Fallout The Eagle And The Bear [Fallout AU]

prinCZess said:

Hmm, that wouldn't seem overly-influential, at least in the short run, unless the NCR went on an adventure into Panama to capture the canal and sallied their way into the Gulf of Mexico...Which we've already heard is basically surrounded by Enclave-US islands after they slapped out Gran Colombia, so probably comparable to being 'their lake'.

So, wild speculation...'Battle of Panama' looks like it might be a thing. Either on the eastern side because the NCR tries to cross-over, or because the US tries to sally through against them and gets confronted on the west...Assuming the Panama Canal survived nuclear holocaust.

Click to expand...

There is the Nicaragua Canal ... as per the actual proposal to basically create an artificial strait by digging it with nuclear weapons. And yeah, it's gonna be a hell of a chokepoint.

Aaanyway:

Map found in the 2329 Edition of Geography And You, a middle-school geography textbook used in reintegrated US territory.



TL;DR; the official map of E-USA's current area of control.

One more chapter and then we hit Texas.

==*==

12:00 EST, July 5 2331

Fort Constantine, South Carolina, Southeast Commonwealth, USA

George M. Walker walked through the mess to his squad’s appointed table, the sound of the drill sergeant’s voice still running through his mind. Shortly after waking up at 6AM to the shrill tone of a bugler walking through the barracks and sending an ear-splitting tone from his instrument, he’d showered and been shaved – which he was glad had been hidden by the campaign hat he was wearing, a looser version of the stiff black leather one worn by senior NCOs and junior officers. The rest of his garrison uniform consisted of black leather shoes, then a dark blue cotton set of pants and shirt and with attached rank insignia of a PVT-1 on his right breast, and dark grey steel buttons; NCOs got brass, commissioned officers got silver, and those at Colonel or above got gold, with eagles carved into the metal. Or so he had heard in a book of factoids he’d read as a kid. He’d been inspected – made sure that his clothes were spotless and that every one of those buttons sparkled. If he failed one of those, he’d get twenty push-ups for a first offence. After that, it’d be forty for the next few failures; then five lashes each following on from then. The intent was to build an ethic of conscientiousness – if a soldier failed to clean his uniform properly, how could he be trusted to keep his gear clean?

He could still hear the man’s ferocious voice as he remembered the first part of his training this morning. Endless, endless drilling. Turning left and right, then front, then presenting arms, then turning around, then marching to and fro – in lines, in squares, and so forth. One of them had asked what the point was learning drills that dated back to the eighteenth century – the instructor’s response had been instant and brutal:

“That’s not the fucking point, you moron. Of course, we’re not gonna whip the rebels by lining up on the open field in front of them! The point is that you – and that means all of you – instantly! Obey! Orders! When your commander orders you to hold a bridge, or storm an enemy strongpoint, or take a hill – you will say ‘Sir, yes, sir!’ and get! Right! To! It! That is what I am teaching right now, and if you disrupt training again with another moronic question it’s five lashes!”

Following on, it’d been weapons training. Not actual shooting at targets – but repeatedly going through the motions of looking down sights, reloading, kneeling to fire, firing from the hip, field-stripping a laser rifle, wiping down the focusing crystals, etc. Over and over, for two hours – again, the intent was to make the necessary movements instinctive. There had been no dissent … they were all familiar with at least some of the techniques from high school Marksmanship class.

And then … physical training. What seemed like endless push-ups and pull-ups and sit-ups and weightlifting, and so on, for two hours. All while the drill sergeant made motivational speeches:

“Perhaps more important than the physical element of this training is the mental. To get through this, you will have to want to win! And that is what makes a United States soldier! Not the power armour, but the will to win! Contrary to what you might have thought, we are not in the business of teaching people to die gloriously. When we fought the Japanese 400 years ago, they went marching out looking to die gloriously – and they achieved that goal! But we won. Because while they were fighting to die, we were fighting to win! Never forget that!”

And so he went to the mess, to meet the rest of the men he’d be fighting alongside for the next four years – unless his contract was extended until the war ended, which he noted was a real possibility. They'd slept in the same barracks, but he hadn't really noticed much and there had been no time to talk there or during their training sessions. So he sat down amongst the men of his squad - 12 in all, to be divided into two fireteams and put under a more experienced sergeant.

He blushed as he noticed a girl sitting opposite him – a Latin beauty of his age, with dark eyes and until very recently black hair, with honey-brown skin. He took a moment to remember what he had promised to Arlene after they had made love, and also the code of military conduct in regards to fraternisation, with attendant punishment.

“Hi,” he said, wanting to establish a connection. “I’m George Walker.”

“I’m Laurita Velasquez,” the girl replied with traces of an accent. “But you can call me Rita.”

“You come from Cuba?”

“Yeah, but papa took me and the rest of the family to the mainland with him when I was young. Said it was better over there – not much difference now, but it’s been so long that he won’t leave.”

“What’s he do?”

“He owns a convenience store – very tough work. What’s your papa do?”

George blushed from embarrassment, trying to think of a way to say it that didn’t come off as arrogant.

“He owns a mining company. Rare earths in Greenland.”

“Rich kid, huh?” the voice was deeper, definitely masculine, and from his right. He turned round to look at the speaker. Chocolate-coloured skin, slightly taller than him, looked about his age. He didn’t know how to respond to the question.

“No need to take it that badly,” the man continued. “We’re all grunts here, no matter who our families are.”

“Heh. So where you are from?”

“Pittsburgh. Pop works at one of the steel mills. Name’s Henry Tyler. I'd prefer it if you called me by my last name.”

“Nice to meet you, Tyler.”

“Coulda gone into baseball – I had plenty of talent scouts interested in me back home. But the country needs soldiers right now far more than it needs baseball players.”

“That’s certainly true.”

The young man sitting on the other side of George spoke up next. He was blond – or had been before being shaved – and had vivid blue eyes.

“Hi,” he said with a pronounced Southern drawl. “Name’s Ray Paulson. I’m from a small farm up near Chapel Hill – family’s owned the land since before the nuclear war. Ain’t that impressive?”

“I guess it is, Ray. Why’d you join up?”

“I wanted to see more of the world outside of ol’ Carolina. Plus, I read in the paper about what the secesh did to that freedom fighter a week ago, and, you tell me, a man just can’t live and let live with that kind of beastliness.”

George knew what the incident had been – it’d been all over the papers the week before Independence Day. The rebels had reportedly captured a freedom fighter and – after torturing him for information – crucified him to a barn door with bayonets. Then they’d jeered at him for hours while he slowly died and left his body as a warning. Like many stories coming out of Texas, it was unverifiable, but certainly lurid enough to draw the attention of the press – and the DPI, which definitely had its own reasons for promoting such stories.

“Yeah, we’ve got to stop them. It’s like the President said – there’s no low they won’t stoop to in their campaign to destroy us.”

==*==

NCR Presidential Palace, Shady Sands, NCR State of Shady Sands

15:00 PST, July 15 2331

President Matthew Kimball looked over the table and the documents on it. General Robertson was giving a report over video-link on the capabilities of the mixed NCR/Brotherhood task force, the one being assembled in the Midwestern Brotherhood’s territory. Once the Deseret soldiers arrived, they’d be good to go, he estimated. Kimball killed the link.

“We should move onto the Enclave already,” Vice President Victor Cole said, spitting. “Arroyo, Vault 13 … while the Enclave still exists they’re still unavenged. My ancestors … Richardson can’t suffer enough in Hell for what he did to them – and the Enclave still hold him as a national hero! That’s proof it’s all a lie in my view – all their claims of peace and freedom, of order being restored, et cetera. Propaganda to damage our morale and get Texas to turn against us.”

“I don’t deny that those victims need justice, Mr. Vice President,” Kimball replied. “But we need to wait. Get the Enclave to overcommit to Texas and they’ll weaken themselves elsewhere. Smash their major industrial centres, then push onto the Eastern Seaboard. Then we can be rid of their threat once and for all.”

And then all the real work can begin, Kimball mused. With the Enclave out of the picture for good, and their heavy industry stripped and relocated to California, the NCR would have no rivals. Then they could create Greater California – a superstate stretching from Alaska to Colima, from the Pacific to the Rocky Mountains and Western Sierra Madre, surrounded by a halo of dependent states stretching across North America, protected by its armies and giving it resources to be sold back to them as finished goods. And then there were the overseas territories waiting to be given once more the guiding light of civilisation … Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, the far eastern reaches of Siberia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand – the Pacific would ultimately be a Californian lake.

From the ashes of America would rise a new world superpower – Cassandra Moore had only spoken about dominance of North America, but it was Matthew Kimball and his successors who would enact a truly world-altering vision.

But before that happened he would have to win the war. And as for that – Gran Colombia had sent 300,000 “volunteers”, a force that had already entered the country with the assistance of the NCR’s transport Zeppelin armada. His other allies – the Enclave’s oldest enemies – had promised 400,000 to fight the old foe. Regrettably NCR logistics would only be able to bring them in by 2334, but by then Kimball was certain the war would be all over but, as they said, the crying. More occupation troops would always be useful though.

And there was another factor sure to be important. Dr. Walter “Walt” Irving, Special Advisor on the Enclave, spoke up. He was a bespectacled, pudgy man with greying black hair – somewhat older than Kimball, he’d been a journalist during the Second Legion War of the late 2290s, risking crucifixion by gangs of Legion remnants to report from the frontlines in Arizona. Following that, he’d earned a PhD in Pre-War History at Shady Sands University and become renowned within the NCR as its foremost expert on the Enclave, writing bestsellers such as The Capital “Wasteland”: Enclave Claims of Barbarism Examined; American Elitism: Pre-War Antecedents to the Enclave and The Ronto Slavery System: Fact or Fiction?. Most recently in a non-official capacity, he’d written an op-ed in the California Times conclusively debunking Enclave propaganda claims such as the existence of the giant robot “Liberty Prime”, that their 71-year-old President Nate Washington was a pre-War survivor, and so on and so forth. Of course, the NCR military had ignored the first one completely, which rankled him.

“It’s no use treating enemy propaganda as if it were true,” Irving had argued. “We must maintain a reality-based approach to the threat the Enclave poses, not one that’s based on TV images that I’ve demonstrated are of men wearing crude robot suits.”

To which the military had responded that they had their own sources which proved the existence of Liberty Prime, at which point Irving had demanded to see them, upon which he was told that they were classified. Furious, he had then written another op-ed accusing them of making up enemy super-weapons to justify increases in their budget, which had almost seen him fired from his position.

“Mr. President,” Dr. Irving said. “We have to keep in mind that the Enclave ground troops in themselves consist of only 300,000 to 600,000 men, as military intelligence has assured me. The rest are auxiliary troops who are given inferior equipment – no power armour, lower-quality armored vehicles, et cetera. This tells me that Enclave leadership is deeply concerned about their loyalty – therefore upon our invasion I guarantee that large numbers of these auxiliaries will defect and fight on our side. We just need to liberate, say, Chicago, and there’ll be a widespread uprising. One good kick to the door, Mr. President, and the whole edifice will come crashing down.”

“You can say that, doc,” Kimball replied. “But the population are already uneasy about our intervention in the Lone Star Republic.”

He gestured to the square below the window of the Presidential Office, where a small crowd had gathered. “TEXAS ISN’T WORTH ONE DROP OF NCR BLOOD” some signs read; “RICH MAN’S WAR, POOR MAN’S FIGHT” blustered others.

“Ungrateful bastards,” commented VP Cole.

“Yes, they’re in a state of discontent right now,” Dr. Irving stated. “But that discontent is merely the anxiety of a runner itching to start a race. Once we actually start taking on the Enclave, they’ll flock to the NCR banner – and once we expose the atrocities that’ve been going on in their territory for decades, righteous fury will overwhelm them. They’ll be all too eager to wipe out the last tainted legacy of Old America, so our continent can finally let go of the past, of its Old World blues, and properly begin again.”

==*==

Austin, Lone Star Republic

CST 17:00, July 18 2331

James Samuel Garner, President of the Lone Star Republic, looked out the window – another black cloud of smoke was rising on the horizon, as it had for the past few minutes. Pro-American militants had bombed another police station – dozens were dead, hundreds injured. Another day in the interminable war that he had been forced into. The occasional shell passed between the sector of the city the rebels controlled and the rest, even as firefighters put out the blaze.

He hadn’t wanted to launch a coup at first. Carrera’s goal of “reunification” had been too radical, turning the LSR back into the Texas Commonwealth from whose ruins it had risen. It had been popular, especially among those in the eastern regions who often witnessed the wealth and technological sophistication of US territory. But it would have destabilised the region, brought in an NCR invasion backed by those Brotherhood elitists – and Garner had not wanted to see war brought to Texas.

It should have been a simple thing – a quick takeover of power, a retention of the Lone Star Republic’s neutrality between the NCR and the USA. Carrera would have been taken captive, exiled to the USA or to the Rio Grande, and a ticking time bomb defused, at least temporarily. But his men – those idiots – had bungled the arrest and shot her … on live TV, at that. That, and not the takeover itself, had been the spark that lit the fire of mutiny.

And once that had been unleashed, he’d had no choice but to request assistance from the NCR and the Brotherhood to maintain order. Technically, they were there at his and Congress’ sufferance – he could say the word and they would be forced to leave or fight both halves of Texas’ divided military. And then once their eviction was over, the mutineers would hang him from a lamp-post – and the NCR definitely knew that.

They’d been leaning on him more and more lately, asking him to commit to an invasion of the USA once the civil war was over (as if that was possible when he would still be rebuilding the country) and insisting he call the Americans “Enclave” after an old base of theirs their President had lived in once or something. He had steadfastly refused every time, but eventually he knew he would have no choice but to acquiesce to their demands … or perhaps they’d move to replace him with a sufficiently pliable individual.

It didn’t matter – all he could do was pray that somehow he survived this situation. Which, with American invasion looming, looked less and less likely by the minute.

He took a bottle of whiskey from one of the drawers built into his desk, and poured it into a glass, before taking a sip.

With how absolutely fucked I am, no sense not getting hammered.

==*==

13:00 EST, September 4 2331

Fort Constantine, South Carolina, Southeast Commonwealth, USA

George M. Walker looked at the suit before him – a T-72 suit, from the back. He’d seen plenty in person – during the annual July 4 parades, at Patriot Park, the American War Museum and Museum of Technology – and played video games where his virtual avatar was a soldier in power armour. But now he was going to wear one for real.

Right now he was wearing his combat suit – black pleather, similar to a Vault suit, slightly bulletproof, fire-retardant. This was the real uniform of a US Army soldier, worn in combat situations, not garrison or high-society affairs. Even the Air Force flight suit was just this with slight variations. With that thought he was reminded of Arlene, and he felt a momentary pang of lovesickness before suppressing it. He knew from her (heavily redacted) letter that she’d made it into the fighter pilot training program. He had to pay attention to his own training.

“The T-72 Powered Combat Armour suit is the most advanced suit of its kind in US Army service!” the drill sergeant shouted. “It is one of the most advanced pieces of infantry equipment ever to have existed! Not only will it protect you, but it will damage enemy morale just to see you in combat. They will see not a human who can bleed or be killed but a nigh-invincible anonymous dispenser of death to all of America’s enemies!”

“Your suit is more important than your grenades, your combat knife, or your laser rifle. It’s more important even than your gatling laser or Enola. When you are not in combat, you will take good care of your suit even as it takes care of you when you are in combat. It protects you from bullets, lasers, shrapnel, poison gas, flamethrowers, and radiation. It injects you with combat drugs and stim-packs. Its computer systems help you target enemy forces more effectively. Treat your suit like you would your wife, your girlfriend, or your best buddy!”

“Today, we will begin basic movement exercises in power armour! These exercises are the key foundation on which your future seven weeks of training will be built. That last period of training will be centred around your power armour. Now, if you fail this particular training you will not be discharged from the Army, barring severe disciplinary infractions. Instead you will spend the rest of your glorious military career loading shells into artillery pieces, carrying out clerical work, or some such other task. Perhaps you’ll drive a tank or fly a vertibird. But you will not be engaging face-to-face with the enemy, doing the work that actually wins the war! Remember what I told you when teaching you tactics – warfare is fundamentally about taking and holding ground, and that can only be done by the infantryman. Hence, all military technology – from the strategic bomber to the main battle tank – is at base level about assisting the infantryman in achieving this objective. Power armour is merely the most obvious example of this principle.”

“Now move it, you sons of bitches! Get into your armour!”

George made the practiced move and opened up the suit, walking into it just like his video-game characters had, and it closed behind him. As it powered on, detecting a human occupant, the rebreathers activated and the hot interior was soon replaced by cool, room-temperature air.

He looked over the HUD, trying to understand it. Targeting systems were offline – combat mode was currently turned off – but otherwise he was beginning to see what it was like. On the left side, various of his vital signs – heart rate, brainwaves, etc. were displayed, and a little featureless stick-man caricature of a human being was displayed by them – chest, abdomen, all four limbs, groin and head were marked out separately, all green for right now. Another system was counting ambient radiation. Yet another displayed amounts of various chems – stim-packs, radiation drugs, morphine, etc. in the suit’s internal reservoirs.

On the right side was a display of the suit’s own integrity, given via another stick-man caricature, with percentages displayed by it given for each limb, the helm, and the chestplate. All at 100%, good. There was also what seemed to be a reactor stability gauge and a switch for “Pip-boy connection” flipped to the red side. Not as if I have a Pip-boy right now anyway.

The drill sergeant spoke up again.

“Enough dawdling, soldiers! Walk around the perimeter of this training ground until I am satisfied with your movements! I want you to proceed to the point where I can begin training you in running, and in marching! In! Formation! within this two-hour training session. There will be more, certainly! But I don’t want to spend one! More! Second! training you up than strictly necessary! Get moving!”

They walked – a tad clumsily at first, until they came to a realisation. Power armour was fundamentally unlike any other kind of clothing – when they moved, the servos were moving them as much as they moved the armour. Control came easily after that.

George idly noted that the armour had made each of them totally anonymous – try as he might to see Rita, Tyler, or Ray amongst the troops, he couldn’t. With their helmets on, they really were just … soldiers.

He supposed he would figure out who was who in armour eventually.