datafiles they wanted had been removed to inaccessible forbidden databanks.

 

The ventilation shaft turned left and then gently sloped upwards. The ignored other, branching off, shafts. They passed thrumming ventilations fans inside safety cages. Then they were dropping carefully down into a big dimly lit chamber. The big room seemed to be a laboratory-workshop of advanced design but with many laboratory benches as well. There were regen-tanks, status storage capsules, various compact machines, banks of computer mainframes and databanks, a labtron robot (designed to work in a laboratory), cupboards, lockers and other facilities.

 

A fine layer of dust covered everything except some areas where people had moved around and had looted various smaller useful items. Locker, cupboard, drawer and other storage spaces had been stripped.

 

The laboratory-workshop was not in the official 3Dmap of LifeVault101. They had entered a sector that did not officially exist.

 

It was in the next big chamber that they found the large gencloner machine, an intricate almost neat tangle of upright capsules, boxes, bundles of cables, pipes, cylinders and other shapes. It was deactivated and empty except for one semitransparent capsule where there was the collapsed, well preserved dead body of a young albino type human man.

 

They gained what information they could, took recordings and notes, grabbed some small easily carried loot and returned back to the main vault; they had to do so lest their absence be detected and they get into trouble.

 

They found their father’s fingerprints on a manila folder with some administrative documents inside requesting that certain basic research supplies be replaced from ‘central depot stores’.

 

They were quickly gaining the understanding that the experiments in LifeVault-101 were part of a far greater research and development program that went far beyond the official vault area and probably beyond the whole vault itself.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED

[Maharg67]

TWENTY

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS

FAWKES IN A CELL

 

 

 

Fawkes could only hear muffled noises through the thick armaglass that allowed anybody to look in at him in his metallic chamber. The super-mutant sat on the bed he had reinforced in a jury rigged manner and tapped on the keyboard of his functioning computer terminal keyboard. The lumbering stupid-mutants had decided that it was something they need not bother about and the very few so called smart-mutants he had seen had walked past his cell with out even looking in at him.

 

The metallic cells held experimental subjects against their will but he suspected that many of the hundred or so chambers were empty. Activity was not great in the hallways outside. Super-mutants of the mutantor size would patrol with various weapons, going solo or in pairs. Sometimes a stupid-mutant would stride past pushing a metal carrycart of stuff or a wheeled bodycart with a body strapped to it. Yet most of the time the hallway outside remained quiet and empty.

 

Fawkes was a massemoth himself, bigger than the mutantors and smaller than the behemoths. He had to hunker a little to fit through even the large vault doors. He wore a ripped blue jumpsuit that had been designed for his body and which had on it both LIFEVAULT-087 and his experimental ID code.

 

He was still smart. Indeed he was even smarter now than he had been as a human. The transmutation process had effected him in a unique manner as it did just a sprinkling of humans. The bigger the super-mutant, the stupider they tended to be.

 

He sighed as he slowly and carefully read the screen, which was not designed for super-mutant eyes, and slowly gained a headache. He was reading an adventure of the famous character, Sherlock Holmes, as he solved another mystery crime in late Nineteenth Century London. Handsome cabs, ladies and gentlemen in fine clothes, dock workers, street urchins, proudly foolish Scotland Yard police inspectors, toad in a hole and much else was quite fascinating.

 

Yet he was lonely and he longed to be either free or to have good company or, better still, both. He wanted badly out of that underground vault where he had suffered so much pain.

 

He sighed again and closed his eyes. He would rest them for a while and his growing headache would ebb away. Then he would eat the last of the radroach meat a super-mutant had left him, drinking it down with fresh tepid water.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

[Herculine]

I don't want people to thing I'm like a broken record just repeating the same things over and over...

 

...but if something is really good I can't say anything but that it's really good.

 

This is really good!