The Wasteland – near Megaton
“This is it, Scribe Bigsley”, the Deputy said politely as he gestured at the shack. A dead Raider could be seen next to the door, still sitting in the chair he had died in. “There were near half a dozen of them…mind the smell.”
“Thank you, Deputy”, Bigsley said as he pulled out a filter mask and prepared to put it on as he walked towards the shack while the fire Team of Knights fanned out to secure the area. . Bigsley was slightly annoyed, he had just began his search of the Pre-War Pentagon files…the look on Jameson’s face when he had shown her the letter from Lyons giving him total access was priceless…when Lyons had sent someone to pack him on a Vertibird to Megaton to look into rumors of Enclave activity there. He kept his annoyance to himself, though….the goodwill his work in Point Lookout had generated had given him one more chance to amount to something in the Brotherhood, and he wasn’t going to blow it this time.
The first corpse was outside, an individual still sitting in a battered kitchen table chair. A beam had entered the top of his skull and bored through the base of his skull and then the corrugated metal of the shack. Three other beams had gone through his body, and another had bored a hole through the wooden stock of the rusty hunting rifle propped up against the wall of the shack next to him. To Bigsley it looked as if he had been sleeping when the unknown assailants opened fire.
“Sleepin’ on watch…tsk, tsk, tsk”, chided a voice next to Bigsley. “Probably never saw it coming.”
Bigsley turned his head to look at the man. He was a tall, wiry man in his mid-thirties with three days growth on his chin and grey eyes as hard as flint. His calf-length leather duster marked him as a Regulator, underneath the duster he was wearing a dark blue ballistic vest with a patch saying “CAPITOL POLICE” in inch high white letters sewn into it. At his right hip was a holstered revolver, a second revolver was in a cross-draw holster secured to the webgear over his vest. Peeking out of his right boot was the handle of a knife. Across his chest, in a single point sling, was a AER-9 Laser rifle, with a scope mounted.
“Are you sure it wasn’t some of your comrades, Kincaid?”, Bigsley asked. “there aren’t many people out here using energy weapons.”
“It wasn’t us, Brother Harold”, Kincaid replied conversationally as he grabbed the body’s right arm and held the hand up for Bigsley to see that it had all five fingers. “If Regulators had done this, his finger would have been taken. We get a bounty, sure…but the real point is to make sure that everyone knows who did the deed.” As he let go of the arm , he added, “Like the Brotherhood, we don’t pass the blame for what we do onto others.”
The Deputy then showed them the outside wall, where the familiar thirteen stars around a letter E had been neatly spray-painted. Bigsley examined it closely, then stepped away.
“They took their time to do a neat job of it”, Bigsley observed, “By the look of it they even brought stencils for the stars and the E, and you can see where they used some sort of template to mark where the stars went. Whether they were really Enclave or not, they took what they were doing seriously." Bigsley shuddered a bit in dread, then continued. “No delaying any further…let’s go in and examine their handiwork.”
They went inside. As the Deputy had said, the stench was awful. In a heap in one corner were five bodies, a couple of which had been turned into ash. Scattered about were Jet inhalors, Psycho canisters, and Med-X syringes as well as empty beer and whisky bottles. Kincaid picked up a Jet inhaler and squeezed it, it was empty. If the clothes piled up near the mattresses and the filth and tattoos on the bodies weren’t enough to mark the dead as Raiders, the grafitti on the walls and the grilled human arm above the burnt out cooking fire made it plain. Kincaid looked at the Raider outfits, prodding at them with a stick he picked up, and then studied the graffiti spray-painted on the wall.
“They were Raiders all right”, Kincaid said, “By the ‘tags’, they were a set of the Cobalt Rain gang.” Kincaid rubbed his chin thoughtfully then continued. “Nasty [censored]ers…haven’t seen them around here since we kicked them out of Laurel two years ago…last word we had was they staked out some turf in Ellicott City. It worries me a little they have come West again.” He spat tobacco juice into a cracked water glass he found on the ground in the shack then continued. “Whoever did this knew their business…these losers didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. The fire seemed to be all coming from one direction, the front. If’n we can find their firing point maybe there will be a clue.”
They left the shack and began looking around. While Kincaid took several men and began to search the area in front of the shack, Bigsley examined the area around it. Near a side window, he found a single footprint that had been undisturbed. It was clearly made by a power armor boot. Bigsley took a picture then summoned one of his armored companions…wearing the standard issue T-47d…to make a footprint next to it and when he saw it didn’t match the photographed them both together. After a bit, Kincaid called out to him from a point about a hundred feet in front of the shack. Bigsley went out to him.
“Can’t tell how many there were exactly”, Kincaid said as he searched around, “They spent a lot of time moving about here. I’m guessing there were 2-3. It also looks like they policed their spent cells after it was over. These people weren’t amateurs….mebbe it was Talon Company.”
“Found a bootprint that appears to have come from power armor of some kind near the shack”, Bigsley replied. “While Talon Company is better armed than most…they don’t have that, Thank Steel.”
Bigsley joined the search, and eventually found a single spent Electron Charge Pack, that likely had escaped notice because it been pressed into the ground by something heavy, probably the boot of one of the assailants. It was Pre-War, though that didn’t mean much as even after two centuries massive stockpiles of Pre-War ammunition were still being found. He showed it to Kincaid.
“Only two weapons use these”, Bigsley said, “And the effects don’t match a Tesla Cannon.”
“Gatling laser”, Kincaid replied. “Folks with Power Armor and Gatling Lasers? It’s the Enclave alright…has to be.”
“Exactly”, Bigsley agreed grimly. “Question is…what are they aiming to do?”