Ch. 17 sneak peek:
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Staff Sergeant Boone Russell looked on at the expanse of the base as he prepared to run laps on the PT field, as he had for so long after his number had come up. The folks up in the Midwest may be complaining about the cold, but here in the State of Mojave it was pleasantly mild. A couple days ago, he had even gone to visit his grandfather – but the old man had been absent. Locals had said he’d gone on a long journey with one of Mr. House’s robots, and wasn’t sure himself if he’d return or not.
He remembered reading James' memoirs of the place – of the tribe of former Vault Dwellers that had lived over here, shooting at anyone who came near until his grandfather befriended them. Well, after the First Legion War they had entered into an agreement with the NCR Army Air Corps to share the base – which they had tried to renegotiate in their favour some twelve years later, back in 2297, well before he was born. Their shenanigans had pissed off the AAC, so their special arrangement had been nullified and they’d had been dealt with as the NCR did with any other tribe – shuttled off to a reservation, over north-west of New Vegas near the mutant reservation at Jacobstown.
They should count themselves lucky they weren’t sent over to New Nevada with the Khans and Jackals and Vipers, Boone mused. But anyway, he was anxious to see action along with the 100,000 other soldiers in and around New Vegas – not to mention the 50,000 at the Dam (it had been renamed Kimball Dam some years ago, but nobody bothered using that name save in official memos and documents) and an additional 100,000 at Fort Cassandra Moore, on the same mountain where Caesar had placed his encampment as he looked to conquer the Mojave. The Enclave had bombed it some years later, and collapsed a corner of the pinnacle, but the NCR outpost destroyed in that attack had been replaced by an invincible fortress.
He had been to the Dam once, on liberty, and looked north to see the NCR’s greatest achievement. Two and a half square miles of military base and airfield, raised up three-seven-hundred feet above the desert on sheer walls of black basalt. From twelve artillery batteries, to a laser defence system capable of defending against everything from artillery shells to nuclear missiles, to virtually limitless supplies stored underground for decades, it could hold out against an Enclave siege for five years according to the latest estimates.
But it would likely never see action. Once Robertson took O’Hare, the Enclave’s subjects would rebel – at the same time the forces in the Vegas region, to be followed soon after by all the troops assembled along the Kimball Line, would be able to travel by air to the Midwest to reinforce him.
