"Ladies and Gentlemen... welcome to Fort Sheridan, Illinois. I am Colonel John Tannanbaum, commanding officer of this base. I find it very fitting that you have arrived here on the day celebrating our great nation's independence. In these troubling times... with the reassuring words of President Richardson still out of contact... we need all the hope and resolve we can muster up. The United States of America needs stalwart champions. She needs defenders such as yourselves. In the face of horror and hopelessness, the United States Army says 'This We'll Defend!'. And we will defend our country, I assure you.
"You stand before me now, civilians. You have civilian senses of order. You have civilian senses of discipline. You have civilian senses of courage. For the next nine weeks... you will be stripped of those things. You will be beaten until you are too exhausted to bleed... and then some. You will be pushed harder than you have ever been pushed before. Some of you will even beg for leniency or compassion before we are done... but those things are not part of this process. When you have been steeled and prepared, only then will you don your power armor, take up your rifle, and bear the name of a United States Army soldier!
"Alright, then. The time has come for you to take your first steps toward becoming soldiers. Lieutenant-Colonel Alissa Yates will be directing you from here. Alissa, I leave them in your capable hands."

I'd managed to excuse myself, which was fortunate... both for the new recruits and for myself. Allisa's voice called her charges to attention, bringing a wave of nostalgia over me. For just a couple seconds I was standing back at Camp Pinnacle in North Dakota on my own first day of Basic. Things were a lot different back then. The loss of communication with the West Coast was still fresh. People were panicking. President Richardson had been the first and last hope we'd had of not living in fear of rampant mutation. Without his calm voice going out over the Public Broadcast Network... folks were in deeper despair than ever. Me, I knew my old man was dead. The service was all I had left. Things really did change. Now I was watching recruits we'd brought in right out of local settlements.

Eventually, however, reality did come back to me. I was the commander of Fort Sheridan... and I was standing there staring off into space like some kind of whack job. With a chuckle and a shake of my head, I wiped the drool from my chin and began the slow march back toward my office. Along the path I passed several new faces which I didn't immediately recognize. The good side of that was that it meant we were gaining popularity among the local populace. The bad of it was that I was beginning to feel old at an incredibly young age. So many of the faces I expected to see... wouldn't ever be coming back. Ironically, that thought struck me just as I bumped into a young Corporal with an eerily similar face to one of those I knew were gone. Corporal Adam Rickler was the son of Sergeant Michael Rickler, a friend of mine. Mike was one of the many good men we lost reclaiming Fort Sheridan from the raiders. His son was a good kid, and a credit to his father, but every time I saw him I couldn't help but feel a little down. As I moved to pass, he fell in beside me and began speaking a mile a minute.

"Colonel Tannanbaum, sir... I heard you were giving a welcoming speech to the newest batch of recruits, so I thought I would try to find you there. Guess I was a bit too slow. Anyway, I have some exciting news! As you know, we've been working on repairing the Main Communications Dish since we got here. The parts are hard to simulate... and the raiders did a real number, so its taken way more time than we thought... but... we officially began picking up signals with it as of last night. Now, get this... the first signal we get... is from someone claiming to be a 'Colonel Augustus Autumn of the United States Army'. Sir... he's calling all units... trying to get word from anyone. We need to send a message back."

I admit that I stopped dead when he said they'd gotten a signal already. The fact that the damned thing worked at all was more surprising to me than that there were other Enclave forces out there. Immediately I gestured towards the Comm bunker and headed off in that direction.

"Lead the way, Corporal... we need to find out everything we can. When we get to the bunker, have one of your tech boys dig out the State of Emergency Challenge Code Book. If this... Colonel Autumn guy really is who he says he is, he will know the codes. Have someone else go digging around through the old records from North Dakota. See if we have any military records for a Colonel Augustus Autumn serving in the United States Army. I want to know who he is, who his parents are, where he came from, and why the hell he's out here in the middle of nowhere looking for help."

Rickler pushed into the bunker ahead of me and immediately set the technicians there to work finding out who this 'Autumn' guy was. Meanwhile, Corporal Rickler and the third technician were busy setting up the broadcasting terminal. I stood there patiently waiting, watching to see what it was they were doing. Apparently the old broadcasting terminal had been a complete loss, and they had been working for some while now on assembling a replacement.

The raiders whom had occupied the base up until we arrived had trashed a lot of the old computers and equipment. It was actually a stroke of luck that they never managed to get through the concrete doors and into the base itself. This place would be almost completely useless if they had managed to get in and do any real sort of damage to the reactor core and the computer mainframe. As it was, we had access to entire archives of information regarding the military facilities here before the war, and power throughout the majority of the on-base structures. It was unlikely to think we would find another base as fortunate as Fort Sheridan had been, but still some of them might prove to have useful supplies and information.

If we could get into contact with this Colonel Autumn, though... perhaps he had enough forces that we could really begin to bring the base we had online.

Unfortunately, as it stood, it didn't look like we were going to get any communication off while I was standing there. I waited for a good twenty minutes while Rickler and a technician whose name I didn't know busily attempted to rig together a transmitter station. When eventually they fell into bickering, I coughed politely and spoke up before turning to go.

"Corporal Rickler... as soon as you and your team here are ready... transmit the Challenge Code: Beta-Zero-Two-Five-Mark. If he replies accurately, then begin transmission of the following message. "Fort Sheridan Acknowledges. Status Update, Colonel Autumn." I want to know exactly what sort of shape he's in and why he's calling all available forces. If he replies, come get me. I've got some work to do, myself. Doctor Hollister left a memo on my desk that said she needed to speak to me. If this is another complaint about me not forcing her random inoculations on all base personnel... I may have to shoot her."

That earned a few laughs from the techs and Rickler... though I wasn't entirely joking. Doctor Marie Hollister was the local representative of the United States Chemical Corps. She was a very capable biological engineer, don't get me wrong. But when she got something in her head, she just couldn't take no for an answer. The last big ordeal had been over some crisis with a disease which may or may not have been spreading through the camp. Convinced that we were all in 'mortal peril', Doctor Hollister insisted that I allow her to host random, unscheduled administration of antibiotics and vaccines. Apparently the random factor was to make it hard for the illness to spread... but... the existence of the illness itself was questionable. Ever since, she has continued to hound me about something on a semi-regular basis. Most days, such as I was attempting to do today, I just hid in my office with the blinds on my window and door closed... and told the secretary to tell her I was out.

Today, as I got to my officehowever, she pulled open the door from the inside just as I was making to grasp my fingers around the knob. Looking up, I came face to face with a grin which I truly despise. You know... the kind that just -screams- 'gotcha'. I didn't have a chance to make a statement or hurry her off, she saw me make a move to speak and cut me off again.

"Oh! There you are, Colonel! I've been looking for you. You never replied to my memo, so I was just delivering a second one to convey how urgent the situation is... but... since here you are, I guess I can tell you now!"

Heaving out a sigh, I stepped in the door and gestured for her to follow.

"Right, then. Fire away."

She seated herself across my desk and procured a small canister which she set upon the table. I didn't seem to recognize it at first, but there was something very oddly familiar about the emblem on it. Leaning forward, I picked it up and inspected it closer. A chill ran down my spine as I realized what was being held in my hands.

"Colonel... I see you realize what you're holding. That canister is one of hundreds my staff recovered from the Medical Storage Warehouse while we were investigating it. According to the shipping and receiving manifests, West-Tek sent five hundred samples of their mid-development phase F.E.V. strains here, to be flown out to the Mariposa Military Base. Before the base evacuation order came, only the first two shipments left. We've got three hundred canisters of a completely unfinished, untested strain of the virus which could potentially kill us all... and we have no place else to store it but in with the regular chemicals and medical supplies!

I very gently returned the canister to the desktop and slid it over toward Doctor Hollister. With a frown, I watched as she took it and returned it to the medical case which I hadn't seen before now. I heaved a sigh of relief when the thing was gone from sight.

"Can we safely dispose of them?"

Marie shook her head and laughed lightly.

"I wish we could sir... god knows I do... but the medical facility here isn't designed to handle biological research. We would have to ship it out to one of our other facilities where it could be done safely, and we've not had any contact with another Enclave base or research facility in years. For all I know, we could be the last bastion of the United States out here."

I eased back into my chair, then, and shook my head.

"Not... necessarily."