» Tue Oct 05, 2010 3:49 pm With the Enclave finally taken care of, Scribe Rothchild asked me to investigate a strange radio signal that a patrol had picked up but didn't have time to check out. I found the signal, and the crash site. At first I thought it was a plane, from before the War, but then I found the pilot's body... he wasn't human. Like a child, but wrong. Then there was this light all around me, pulling me up into the sky. I couldn't see anything, it was too bright. Then I must have passed out.
When I came to, I was in a... an operating theater of some kind. And there were more of them, aliens, all around me. They started... maybe they got the dose wrong, whatever they use for anesthesia. Maybe they didn't know I was awake. But from some of the things I saw later, I think maybe they just didn't care. Anyway, after about a minute of that... procedure, I blacked out again. Thank God.
When I woke up again, it was in a holding cell. My cellmate was a mercenary, and maybe a slaver, but at the time all that mattered was getting out of there, which we managed to do. That's when Sally found us. Yes, the girl. I don't know what we would have done without her. She knew all sorts of secret ways and tunnels through the ship, some even big enough for me.
I found logs, audio recordings of interrogations of other prisoners. They've been coming here, to this planet, for hundreds of years, maybe thousands... scooping people up for their experiments. I'd hoped that I could talk to them, reason with them as a man of science, that this was all some misunderstanding. But listening to others who'd tried that, I began to doubt. They might be more advanced than us, but they didn't seem to be any nicer.
Well, we reached the area where prisoners were kept "on ice", in long-term storage. Some sort of stasis... my guide didn't know the details, and I didn't have time to work it out on my own. What I can tell you is that it's not always safe - one poor man came out of it dead. One of America's first astronauts... I wish I could have met him. His pressure suit was the key to everything, though.
The others, I've already told you about. Paulson, and Elliott, Dr. Tercorien, and the man in armor that none of us could understand. I think he was from Japan, a very long time ago. We found out later that he was absolutely deadly with that sword of his. Elliott was an Army doctor in the War; we had a lot to talk about. And Paulson, poor bastard. He was a cowboy, a real one, from the Old West, four hundred years ago. The aliens took everything he had.
To get into the other part of the ship, I had to shut down some generators. I took Paulson with me the first time, to the hangar where they kept their planes and other vehicles they picked up. They came at us in waves. Paulson didn't make it. I guess... I hope he's with his family now. After that, I told the others to stick together in the engineering core and protect each other. I'd do the rest alone. I didn't want to get anyone else killed.
After all the generators were overloaded, I was able to get outside and walk across the hull. That was the most amazing and most terrifying thing I've ever done - even more than leaving the Vault for the first time. There were no air tanks, so I only had what was in the suit with me. No time for sightseeing. But I couldn't go too fast, or the magnetic boots would come loose and I'd drift away into space. When I got to the other airlock and pressurized it, I had to take a couple of minutes to just calm down and breathe, I was shaking so bad.
Any hope I still had of negotiation, of peaceful coexistence, went out the airlock when I saw what they had in the other section. Weapons that could carve terrible new scars across the face of our already battered planet... and those things... how they screamed, like ghouls but worse, and how they made them... that's where I gave up trying to be objective. They had to be stopped. They had to die. All of them.
The rest is a blur... we took the bridge... no one else killed this time, thank God, just alien bodies on the deck... heaps of ash, others chopped clean in half by our friend with the sword... the deck slick with green blood. Then that other ship showed up... Sally knew how to work the controls... Captain Cosmos, ha! Impossible... crazy...
It didn't really happen, did it? This isn't real... oh God... you aren't Brotherhood, you're... no, get away, don't, don't cut me again, don't stick - NO! NOOOOOO!"
The young man on the table sagged and went limp against the restraints as the sedative took effect. The Mr. Gutsy known as "Sawbones" drifted back a little on its hoverjet, its syringe arm retracting. Sentinel Lyons, looking troubled, turned away from the scribe who'd been recording the debriefing and walked across the Citadel's infirmary to where her father was watching over the proceedings.
"What the hell happened to him?" Sarah demanded, showing the same concern she would for any other member of Lyons' Pride.
"That's what I brought you down here for," the elder Lyons said. "To hear it for yourself."
"Yeah, but it doesn't make any sense. Saucer Men from Mars? Captain Cosmos? Cowboys and... and samurai?" She ran a gauntleted hand through her hair, frowning. "If I didn't know better, I'd say he was whacked out on Jet. You didn't send him back out to Vault 106, did you?"
"No, it's as he said. Rothchild sent him to investigate an unknown radio beacon up near Olney. That was five days ago. Last night he showed up at the gates, exhausted and almost in shock but determined to give his report."
"Olney, huh?" Sarah half-turned to regard the unconscious Knight on the examination table, thinking. "Besides the deathclaws, isn't there an old disposal site in that area? Maybe he got another bad dose of radiation, or something else that made him sick."
"His Pip Boy and our tests say that his rads are fine." Owyn Lyons turned away from his daughter for a moment, picking up something from the workbench he stood next to and presenting it to her. "Besides... how would you explain this? He was carrying it when he arrived."
Sarah could only stare as she accepted the disintegrator rifle, her eyes and then her fingers roaming over its silvery surface and sleek, unfamiliar contours.
