We're not dealing with age-old traditions here, but the detritus and wreckage of a cultural and societal collapse eclipsing the fall of Rome. These people have been living these primitive lifestyles for less than two hundred years – their ancestors were civilized American men and women living much as we do today, there's nothing time honored or traditional about how they're living, just sheer degradation. That's why, as I've expressed to you, our mindset should be a whole-hearted "kill the tribal, save the man!". Anything less is contrary to Christian charity.
Private E-letter of Caroline Autumn to Secretary of Education Loretta Andrews
A man in a loose leather jacket, a patchy set of farmer's overalls and ragged jeans walked northward, listening to the radio on his pipboy, hidden behind his sleeve – a more observant viewer would notice his clothes were stretched thin, as if there was something more than skin and muscle under them. He wasn't going by road – the Enclave had set up checkpoints every so often, most of which weren't manned strongly. Still, Russell didn't want to have his movements monitored as he made his way northward, trudging through the thick snow. He didn't like it – the snow was worse than traipsing over Mojave sand, more resistant – but he could tolerate it. Right now the Enclave radio was playing a song – worryingly, it was an outright parody of an NCR original, they themselves said it was new.
'Cali rebels went to war riding on a brahmin,
Thought they burnt Old Glory up - they're built for farmin'!
Cali boys just can't keep up, Yankee Doodle dandy!
From sea to shining sea we'll march and with their girls be handy!"
He guessed they'd gotten it from the Remnants, or maybe word of mouth from the caravans, some overwritten holo or cassette that'd made its way eastward.
"US Army's basic skill is deadly pinpoint shooting;
We move forward, bring back order, in service we're saluting
From NYC to Los Angeles we'll restore our nation;
And those who won't give up their fight will face annihilation!"
It galled him that they were insulting California but every step reminded him that he had to keep his cool. Observation first, then he'd decide.
"Spreading lies and making laws, thinking they're so clever,
But we'll show them who's their boss, Stars and Stripes Forever!
The world's first democracy, with freedom as foundation;
Our starry banner flies highest as we rebuild the nation!"
He wondered if there were more of the Remnants out there – if Arcade had made it back to the Enclave, the others must have unless they'd died along the way. And how much had they told – could they be one of the sources for the song? It was recent, the announcer had said, came out a few weeks ago. Time enough for them to have been debriefed. What else could they have said in those long interrogations? He'd never gotten the whole truth out of them back in the Mojave, he'd always felt.
"So watch us now take back our lead, lifting up Old Glory,
We're writing the next chapter in our country's story!"
Russell took deep breaths, forced himself to keep cool as he turned off the radio. He wasn't the deepest thinker around, but he knew something was off. The Enclave were leaning into that propaganda so deeply it was almost .. could they really be functioning as an actual government, holding territory, making laws and doing all the dreary business of statesmanship? It seemed so impossible it was almost comical … but the Enclave back on the rig had maintained the trappings of a government even as it sought to do nothing more than kill all the people who would be its citizens. If the Enclave wasn't just an army or a network of bunkers … that thought worried him more than anything, and he was almost certain it was true. But he had to see if it was. He had to check Hanscom, report to the others down south, and then … infiltrate one of the nearby towns. Lexington, he'd heard, had the heaviest Enclave presence – Concord and Sanctuary were nothing more than houses while Lexington itself was an industrial center of sorts. He had to get in!
==*==
The flight back to Hanscom had been easy to arrange after the Rust Devils had been flushed out of their lair, thankfully without detonating any of the stored munitions and bringing the whole bunker crashing down. A fireteam had been assigned to secure the entrance until civilian contractors operating under supervision of the Army's quartermaster corps could find a way to bring all the stored materiel in the Fort Hagen depot out; it'd take months. Right now, Nate found himself glad to be in Dr. Whitley's centrally-heated lab, with the robot's unpowered braincase – the brain floating in its life-support biogel fluid - set on a table. Say what you like about the Castle, it wasn't like here.
Dr. Whitley had been talking privately with Dr. Siggi Wilzig, a bona fide quantum physicist, about the teleporter design. He said that it should be possible to follow the schematics off the books with wasteland material – if and only if they had a courser IFF. Nate wasn't sure of that – you could count the number of quantum physicists in the world right now on one hand, but he wasn't sure if he could trust his life to some jury-rigged attempt at something beyond cutting edge technology. It's crazy, but it's my only way. I need to see him again!
Whitley finagled the connection, plugged in the braincase into a wall socket. Lights turned on and the EEG monitor turned from minimal activity, something like a deep sleep, into sudden wakefulness.
Okay, time to begin the interrogation.
"What's your name?" Nate said, asking with the simple things first.
"I am General Atomics Cybernetic Unit 22145142, designated Jezebel."
"Why're you attacking the wasteland?"
"We're following our directive to restore order and improve the standard of living in the Commonwealth."
"So, Jezebel, what's the real reason?" Nate asked, holding the robot braincase in his hand. "You're not restoring order, you're massacring people, attacking whole caravans and settlements."
"But we are helping the Commonwealh," Jezebel said in electronically-modulated feminine tones, the very perkiness of her voice making what she said even more chilling. "Calculations determine that quality of life for all humans is so low as for death to be preferable for life. Therefore, we are helping the humans by killing them."
"Saving the wasteland by killing everyone in it? That's crazy!"
"We are, by any practical definition, incapable of error."
"So, where are you coming from?"
"Wouldn't you like to know? I won't divulge any information unless you promise to give me a body."
"You have to be thinking we're insane," Whitley added. "You're a homicidal psychopath to the degree that you don't see any problem with the logic of your cybernetic components. We're not going to let you roam around a US military base."
"Then I'm afraid I can't do that. Sooorry."
The little bitch.
Nate turned to Whitley.
"What's the most likely facility here that would be capable of sustaining such an operation?"
"There's the RobCo factory – but the militia secured that. There aren't really any other candidates unless …"
"Unless what?"
"There's a pre-War military facility that's the only other potential base of operations. It was classified at the time, but it should be …"
Whitley sat at his desk and got on his computer for a few minutes, eyes tightly fixed on the screen, and then replied.
"Yes," he said. "It's at the RobCo Sales and Service Centre, near the airport. And it was a facility specialized in robobrain research to boot."
"Wait!" Jezebel cried. "The facility's under lockdown. You'll never get in there."
"So what do you wanna say?"
"If you give me a body, I can unlock the facility. I have the necessary codes."
"Do your people have them?" Nate asked Whitley.
"We don't, as I recall," Whitley replied. "We have IFF and lockdown codes for many of our facilities but not all of them. Some were never part of the continuity plans, some were stored at continuity of government locations that fell out of contact or were destroyed, some are simply lost in the bureaucracy and it'd take months to find them."
"So … "
"Hmm … "
"Can you just wait a little longer, Jezebel?" Nate said, interrupting whatever Whitley was thinking about. "Once we stop the Mechanist we can provide you with a body from the facilities there. You won't have any directive, you'll do whatever you want with it. Is that okay with you?"
"What makes me trust that you won't keep up your end of the bargain? Logic dictates that in that scenario you have the full ability to double-cross me. I will not give the codes – if you want to take on the Mechanist, you will have to bring me along!"
Nate sighed. So be it. He wouldn't do with waiting months while Federal officials made their way through endless dust-laden archives.
"I'll take that up," he said. "I'll keep your word if you keep mine."
"I agree," Jezebel said, and though Nate had a bad feeling he felt he had no choice.
"So, can you give me backup?" he asked, turning to Whitley.
"I'd have to talk to the military governor about that … as it may be, we most likely can't. We're just, to put it in layman's terms, stretched too thin."
==*==
Russell clambered up the ruined overpass gingerly – this wasn't worse than the High Road in the Divide– and crawled over the asphalt. He was under stealth, should last for several hours – but still. He couldn't spend too long here. He hazarded a glance over the old safety barrier and got his first real look at the Enclave's main facility, Hanscom AFB. The complex stretched over slightly more than three and a half square miles, the perimeter surrounding it more than eleven klicks long. Every five hundred feet of that distance had a guard tower overlooking it – a squat construction twenty feet tall, manned by a fireteam of soldiers in APA Mk. 2.
In front of the towers was a line of defense – first a deep ditch two meters deep and wide – the soil taken from it used to build a corresponding berm on the side towards the base - then past the earthworks a suspiciously clear stretch of ground, a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, penultimately a set of interlocking modular concrete barriers, and finally a forcefield. The space behind this defense line was patrolled by a group of robots – each containing a sentry bot, three Gutsy robots or another, humanoid design that looked vaguely feminine, and six eyebots. Each hundred-meter stretch was also patrolled by a team of four bikers or horsemen, wearing combat armor and carrying laser weapons, a combat-armored soldier leading a dog on a leash, and finally a deathclaw, loping docilely with some sort of cybernetic on its head. The patrols were staggered so that each section of the stretch between each guard tower had at least one of the patrolling groups in it at any given time. There were pathways through this perimeter every so often, but they were separated from the main space of it by barricade walls topped with firing platforms, two metal gates on each side.
The main entrance to the base, opening right to a ground-level stretch of the highway, was a checkpoint set up between two forcefield gates, with enough room to contain two trucks side-by-side – one was currently parked and was being thoroughly inspected, each crate being taken out of it and rifled through by soldiers. This area was surrounded by an elevated walkway, patrolled again by soldiers in APA Mk. 2 – no power helmets though – and there were two long concrete and metal buildings to each side of it, both of them seemingly new.
But the rest of Hanscom was what scared Russell. In his time in the Mojave, he'd frequently stopped at Camp McCarran – an Old World international airport selected by the NCR more for it being a large secure compound than its use as an airfield. That had been a sprawling mass of people, a vast tent city stretching out over Old World runways with the terminal building rising up like a plateau of ice-cold splendor above a sea of human messiness and grime. There hadn't been only soldiers in there, but caravaneers and cooks and salesmen and merchants and good-time-girls, a sprawling chaotic mass of all humanity.
This wasn't Navarro – this was the Enclave's own Camp McCarran. Russell's eyes struggled to take in everything he saw, darting from sight to sight as they were overwhelmed. There was the motor pool, long lines of neatly-parked trucks – heavy cargo transporters and utility vehicles alike - construction vehicles, staff cars – black-painted gold-trimmed Corvega Highwaymen in what seemed a deliberate insult - dozens or even hundreds of them. There was another section, where he could make out Enclave tanks – new designs for a new world, slab-sided and angular and brutal. There seemed to be two types – light models and heavier ones. With the tanks there were also combat troop transports, some slab-sided like metal boxes and tracked, others rounded and wheeled with turreted cannons on top.
Nearby the motor pool was a set of howitzers – they looked somewhat different from Old World designs, the round barrel thicker on both right and left sides. He didn't know what that meant, but the idea the Enclave had developed new designs for vehicles and artillery pieces was worrying.
He could see long rows of prefabricated barracks buildings, like Old World shipping packets given windows and doors, stacked three stories on top of each other, prefab sloped roofs topping them. Not a single tent in sight. A massive jetliner stood at the end of a runway – painted jet black, it had the seal of the Enclave president as described by the Chosen One on it, and bold letters – red, white and blue on each word specifically – naming it AIR FORCE ONE. Kimball would be jealous, Russell thought. There were other cargo planes at the end of other runways, and transport vertibirds on pads. And then there were the gunship vertibirds – dozens of them, lean and mean and ready for the fight. Some pads were unoccupied, their assigned planes clearly out on missions. In other areas of the base, engineers were clearly digging tunnels and making or expanding some sort of bunker system. The place was a veritable hive of activity, just like McCarran, but this seemed purposeful, disciplined, put all towards one purpose.
Russell took his eyes across the base. At its heart there was what was clearly an assembly field for drill and giving speeches, capable of holding a thousand men, with a wooden stage up front. I guess there would be given their President's here, Russell thought. At that place there were several banners. Highest was them was the Old World US flag – there wasn't an E-symbol for some reason, just the big star in the center. Across from it there were three flags – the first he made out was a white banner with a blue eagle, some text he couldn't make out – he zoomed in his binocular, it said "UNITED STATES ARMY" with the date "1775" below that. There was a dark blue one, showing a gold eagle perched atop a brighter blue shield – the text on that was too hard to make out even with binoculars, on account of how it was positioned. And finally there was a red standard with a gold eagle perched atop a white globe and a gold anchor, reading "UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS".
There were two other flags aside from the military ones, set across from them next to the USA flag the Enclave were using – one was a white flag with a gold tribal on a blue shield, the other was a red cross on a white field, at its center a circle of white stars on blue and a green pine tree. He had no clue what they meant. But what those banners in total meant was simple – the Enclave had referred to itself as the United States before, trying to pretend they were a government of a now-dead nation. They'd upped their commitment to that act for sure.
Russell turned his eyes again to the southeast of the base – away from the main buildings at its center and the runways in the north, he could see a cluster – almost a compound within the compound – of white pre-War buildings. They looked almost like office blocks or even – maybe – labs. And in the southwest, Enclave construction workers – that thought seemed incongruous, even though he guessed they must exist – were working, wearing bright yellow hard hats and yellow-painted power frames, alongside construction vehicles and yellow-painted protectrons. They were rebuilding some sort of Old World suburb within the base perimeter – family homes of brick and timber, with amenities such as swimming pools and front yard porches. That was the scariest thing of all. It meant the Enclave was intending to stay for good.
There must be thousands of power-armored Enclave shocktroopers here, though Russell couldn't see many, apart from soldiers exercising in dark blue or forest green fatigues. He doubted the forces that took Navarro, that stormed Helios One, could have successfully attacked this base. How did they get so many?! Russell thought, hyperventilating before he calmed himself. That the Enclave could have survived in some form wasn't beyond the NCR's speculation – there had been rumors of remnants fleeing east. That it could have resurged like this was more than everybody's nightmares. That's why I have to get the tech, the blueprints, level the playing field. His best chance wasn't their top-secret black projects, it was the tech they considered mundane, but nevertheless would give the NCR a big leg up. One it needed to survive.
And the sheer fact of what was here – that meant the Enclave really did control territory, was building industry. There was simply no other explanation. And that meant – that implied, at least – there was no crazy scheme at play here. The Enclave was simply sending its forces – no, its armies - out to conquer the wasteland with brute force. And with what he saw here – they could do it. Even if it could arrive here, if logistics and thousands of miles of mountain and desert and prairie were of no consequence, if there was no Legion outside the door, the full might of the NCR Army would take massive casualties to raise the two-headed bear above this base. And it's, he reminded himself, just one base. This was, as it turned out, truly just the HQ of an expeditionary force, the tip of the iceberg. He needed to get that tech. The NCR had beaten the Enclave before with vast superiority in numbers – but that imbalance had somehow impossibly been much reduced. And with that, the odds weren't in the NCR's favor, had to be made up some other way. He needed to grab Enclave tech – not just samples, but blueprints and scientific theory. It was the only way the NCR would stand a chance in the future.
He crawled back down and returned the way he came, musing as he trudged back down through the snow. The highway was unsafe right now, for sure – the Enclave had checkpoints and outposts on it, especially on the elevated sections where they could look down on movement. Once or twice he saw a patrol, some militiamen going by on motorbikes and on foot – both groups a mix of navy blue Enclave uniforms and heavy farmers' clothes. Evidently they were relying heavily on locals to keep the- no, to assert their control – and that was a vulnerability. Not all the militia had to be on board with the Enclave agenda, or even what they were told it was – especially, he hoped, in the southern areas where they hadn't rooted their tentacles in so deeply.
At any rate, a campaign of sabotage couldn't be carried out without local support – not only in getting access to targets, but also in that the Enclave would be looking for culprits when it came to ambushes and attacks on infrastructure. If they thought it was just locals … he had to admit, even if it seemed impossible to infiltrate Hanscom itself, he had already started to figure another fairly good idea of how to get that tech.
==*==
President Autumn took one last look back from the door of Air Force One as it closed and headed to his prepared seat. He was back to Raven Rock for right now, to prepare for the State of the Union and meet with one of his better military leaders. Keller was preparing to set sail for England in a week – a choice that'd weaken the local position here, but a calculated one. With control over the harbor almost in play, US forces didn't need it as another stopover point for transport VBs – indeed, there was another Navy ship preparing to take its place, an old Nimitz-class destroyer preserved by the Hampton Roads Republic as their trump card. That government had been easy to reintegrate – it'd been composed of the descendants of a mix of ENCLAVE personnel set up in the bases around Norfolk and the remnants of Constantine Chase's American Provisional Military Government. From the best that could be gathered, Chase had tried to maintain order following the atomic war and destroyed the People's Republic of America, a short-lived communist state run by Chinese spies, immediately after the bombs dropped. The commies had fled into Appalachia and persisted a couple of decades more before being wiped from history by the rising Appalachian Confederacy. Good riddance.
Chase's provisional government had collapsed as it overextended and he ultimately died himself in the mid-2080s. The survivors had fled to the ENCLAVE bases at Raven Rock and the Hampton Roads area, Norfolk becoming the central nexus of trade to the Chesapeake Bay area. They'd considered the Capital Wasteland a worthless backwater of mild historical interest, but their semi-technological society had been built on slowly-declining infrastructure they could only maintain. That Nimitz-class was to be backed by ten PBRs – Patrol Boats, Riverine – intended to control the Charles River, armed with 105mm turreted guns and a variety of gatling lasers, rapid-fire grenade launchers, and incinerator flamethrowers. There was work going on for that old Iowa at Norfolk too, USS Wisconsin, but Autumn didn't have a clue when that would be done.
Be that as it may. Colonel Walker – who was moving with his men into Massachusetts soon – reported that one of his new subordinates, Richter up in Maine, had reported to him concerning a developing situation which looked like it was getting dangerous. Impossible to stamp it out, Autumn mused as he got into his seat. We're just spread too thin, trying to do so much with so little! This may be a serious crisis, but there was just too little-
Again, the main situation. The State of the Union – to be held in the heart of a ruined city, in front of the broken Capitol dome – would be a celebration of the great victory and the progress made since then in making America great again. He would need to be there to oversee the preparations for the ceremonies – not just a speech but a newsreel show that would be spread up and down the nation. The rebels out west – there wasn't even a consensus on how to deal with them, with the reports from those veterans many were now turning to argue their government should be left to collapse on its own – would know of the revival of America by that, if they didn't already.
Autumn smiled as the plane prepared to take off for Adams, to be followed by a trip on Marine One to Raven Rock. Caroline had said she had the best news for him on her last vidcall, that she wanted to give in person. As far as he was concerned, all was right with the world.
==*==
Arcade Gannon looked tiredly at the US flag propped up on the wall of his room, the second story of the crude building that housed his house, office and workplace. There was another one flying on a pole on the roof, a message as to just who was controlling this operation. I'm working for a socially conservative, militaristic, authoritarian regime, he mused. One I'd easily call fascist even if it wasn't the Enclave. And I have no choice.
At least – he warily hoped – he wasn't playing a role in a genocidal state. This didn't seem to be some Potemkin façade put up to dupe him – they couldn't have known about his politics beforehand, hadn't been expecting the Remnants to arrive home at all. He remembered what he'd said about Caesar – "just another jerk". What made Augustus really different from him in the end? The bureaucracy? Caesar had that too. The undoubtedly fake elections? The high technology? At least the role of women was better off – though that had always been an Enclave attitude. And if Augustus Autumn was better than Edward Sallow, he was the same type of man. Ruthless, bloody-handed, a dictator by any reasonable measure. But at the same time, hard to dismiss as another wasteland warlord.
And on the other hand – the Enclave is funding me, supporting me in my work here. I'm saving lives, helping cure things they can't … but for their benefit. He knew that what he was doing here was for the benefit of the Enclave's agenda in taking – they'd call it reclaiming – control over the area. He wasn't just working for an authoritarian regime, he was working to help spread it. But again, they were the only people able to protect him, and more than that, to give him supplies. Outside of Enclave territory the NCR could get to him easier – damn, he was thinking of the country he'd spent his whole life in as the enemy now. At any rate, he had little choice.
==*==
Elliot Tercorien took a deep breath in his armor as he moved forward, almost at the reactor room. The Marines had pushed through the dark corridors of the Atlantic Oil Rig through endless warrens of underwater passages, and now they were at the very bottom of it. He could hear the sounds of the water against metal even inside his suit, and prayed under his breath. If the seals failed, if there was even a hint of a pressure leak, they were already more than half a thousand feet below sea level. Their suits would hold up for their terrifying descent below until it got to crush depth and they were imploded; their bodies smashed by God's own fist closing on them from all directions. His eyelights could see fairly well down the corridor as they moved through the bulkhead into the reactor room.
The Marines could see through thick leaded glass what looked like the inside of a steel donut – a typical twisted-tokamak design.
The shapes rose up from the floor and Tercorien was in a mind to give the order to open fire before deciding not to. Only ghouls could have survived this, but there didn't seem to be hostility or aggression there. They seemed more like people waking up from sleep than the frantic, feral attitude of the vast majority. And if they were here … they'd probably been the people running the reactor itself. Ghouls could hibernate for decades and centuries, but he'd never seen something like this before.
"Ugh …" one said, in the typical cigarette-smoker voice, but Elliott noted relatively little facial damage. Some of those freaks were almost skeletal, and others looked like little more than burn victims – but the same degradation to their genes had affected them all. At the same time as he still fought to keep from throwing up at the sight, he stayed on edge. Ferals outnumbered sane ghouls by far for a reason. You never knew when they might flip, but they would at some point given enough time. No wonder US troops tended to shoot first and ask questions never when it came to them, even though it wasn't official policy to shoot them on sight any more. As it was, Elliott could barely restrain himself or his men from opening fire.
"Who are you?" he continued.
"Gunnery Sergeant Elliot Tercorien, United States Marine Corps. We're here to get this US government facility up and running again, so help us God."
"How long's it been? The control room went into lockdown with the radiation leak, but no one ever came to lift it. We were there for weeks … everything went dark, we were falling asleep, no food or water and with the radiation sickness … I thought it was the end."
"Two hundred years," Elliott replied. "It's the 2280s now. Large parts of the nation are still in chaos, but we're recovering. Now, can you get that reactor up?"
"Not normally," the ghoulified tech continued as others came to. "The last thing we did with the leak was turn it off. But to start it up – you need a lot of power to begin a self-sustaining reaction with hot fusion. We'd have to overcharge the auxiliary generators."
He didn't like the way the ghoul said that.
"Which can … ?"
"It has the potential to blow the whole rig sky-high. Not just a radiation leak, but a plasma containment breach. It'd blow out the whole lower third, and everything left would sink. Might even set off the nuclear self-destruct."
"Do it," Elliott ordered. They didn't really have many options here.
The ghouls started working on the consoles as power flared through the system, sparks flying from consoles as they got it to work. For a moment, a terrible instant, he thought the reactor might blow, but as it stabilized and moderated Elliott breathed a sigh of relief. The lights turned on, but they were eclipsed by the gleaming energy visible through the window, near-blinding even through polarized glass.
They moved up top to the main control room, where the command staff had already situated themselves – General Ward was happily surprised that power had been restored.
Major Onassis however, seemed less happy that the ghouls'd been left be when Elliott gave the full debrief.
"I'd rather you had taken a solution that didn't rely on those mutants," she said. "I would have sent engineers had you sent a messenger to me."
"With all due respect, ma'am," Elliott replied. "Those ghouls in the reactor control room are the only ones who know these systems. If it weren't for them it could have taken weeks."
"That is true," she noted. "And we do have orders to get this facility operational ASAP. But still … I'll have them retained only until we can get non-mutants to run the reactor. After that … I don't know, we'll dump them in the settlement zone or somewhere."
"No problem, ma'am," Elliot answered. "Understood."
