TWENTY-FIVE
THE MAN FROM SEARF
SEARF MEETING BENEATH OLD McDONALD'S FARM
:hugs:

The knocked out chimpnoids and tribal humans were in cages in the cave chamber with its bright daylight panels. Their weapons were gone but were heaped neatly in two sections, tribal and great ape. Eddie'Jo was there with three SEARC super-soldiers who had come seemingly out of nowhere. They had been scouting the area and had followed the tribals into the area. There were also androids standing close to the troopers and the girl was sleeping on a inflatobed along with two dogs, the molerat and the dogdroid.

The three women SEARF troopers had their helmets removed, as Eddie'Jo did, and were quietly listening to him.

He was speaking in SEARF battle-language. "We talk with these fine folks, when they wake, and find out anything we can from them with out resorting to any nasty type interrogative techniques."

The sergeant nodded. "As you will."

He sensed her doubt because was he not Bloody Eddie who was infamous for breaking prisoners during interrogation?

He sighed. "My memories are far from perfect but the zetan aliens caught me, along with a few folk including zetan aliens from another faction. There were even some Patriot Guards amongst us and fifteen of our comrades. Normally the zetans that raid Terra for prisoners, and what ever else their weird little minds are attracted to, belong to the Zeta'Zool or Zeta'Zaku Factions. They and their motherships are amongst the middle ranks of zetan factions when it comes to technological advancement, power, wealth and influence."

"No, the ones that caught me that day were much more dangerous and they had much more advanced technological tricks to play with. They were the Zeta'Zoosh. I say 'were' because they were destroyed. It seems the zetans serve, with an eternal contract of some kind, a kind of coalition of aliens known generally as the All'Moom'Laa. The zetans gain user friendly motherships and other technologies. In turn they supply the coalition with most of what they gain or do various tasks for them. The Zeta'Zoosh, as at least one zetan faction does every century or so, tried to cheat the All'Moom'Laa. The Zeta'Zoosh were doing contractual forbidden experiments with captured technologies they tried to hide from the All'Moom'Laa instead of handing them over."

The sergeant nodded. "You were captured by the All'Moom'Laa."

"Thankfully, no!" He shook his head. "All'Moom'Laa are linked with the Greys, both the Greynari and the Greytorv. They are even more fallen, more insane, then the zetans themselves. Zetans are Greynari-human hybrids."

He shrugged. "I got taken by the Centro, the ancient enemies of the All'Moom'Laa and the force that is slowly, steadily destroying them."

The sergeant suddenly struck a fist out so fast the movement was invisible. He effortlessly deflected it. It was a test and soon the three SEARF women were throwing attacks at him. He effortlessly deflected every one of them and did not attempt to attack in return.

Until Lilly got up and the girl cried out in anger. "You leave my daddy alone." The dogs and molerat looked up and all began growling, the molerat in its odd way.

The three women stopped, turned and looked at the girl in surprise. Then they bowed their heads and the sergeant spoke again. "Forgive us, Lilly, for being so foolish. It was a test. We were not trying to hurt your daddy but to measure his fighting reflexes. He is now even a greater fighter than he used to be and he used to be amongst the best. He is also deeper to the hub."

Lilly frowned tiredly at them, humphed and went back to bed but as she went to make herself comfortable, gently pushing the molerat to one side, a device landed softly in front of her. The animals settled down again quickly. She picked it up and found it was a small multitool with a torch, a small blade, a toothpick, small fold-out scissors and other items. She looked up in surprise.

Eddie'Jo smiled. "A gift from these soldiers and I."

Lilly nodded, smiled back, slipped the device into a pocket in her teddy-bear, and went back to sleep.

The sergeant spoke. "What did the Centro do with you?"

He sighed. "Sent me to various worlds, various dimensional planes and altered me in various ways after gaining my permission to do so. They always got my permission to do most things. Then they did something I can not remember, but I gave them permission to remove my memories, and sent me back here."

The sergeant frowned. "What of the other SEARF troopers?"

He shook his head a little. "I do not know! The zetans who captured us, sent us to different motherships. They ended up on another one. At least I do not remember meeting any but the renegade Rashnar and the last I remember of him was throwing him off a catwalk. He fell out of sight and I never saw him again. Rashnar was trying to do unpleasant things to a young man he had taken captive. The mothership I was in was being destroyed and outside Centro and Greynari forces were fighting. The Centro were Rainbowzari. They were wiping out the Greynari easily but those Greys had at least a hundred of their motherships for every rainbow-orb that was there."

A SEARF private spoke then. "Greys seem to keen to throw away their lives."

Eddie'Jo turned to her. Once he would have punished her for speaking out of command but he simply answered. "The Greys are fundamentally insane as are all of the All'Moom'Laa but they differ in the way they express it. Greynari are amazingly suicidal but also amazingly prolific in their reproduction."

The sergeant frowned. "Why did you not punish the private for speaking out of command protocol?"

Eddie'Jo responded. "Times and conditions have changed and so must we. We must be more open, more flexible with each other and be more diplomatic with non-SEARF folks in order to survive and to thrive. A great threat is returning to this world. We must deal with it. First we must deal with ourselves and the DC-Wastelands as they are. We must keep our real nature largely hidden while also sending out envoys and groups to communicate with and better understand these Wastelanders and others we might encounter. I have learned much since my rather exotic return but I expect that we need to share data."

The SEARF sergeant was grave. "SEARF is strong in many ways. The SuperDuperMart bunker is important but only an outpost. In truth we have taken over a LifeVault that fell into trouble thanks to a horrific experiment and we have mad this our home base. We share it with the Vaultfolk survivors and get on surprisingly well. We have also taken over a dozen other places as outposts and three others as central sites. We number close to twelve thousand in number as super-soldiers with about twenty one thousand others including cyborgs, androids and norms."

Then she went on. "We have gained evidence that President James Patriot Jackson did not truly die. That on the moment you shot him that he escaped into some kind of amazingly complicated, sophisticated, advanced and bizarre virtual reality realm. We have only bits and pieces but enough to know that it is made from a bizarre and, most likely, unstable jury rigging of alien, human and human-alien hybrid technologies. Oh, also alien-alien hybrid sciences. The realm is known as NeoDC as in Neo District of Columbia and it is centred by NeoWashington, a more or less accurate copy of Washington DC. But there are problems. Some force discovered our infiltrating of the Compunetwork and other activities to find the truth and they have been hunting us."

He did not at all like the idea that his father had survived. "Like the smart-cruise-missile that destroyed the SEARF safe house that I was in." Then he told them about what had happened.

The sergeant nodded. "We were forced to abandon all covert SEARF sites, that is official ones created before the war but we fear they have learned about some of our unofficial ones. There has been treachery amongst our ranks."

He shook his head. "Careful about such conclusions. There may be a simpler and less disturbing, less dangerous answer. We are changing, getting deeper to the hub."

The three other super-soldiers nodded.

The sergeant spoke. "We are hunted by various super-soldiers much like ourselves but some have exotic powers and weaknesses unlike our own. We have not learned much about them except that they serve something called JAGAF. We think that they are clones, as we are. Well, most of us. They may have come from a similar experimental program but they differ in some ways from us. They can shapeshift and they act as other factions either as whole groups or infiltrators in normal groups. We can sense them. We call them doppelgangers of which there seem to be various kinds."

At that moment the tribal warriors and chimpnoid soldiers began to awaken and to sit up, to look groggily around in confusion and wonder.


TO BE CONTINUED

TWENTY-SIX
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
A MEETING OF ELDERS IN THE DC/CITADEL
:intergalactic:

Elder Lyons turned away from the big 3Dwallscreen and towards Elder Carvina of the Seekers of Truths. A small, specialised Order of Steel, they worked covertly in trying to find information from the local populations, from ruins, from the Compunetwork at various isolated locations. Yet they also carried out some security-intelligence work along with the Sisterhood of Espionage. Elder Carvina was a handsome woman of mature age, her life extended by genetic inheritances and regen-rejuve treatments. She wore the robes of a Scribe. She was of light brown skin, hair and dark brown eyes.

Then she was halting in the small multiple purpose chamber and was frowning softly. "We have confirmed it. There exists somewhere in the vast madness of the changed District of Columbia a huge network of network-systems that function as some kind of amazing form of virtual reality domain. We have confirmed its existence but we do not know where it is, how we can get to it. The vast network of network-systems is not only designed cleverly to serve and support the super virtual reality domain, it is cleverly designed to conceal it and, we figure, to protect it."

The chamber was part meeting room, part office-library and a door led to a small bedsitter apartment for this was where Elder Lyons often spent time working things through, making decisions alone or just resting. A protectron robots stood in one corner and a young woman android stood demurely in another.

Elder Lyons scowled. "President James Patriot Jackson?"

The woman nodded. "We fear that Bloody Eddie did not manage to kill the mad president but that JPJ escaped at the moment of death into the SVR domain that we speak of. Which brings confirmation of other points of concern. SEARF is alive and well in the DC-Wastelands. Bloody Eddie himself has been briefly sighted. The Eagle-Enclave is active covertly in the DC-Wastelands though we do not know how extensively. Super-mutant activity is again on the increase and they seem to be testing the fighting capacity of various factions and defensive capacity of various settlements."

The Elder shook his head in wonder. "Bloody Eddie has returned, SEARF is on the rise and the Mad President has escaped to some sort of incredible virtual reality domain. SEARF will be hunting President James Patriot Jackson. They turned against him for a more than one reason, as you know."

"He was going to betray them, to use them as an expendable suicidal death squads that would destroy as many of his enemies and others he simply did not like, including supposed allies and even friends." Carvina stepped closer. "What will we do now? My suggestion is that my order attempt to track down the location of the super virtuality domain and that the Sisterhood of Espionage attempt to track SEARF, Eagle-Enclave and super-mutant activities. How are the various more important projects going?"

"We continue to have troubles with Liberty Prime's power supply." Elder Lyons responded dryly. "We continue to live in hope. We have discovered fire fighter power armour suits, over twenty of them, but we will leave them for use against fires that break out in the DC-Wastelands. We continue to explore the deeper levels of the Pentagon that were greatly expanded under the rule of the Mad President. It is a vast maze down there and it seems designed to cause confusion and to hide secrets as much as to assist people to use the levels. We find mostly standard military equipment and supplies, network-systems and robots but sometimes we gain more exotic discoveries. That includes a Compunetwork Subcore that indicates that the Pentagon was far more deeply linked into the Compunetwork than we, and many others, had previously assumed."

The woman nodded. As President James Patriot Jackson had grown increasingly insane and alienated from his own people, he had retreated to the Patriottium, his own amazing hitech semi-underground fortress. The White House and the 'Hill' had been taken over by rebels but the Pentagon had turned into a battle ground. Yet it was suspected that JPJ did actually spend time in the deeper depths of the Pentagon even closer to the time of his death and the unleashing of terrible death and destruction upon the world. The discovery of a Compunetwork Subcore could go a long way to confirming that such was true for the Mad President often worked with and through the amazingly big, powerful and sophisticated computer network of network-systems. Indeed he had been one of the team of brilliant minds behind its creation. The Compunetwork Subcore was not shown on any official interior 3Dmaps of the Pentagon but a good deal wasn't.

Unknown to most, Bloody Eddie, also known as Lucky Eddie, the son of JPJ, was also a genius and had helped to design the Compunetwork. He had been an unofficial consultant whom the president had regularly referred to.

"We must find Bloody Eddie, must capture him." Elder Carvina spoke. "Though how one would capture a SEARF super-soldier gone to ground in the DC-Wastelands, is almost beyond me. Such an environment would be ideal for such people."

Elder Lyons nodded. "We may have to form an alliance with him and his people. In the end they turned against the Mad President and they almost stopped him from destroying much of the world and its people. They paid a high price for doing so for over half of them were killed. They saved many lives because they delayed the JPJ's last insane act and many were able to escape into deep bunkers or by other means who otherwise would not have been able to make it."

She frowned. "By other means?"

Elder Lyons nodded. "It is time you knew more of the Prime Classified Secrets. People escaped in many rocketships, aeroshuttles and by other means to the L5 Orbital Colony and to the Lunar Colonies. Then there were the might Arksubs, mighty atomic powered submarines seeking safety in the very depths of the oceans. Others will remain secret from you, for now."

At that she nodded. "I have picked up whispers of something called the Masstrains."

Elder Lyons turned to her with an odd smile. "Massively armoured, fairly fast moving monorail trains that would hopefully avoid trouble by moving through great underground railway tunnels. A Soviet concept but not one, I think, that appeared in the USA. I could be wrong."


She responded. "I must return to my duties."

They parted ways.

Knight Captain Gallows paced quietly into the room in light power armour, moving very gracefully and predatory. He halted and then he spoke. "What do we do with her?"

"She is not a proven traitor but she is holding back important information from the DC Elders Council." Elder Lyons. "You yourself have found no link between her and such as the Eagle-Enclave, the DC-Syndicates or even such as the SEARF. Have you found any more clues to what she is holding back on us?"

The other nodded. "Data on mutagenic virus types from a small semiautonomous university research cooperative of the Canadian Commonwealth before it was conquered by the USA. A breakthrough, it seems, on understanding some aspects of wild mutation patterns in FEV. It appears to be linked with ghoulification."

Elder Lyons smiled. "Then it is as we suspected. Elder Carvina is a demighoul, a ghoul who is overtly a norm human."

He turned and pressed a green button three times. Then he turned again to look at the door this time. After a few minutes Elder Carvina returned but with her were two Elder Guards in standard power armour suits.

Carvina frowned. "So you found out I am a demighoul. Will you shoot me as you do the ghouls in the street or will the infamous Knight Captain Gallows cut my throat?"

Elder Lyons sighed. "Neither! Firstly, while the Orders of Steel sometimes shoot towards ghouls, no ghouls are shot. Ghouls tend to be damned stubborn and will not listen to being asked to leave an area. Yet that is not the only reason for the shooting. We wish to keep up the pretence of hostility because of Project Trasher. It is a project named after its founder and hard working scientific director, Professor Gordon Trasher."

He turned to the 3Dwallscreen that had was showing a map of the DC-Wastelands including the eastern coastline with the Atlantic Ocean. He took out a remote control unit from a pouch and tapped some buttons that showed on a screen as numbers and a password. The 3Dwallscreen changed and now showed a very large chamber, a great laboratory where dozens of scientists, lab assistants, lab techs and other moved around including robots and androids obviously marked as such. At least half the people working there were ghouls.

Lyons spoke. "Beneath the DC-Citadel is a hidden settlement with over 13,000 people and at least half are ghouls, semighouls and demighouls. They not only work in this and other RD projects but they help run workshops, factories, warehouses, hydroponic farms, recycling plants, training centres, a hospital and much else. Now, who were you intending to send the data to that you held back from us?"

She was looking shocked. "Doctor Barrows in the Ghoul Underworld."

He nodded. "Doctor Barrows has a fine mind but he is eccentric and not dependable. Still we have traded data with him through a third person who is actually an agent of the Sisterhood of Espionage. I would like you to take over the role of being a liaison between Doctor Barrows and our operation here."

Elder Carvina. "I will gladly do so. What other secrets have been held back from me?"

Elder Lyons frowned. "Many and they will most likely continue to be held back from you as many are held back even from me because no one mind can afford to know too much lest the individual be captured or compromised or turn traitor. Now, you are much older than you pretend to be. Who are you really. Be honest enough and you, along with your small Order of Steel, will benefit greatly. The Seekers of Truth Order is made up of those, like you, who we needed but could not fully trust because your stories did not quite add up."

Carvina frowned. "You used us."

"Of course but you also benefited." The Elder did not look at all apologetic. "Being an Elder means that I must often do what I least want to do. I have always admired your intelligence and dedication. Now, who are you? We suspect somebody from Stratscidev."

Stratsci was the basic name for the Strategic Scientific Network of the USFG, or United States Federal Government. It was an umbrella agency for many project organizations, agencies and other units. As President James Patriot Jackson's power base crumbled both in the USA and internationally, Stratsci turned against him. This event was part of what many called the Secret Civil War of North America. It was fought between three major factions and many minor ones. The three were President JPJ and what was called his Patriot Empire, the Eagle-Enclave and the rebels of the Free-Alliance. It was darkly ironic how much of this history was never made open or official and how many Americans never really knew what was going on. All most people knew was that the economy was crumbling, they were hungry and that many people were dying.

There was the virus, of course, as developed first by WestTek.

"Professor Asher Carvina Trent of the FEV Biological Regulator Program set up by the break away US Federal Government that was based on a rebellious congress and the rule of the famous, sometimes infamous, Vice President Sharon Bane." The woman shrugged. "Many of my extended family were not only famous scientists but were involved with Stratsci. We tried to deal with the FEV with only mixed results."

Lyons nodded. "I suggest that you continue with your current duties until we call you forth to attend a special meeting. You will learn more then and there."

The woman nodded. "There is much for me to do."

Then she turned and departed.



TO BE CONTINUED

I ACCIDENTALLY LEFT OUT CHAPTER 25. IT HAS NOW BEEN PUT INTO PLACE ABOVE.

TWENTY-SEVEN
TWINS IN LIFEVAULT-101
INVASION OF THE RADROACH MONSTERS
:shakehead:

Radroaches were bad enough, swarming along the metallic hallways towards the inhabited sectors of LifeVault-101. What was worse was what came with them. Black radroach monsters, about three times larger than any mere radroach and with great jagged edged pincers, leg like appendages ending in jagged sharp blades and head tubes that fired glistening spinedarts. One good thing was the radroachaks were only a relatively few and were greatly outnumbered by the radroaches. The other was the new monsters were not bullet or flamer or laser proof.

Aarie aimed her 22LR foldagun and shot the charging radroachak in the head and then again. It shuddered and died, strange mandible arms going crazy, a spinedart shooting harmlessly through the air. Ammunition had to be used with care for there were only two manufactories of such in the vault and both were finding it hard to keep up with demand while emergency reserves were being kept back in case. In case of what, the twins were not sure.

At least their recommendations had been listened to.

Repeating crossbows were being manufactured, compact and lightweight but powerful enough to kill radroaches or the radroachaks. The repeater crossbows had fixed box-magazines for up to ten crossbow-darts. These darts could be and often were reclaimed, cleaned carefully and reused.

Laserguns were plugged into local power points and used to burn holes in many an attacking monster. Flames spouted fire and flame-bottles full of biofuel made from a type of cave-moss, exploded hot and burning. The smell was damned awful.

Simple hight voltage wire-web traps caused many a radroach and radroachak to sizzle away. Again there was more stink.

Dartguns had been found, a whole lot of them, along with the same kind of darts the repeat crossbows used. These dartpistols, dartcarbines and dartrifles were being distributed as quickly as possible.

Despite this many residents had to resort to home made body protection, baseball bats and other such handy items.

Big plan was to direct the attackers into hastily prepared kill zones while trying to stop them from coming through other areas. Protectrons and turrets were greatly effective against the monsters except there were not enough of them. Antibug roboremotes were easier to make, easier to maintain and were still effective against the monsters but decades ago some stupid Overseers had overconfidently recycled them all for some stupid project that had failed anyway. Now techs were desperately trying to turn the units back into antibug units as quickly as possible.

As for the Overseers, they had all reacted differently; the Defence Overseer was busy directing the defensive actions: the Security Overseer was being damned helpful; the Safety Overseer was checking other areas for future danger; the Technical Overseer was focused on producing new resources for the fight; the Civil Services Overseer was in a police cell for trying to make profit out of the disaster and his freedom was at an end; the Social Security Overseer was trying to keep moral up along with organising ongoing efforts to keep the vault functioning in a healthy manner; the Law Overseer was trying to stop panic, hoarding and other crimes linked to the crisis; the newly appointed Civil Defence Overseer was still getting fully into action, the replacement Civil Services Overseer was still being chosen and there were plans for a Special Disaster Overseer, an Agricultural Overseer, a Health Services Overseer and others. As for the High Overseer, he was generally panicking and was busy appointing lots of new Overseers so he could delegate as much responsibility to others as he could.

There were strong whispers of a plan to depose the High Overseer and replace him, of course, but with whom? The transferral of power from one High Overseer to another was supposed to be a smooth event and so far, in the history of LifeVault-101, it had been. Now conditions were different, were far worse. Already political factions were seeking a way to gain more power through the placing of one of their own on the throne of the High Overseer. Actually it was just a fancy office chair.

She turned her weapon, targeted a radroach, and shot it dead. Next to her, Aaron hurled a plastic burner-bottle and it exploded into flames as soon as its simple detonator went off. The flaming biofuel splashed all over radroaches that ran around madly, causing others to flash into flames.

Aaron frowned. "You sense it?"

Aarie nodded. "The dark, twisted mentality behind this attack. Reminds me of the brainabugs but doesn't have their odd naivety, their eagerness to please. This mentality differs not just in mood but in the way it thinks."

Aaron sighed. "Directly controls the radroachaks but indirectly drives on the radroaches through the radroachaks. Could we do something effective?"

Aarie nodded. "Trying is good."

The other defenders were a middle aged husband and wife pair bravely clutching baseball bats and shivering only a little, a young man using a .22LR bolt-action rifle with much dedication but only fair skill and a young woman clutching a crossbow, having used up all of her crossbow-darts. None were observing the twins.

Aarie and Aaron focused, held hands and, very carefully, reached out with their minds. They sensed what seemed like a dark psychic thread, a puppet string, reaching out to each radroachak from some cleverly hidden source. Yet it was not too cleverly hidden for they glimpsed a mind, a face, an office.

The High Overseer was somehow less harmless and bumbling in his aspect now but was grinning and concentrating with his eyes tightly closed. Sweat flowed down his face as he controlled the radroachaks but he did not do so alone. A machine sat there looking like a black, altered version of a VirtualTek portable VR-console. Then they saw it, the thing perched on his back, like a brainabug was more armoured and with more savagery to its nature. The thing extruded hunger.

It was an open secret that psychic warfare had been researched heavily before Doomsday by the USFG and many others around the world. While much of it had gone nowhere, some of it had gained interesting results and a small number of projects had amazing results. Most of it had been heavily classified except that carried out by the European Central University and Cambridge University.

The twins found a weak spot in the psychic puppet strings, the place where they came out from a thicker strand leading back to the High Elder. Then they cut it.

The scream of psychic shock and agony had them hunching down and gripping hands hard. Psychic sensitive people through out the vault felt the shock. The radroaches turned and fled back the way they had been coming from but the radroachaks were stunned for a short time. Then they also began to flee.

It seemed that the battle was over!

The High Overseer vanished. Nothing was found of him, the thing riding his upper back or the altered VR-console. But it was found that the High Overseer had been quietly and efficiently robbing the vault of 0.1% of its valuable resources for many years. At a glance it did not seem much but it added up to a lost fortune in resources and all of it had vanished into the unknown along with the High Overseer himself.

In the political confusion that followed, Amata's father, the Security Overseer, took position as High Overseer and passed over his former position to one of his loyal followers. It was done so smoothly that it was obvious then that it had all been planned as an opportunistic measure for at least a decade. But the new High Overseer did not have it all his own way; as soon as he pushed for a new set of regulations and laws that would increase his power tenfold, every single one of his motions was soundly defeated at the next Overseer Council's meeting.

Life in the LifeVault improved for a fair while.

TO BE CONTINUED

TWENTY-EIGHT
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
GARYS IN LIFEVAULT-108
:toughninja:

Super strong, super fast and super hard to kill Garys came rushing along the hallway aggressive and shouting 'Gary, Gary, Gary!" The freedom-fighters fell back shooting laserguns and autopistols. They were the last nonclones to try to hold back the swelling tide of insanely cunning and aggressive clones. Some wore Vault Guard gear, some security body-armour but most had on just jumpsuits.

People were fleeing from the vault in a fairly orderly manner, were making their way to the long abandoned ProjectVault-108 built to house those constructing LifeVault-108. They had destroyed most of the man made and cave tunnels between the two vaults. Only one remained. Garys numbered in the hundreds and kept being spat out by the Gary-Cloner machine. They had few guns but they used a wide range of odd weapons from metal pipes to knives of many kinds to baseball bats.

LifeVault-108 was mostly the territory now of wandering hordes of Garys. Sometimes a lone Gary would wander aimlessly about. Garys ate dead humans, including dead Garys, radroaches and anything else they could find.

Jamane was in charge now, what with higher ranks either dead or fled to the other vault. She raised her laser-rifle to her shoulder and burned a hole right into the forehead of a clone. The Gary collapsed and thrashed around horribly, words and blood bubbling from his mouth.

Where had the Garys come from? Experimentally they were meant to an endless supply of expendable workers for the LifeVault. At first Garys had been passive and not able to kill but then Professor Abe Adams had decided that as Science Overseer he should take over the LifeVault. He did this by injecting the Garys with something to make them able to kill and then tried to control them through special hypnotic conditioning. The slaughterer Garys had killed the professor first but for a while they had pretended to be normal as they injected other Garys with the kill-juice, as they called it. It was addictive and made Garys feel good, very good, as they did no good to others.

Jamane knew something else and had told others but only a few had believed it. Some dark psychic force was directing the Garys and it was hidden in the vault somewhere. The kill-juice allowed it to control the once passive and fairly simple minded clones, allowed it to direct them to take over LifeVault-108 so cleverly and systematically. Had the same mind influenced the quite insane Professor Abe Adams to inject the Gary clones with the kill juice in the first place?

Again she fired her laser, concerned at its reducing charge. Behind her a man signalled her and the others to fall back through the big door behind them. They did so, still firing their weapons. Then they were pushing the door closed with the help of a couple of protectron robots. Despite Garys pushing against them, they slammed the door closed and began locking it.

Then they turned and fled from the vault. They raced through a big secondary vault doorway, heavy and disk shaped, even as the big armoured door closed behind them. The explosives where ready. As soon as they were far enough along the tunnel, they would bring the section just outside of the gateway down with explosive force. With the protectrons following as quickly as they could, the humans moved fast.

No Garys followed.

The group slowed and walked quickly out of there. They joined a larger waiting group with small electric vehicles, androids and more robots. Jamane made sure everybody and everything was secure. Then she climbed into the first Ejeep and soon the electric four wheel drive machine was heading the convoy along the tunnel.

Behind them the explosives blew and the tunnel collapsed nicely and dramatically.

TO BE CONTINUED

TWENTY-NINE
THE MAN FROM NOWHERE
TRAVELLING TO THE SUPERDUPERMART
:foodndrink:

Chimpnoids and human Tribals began peace negotiations with a swapping of low ranking envoys. The way the SEARF super-soldiers had so easily taken them down had unnerved them and left them open to listening to Eddie'Jo. Also there was something special about the youthful man that gave his words greater power. He had warned them that a dark and powerful force was coming to the DC-Wastelands and that they must prepare for trouble; the Primateriarch Colonies and the NuNarli Tribes could not afford to continue fighting each other. They had to form an alliance with each other and other factions of the DC-Wastelands such as the Union of Columbia and the Orders of Steel.

The chimpnoid soldiers returned southwards with three tribal envoys and the tribal humans returned northwards with three chimpnoid envoys. They moved as two groups off away from the farm, following roughly the coastline. They were heading for the nearest coastal port settlements of their peoples. That meant the a lower long coastal shelf of land that gently sloped over a hundred kilometres down to the actual shoreline.

In the Blackfire and a stealth-slider, a sleek grey antigrav machine, Eddie'Jo and his companions headed away from the farm site. The stealth-slider was a finned machine like a low flying delta wing with a fairly small sized cabin and stubby somehow sleek winglets. They planned to send SEARF units to the farm bunker to salvage further equipment and supplies from it.

The sergeant sat on a front passenger seat with Lilly on her lap. The girl was quietly watching the landscape outside as rain flurried against the armaglass. It was only dim light inside. The animals were in the back all sleepy or sleeping.

Sergeant Kallista spoke then, quietly and calmly. "Not all of our comrades will welcome your return, though easily the majority will. Some have come to question your wisdom in turning against President James Patriot Jackson. They say he would have rewarded us well for loyalty to him."

The man frowned. "They are being foolish. The Mad President, my biological father, in the end most often rewarded loyalty with betrayal. That is why the Patriot Guard was destroyed and why the Eagle-Enclave turned against him. I used to assume it was insanity that drove him erratically but I have come to think that he had some insane final scheme in mind, a grand project with himself at the core of it."

Kallista nodded. "We will deal with the minority with force, if we have to."

He smiled. "Better still, I will talk to them."

She gave him an odd smile. "As you did with the chimpnoids and the tribals? You have a way of swaying people and even once wild animals. A killclaw addicted to SPAM and called Spammy, who would have thought it?"


He sighed. "I have tried to find out where my beloved Lilly comes from but so far, no luck. I talked with many locals and tried using the Compunetwork because some people have added data to it since Doomsday. Some of that data is quite interesting, even quite bizarre. The Church of Atom in Megaton has gained access to a terminal and one Confessor Cromwell has put a good deal of effort into writing down his theory of faith and of atomic enlightenment."

Kallista frowned. "He is harmless enough but the Crusade of Atom is far from that. The Knights of Atom are dangerous, fanatical and dedicated to spreading their insane vision of atomic salvation across the world. They actually hold the Church of Atom in disdain and would burn Confessor Cromwell for his evil 'false moderation of true faith'. They have a Chapter here in the DC-Wastelands up north somewhere."

He nodded. "The DC-Wastelands has too many dangerous factions."

Suddenly there was a soft sparkling shimmer and on the middle finger of each hand appeared a black ring, each fronted by a black disk. On the front of the left one was a golden shield and on the right a golden sword.

The sergeant looked startled. "Where did those come from and what are they?"

"A gift I was waiting for, a very special set of technologies, but it will take time for me to tune to them and them to tune to me fully. The right ring is prime offensive and the left ring prime defensive in nature but both also have other 'tricks' to them." He steered the Blackfire around a large hole in the dirt road. "They were rewarded to me from the Centro; I had to earn them."

Sensors picked up something ahead. He slowed the machine and before him the stealth-slider was already halted. Then large creatures were moving in a herd across the road, huge and transmutated, powerful and deadly oliphants. Where elephants had come from to escape into the DC-Wastelands and beyond, was unknown, but oliphants were armoured, had great bladed tusks and yet were damned fast. They were also surprisingly intelligent and canny.

On this occasion they were fleeing from something but not in panic.

Eddie'Jo got out of the fake mobile-home and went to talk with the herd matriarch as one would do with such. He learned that something very big and monstrous, something wielding terrible pain, had devoured four big bull oliphants with out any real trouble. The bull oliphants, strong and experienced, had given their lives so the rest of the herd could escape. The herd was now grieving.

He placed a silver orb into the air, took it out of a pouch or so it seemed, and it gleamed smoothly silvery translucent. There was a flash of dull silvery light and the oliphants vanished.

He returned to where a wakeful Lilly and the SEARF sergeant stared at him in wonder. Then he was driving the Blackfire again. "Orbis was given me for many purposes and one was to put samples of transmutated or other life into safe reserve. The oliphants are now in a domeland, a dome shaped land spanning three hundred kilometres plus as it slowly but steadily expanded, globe wise. The Domeland is in the 'top' of the globe, so to speak. Before I met Lilly I sent there many samples of life from the DC-Wastelands be they plants, animals or other things. Orbis has used them to spread life across the Domeland which is a shallow bowl with a slowly expanding great lake of fresh water at its centre that expanded as Domeland did."

They moved once more along the gently winding dirt road. The vehicle moved around an obstacle on the road that looked to be a burned out battlewagon surrounded by the dead broken and burned bodies of raiders. Not just any kind of raiders but reavers, the ice cold killers. In many ways the reavers were the worst kind of raiders as gangers were the least dangerous kind. Then there was another wrecked battlewagon and then a battlebuggy. Some force had not only destroyed the convoy with deadly force but also with devastating power and speed. The vehicles had not even had time to leave the convoy.

Which was when the first heavy shudder hit the ground as something in the distance, something very big, began to move. It rose from the ground as if it had been crouched there and then, a great dark shape, it began to lumber across the landscape on four great single jointed legs. It had a great thick neck and a great head plus four double jointed arms that each held great smashing-cutting weapon but also a plasmagun. The arms came from the front and middle. A great flexing tail ended in some kind of big powerful plasmagun. On the head were two more big plasmaguns. Not only was it huge but on top and sides were crude metallic cabins, battlements and there were super-mutants there be they mutantors or massemoths but nothing larger than that. There were also more human sized smart-mutants.

Eddie'Jo sighed. "So the Mad President actually got around to having his colossus-mutants made. Or did somebody else have the same insane vision?"

Then the great monster turned great big plasmaguns towards the stealth-slider and the fake mobile-home. Eddie'Jo made an emergency decision and sent them and other things to Orbis. Even as they vanished, with a sparkling shimmer, great big plasma pulsebeams struck the area they had been in and exploded dramatically.

TO BE CONTINUED

Oh hell, you write too fast. I'll be reading up on this and hopefully can provide more feedback than "it's awesome!" though don't hold your breath

I love the emoticons in the title of each chapter.

EDIT: Quick feedback: The slashes are a bit weird and break up the sentences when reading them. (I refer to things like "super/mutants"). You could have a space and it'd be fine.

super mutants
DC Citadel (or just Citadel would work)
DC Wastelands (or Wastelands)
etc.

Thank you, Kikaimegami, for your feedback.

Will remove slashes from first chapter onwards.

UPDATE! SLASHES HAVE BEEN REMOVED EXCEPT WHERE THEY NORMALLY SHOULD BE!!! :celebration:

THIRTY
PASSING TIMES
:bolt:

About nine months passed.

Super-mutant strike forces, some with hulking colossus-mutants, rose up seemingly from nowhere to launch a new major offensive against the Brotherhood of Steel garrisons in Grand Central Mall, based at the All Presidents Grand Memorial. This great smart-marble complex of structures engulfed the rebuilt Lincoln Memorial and had thrones for all Presidents but easily the biggest seated figure and throne was President James Patriot Jackson himself. Part service-support, part museum, part administration, part shopping complex complete with souvenir shops, it was low hulking, strong and mostly underground. It was a surprisingly ideal fortress. It not only had the HQ, a big garrison, a Sisters of Steel force but a small settlement of camp followers.

Lesser super-mutant offensives took place across the DC-Wastelands in the form of small savage armies that seemed, again, to come out of nowhere. One managed to reach the great Columbian Central Island of the DomniCommonwealth where it fought an army of DomniGuard Mechanised Infantry including power armour troopers, robots, androids and cyborgs but also a far greater number of unwilling conscripts. The super-mutant invaders were defeated and the survivors vanished as quickly as they had appeared. Losses were heavy on both sides and far too many DomniCommonwealth conscripts were buried in mass grave yards.

Eddie'Jo and his companions were trapped in Orbis because they had gone there by emergency method. Truth was Orbis was meant mostly to hold living and other samples from the Earth (Terra), was intended mainly for one way trips. They found themselves in the large, friendly settlement of NuHopetown. Humans were there and ghouls but the ghouls were slowly healing, were becoming more human in appearance. Zhouls were there but though largely mindless and sometimes wandering, their hostility was gone. Lilly went to school, made some friends, kept mostly with her animal friends except for two girls and a boy. Eddie'Jo and the SEARF force were allocated a small fortress. They trained the NuHope Guards, greatly improving fighting and survival ability but bruising a few egos. Eddie'Jo attended open Leadership Council meetings and some public meetings but did not often say anything. He gave over some resources but refused to give into settlers' demands to give over half or even more of the SEARF resources. Yet the SEARF remained mostly removed from the other settlers.

The twins Aarie and Aaron, in LifeVault-101, went through a difficult time. The rebels cell-network was smashed by the vault security forces and many rebels were taken into custody. While some were given citizen arrest in neckbands that kept them to only a few areas, some ended up as convicts and five were executed. The rebel cell-network was far from finished but it was weakened for the moment and forced to go underground. High Overseer Alphonse Almodovar tried to gain an increase in power but only succeeded in a few small, non vital changes. A reformation of the Vaultgov began with the rise of a Elder Triad of High Overseer, Secondary Overseer and Guardian Overseer. Then there was the Grand Elder Council of Senior Elders, there were Junior Elders, Coordinators, Supervisors and various Offices and Services. Sector 10 was cleared of everything useful and was sealed off. The twins could not go that way any more, or at least not for now. They attended school, carried out allocated work tasks, messed around with friends and, under the disguise of hobbies, went on with their old secret activities.

Jack'O'Man and his people suffered a series of setbacks as he was betrayed by an old comrade. His wife was heavily wounded and was sent off to Megaton to heal properly. Jack'O'Man killed his ex-comrade but it gave him no satisfaction. Convoys were often tricks and the Talon Mercenaries were assisted by Wastelander scouts who knew the area. Yet the Antislavers were far from defeated and ex-slaves were still building up their ranks.

At the big SuperDuperMart a diplomatic resolution was made to the situation. SEARF, robots, bananadroids, settlers and others were at peace.

Captain Jane Eye kept skippering the UCCS Lucky Eddie, kept fishing in small protected convoys, despite growing troubles..

Giant ants not only worshipped the strange baby girl and kept her safe in their underground nest, they were joined by another nest but the different kinds of giant ants cooperated under the amazing influence of the odd little girl.

Deathclaws did something odd in Old Olney. They joined forces not only with each other but with smaller killclaws. Packs still kept their own territories but would assist each other or even escape freely into other territories. Then they began linking with other creatures. Yet this was only happening in Old Olney where various secretive experimental projects had once been carried out.

Rose'Ama continued to live in NeoWashington of NeoDC. She also continued to serve the Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization but she also went on being a rebel. She beat up on some more evil clowns.

As for Sheriff Lucas Simms, he continued to be the best cowboy sheriff in the whole of the DC-Wastelands.

TO BE CONTINUED

THIRTY-ONE
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
SAVAGERY IN THE GRAND NATIONAL MALL


Howitzer rockets hurled up explosions of brown smoke as 20mm shells filled the air. 10mmLR, or specialised 10mm Long Rifle rounds, were fired along with more old fashioned kinds of cartridges. The Brotherhood of Steel Knights were forced to crawl in their power armour, not something that they prided themselves in doing. Led by Paladins, they reached what had once been a beautiful rose garden, part of a memorial to the Red Plague of the first half of the Twenty-First Century. The mutated rose bushes were a great monstrous tangle of monster plants with huge hard sharp spikes and great, amazingly beautiful roses that ate anything they could. Spikeroses had become a deadly nuisance across the DC-Wastelands but they made surprisingly good barriers even against modern weapons.

The Brotherhood of Steel and Sisterhood of Steel were focusing many military assets in obliterating the super-mutant threat to Washington DC. Thanks to the planning of President James Patriot Jackson, to control the Grand National Mall and the Central Hub Network beneath it, was a first big step to controlling most of the ruined city. That meant controlling too many of its remaining vital resources. But it was clear to a fair few that the super-mutants seemed to be after something very important or perhaps more than one thing.

A long range missile came down and drilled into the ground, a so called mole-missile, then exploded as a great spouting burst of mud, dirt, super-mutant bodies and other stuff including much brown smoke.

Sisters of Steel still attacked but the super-mutants had come this time with more anti-aircraft weapons and weapons able to be used as such. So they had lost some of their best vertijets and vertibirds.

Union Guardsmen moved in platoons, one providing covering fire while another moved forward. Yet there were too many losses for relatively small areas of ground gained.

Fighting underground in the mazes of tunnels and chambers was, if anything, even worse. One almost felt sorry for the zhouls as they were driven by the super-mutants towards the Free Alliance forces and were slaughtered.

Sarah Lyons crouched in her power armour, aimed a missile-quadlauncher and fired off two multiple purpose missiles in quick succession. In the distance a colossus-mutant was stomping across the landscape, smashing over statues and firing off pulsebeams. The super-mutants on its back were firing off a whole lot of weapons but most had long jumped off, realising that while powerful, that the huge mutants were also big lumbering targets.

"Biomechanical constructs." Knight Captain Gallows crawled up beside her. "The basis of the colossus-mutants maybe Soviet biomechanical science. Take a Soviet construct, a quadwalker for instant, dip it into mutagenic gunk, add weapons and, presto, a monster romper stomper."

Sarah frowned. "Where are they all coming from?"

He managed to shrug his power armoured shoulders, a neat trick. "The problem is that there are too many possibilities. The DC-Wastelands must hold over a thousand hidden project bases, bunkers and even those damned VaultTek Vaults. The strong possibility is that they are coming from more than one place. President James Patriot Jackson focused a great deal of research and development here in the DC. While else did we Orders of Steel come here?"

Sarah snorted. "Sometimes I wonder. My father has so many secrets in that head of his. Another important question is what is controlling the super-mutants and the colossus-mutants. Not those less dumb smart-mutants. What stops such aggressive, wild creatures from just running off. What unites them and guides them in, admittedly, crude group tactics?"

That was when something dropped between them, a black plastic capsule 20cm long and 10cm wide. They both went to leap but a calm, apparently youthful female voice began speaking from it. "Hidden amongst the smart-mutants are others, far more clever and endowed with the psychic ability of psykers, having gained those abilities from the use of mutagenic gloop and FEV injections. The Master did so, the infamous monster made partly of organic growths and absorbed hardware. They are the psyker-mutants. They are not shapeshifters but generally look like smart-mutants. You should also know that there is a larger core hidden amongst the smart-mutants who are quite smart even by human standards. We have come to call them the sharp-mutants but they are just smarter smart-mutants by nature. Inside the capsule you will find datachips, microfilm flimsies and organic samples of various kinds from different kinds of super-mutants that we have captured, interrogated, tested and have done autopsies on. We lack the research resources that you have and hope that as we have chosen to provide you with this important data that you will choose to be generous in what ever results you obtain by using what we have given to you. We are the SEARF!"

Sarah frowned. "I have heard of them. They are supposed to be very good fighters."

The other Brother of Steel laughed softly and in a bemused manner. Then he spoke. "I watched one take on five super-mutants, that is stupid-mutant mutantors, heavily armed and ready to fight. She, the gender was obvious thanks to the tightness of her armour, just stood facing them. Then she moved. I did not see what she did but then the five mutantors were dead. They were dead before they hit the ground. She was back in her former position. I thought I was well hidden as it was in the dimness of late day and I was observing her with enhanced binoculars. She turned, waggled a finger at me, and vanished. Very good fighters? They are incredible. Yet they are cursed somehow, though I do not know the nature of this supposed curse."

She aimed her launcher and fired off another missile. "I suggest you take the black capsule to father. I have a platoon to lead and I am not speaking to my father at this time."

He spoke with a grin in his voice. "What did he do this time?"

She reluctantly replied. "He is overly protective and did not want me to come to battle here in the Grand National Mall."

Knight Captain Gallows began to withdraw. "Both of you are so alike in some ways it is amazing." He gingerly picked up the capsule. "Keep fighting, keep surviving and hopefully I will see you soon."

A great tremor ran through the ground. A statue toppled over in the near distance and soon after a Brother of Steel cursed something about being pinned down under a half naked woman made of smart-stone. Sarah fired her last missile and then went off to help free the unhappy trooper.

Knight Captain Gallows vanished into the battlescape.

TO BE CONTINUED

THIRTY-TWO
THE MAN FROM SEARF
TROUBLE FOR NUHOPETOWN
:violin:

NuHopeland reflected the DC-Wastelands but was like a nicer, greener, less ruined version of it with a variation of some features. A copy of the towering Washington Monument, undamaged, rose above the tower at its far edges. It was used in various ways including as a watch tower. The town itself was like a nicer, cleaner and safer version of a typical DC-Wastelander settlement. Feathered wind-wheels spun slowly on their tall, slender looking towers built to bend with hard winds. Buildings were tough, fortified, in DC-Wastelander style but also had solar power panels and solar hot water systems on the rooves. Special insulated armaglass was the norm.

Eddie'Jo smiled at some children making their way to the NuHopetown School. They smiled back but the teacher frowned softly as if a SEARF super-soldier might be a threat to her charges. The teacher then ushered the children along a flagstone sidewalk towards the school entrance inside a stone wall that fronted the street.

In casual earth coloured clothes he turned and strolled towards the cinema with a pouch dotted belt and a compact backpack. People passed him, most in casual clothing or overalls or jumpsuits. Some gawked, some sped up to get past him quickly but a few just nodded greeting and moved on. Some women flirted with him in what they considered to be a discrete manner.

He was aware of much that happened on the busy street and yet he did not seem to look around or even move much. He just stood there, stock still, outside the sweetshop with the display of lollies of all kinds behind the big window. The owner of the sweetshop darted up to the window, peered anxiously at him as if she feared the super-soldier would scare customers away, and then darted away again.

Shops, workshops, offices, the school, the town hall, a cinema, a theatre, the sheriff's station, a fire-station and other facilities ran down both sides of this, the main street of the town. He wondered if he should go see an old black-white 2Dmovie called Casablanca that was showing at the cinema but then sensed again the troublesome thing.

Something was not right but it was subtle, the sense of wrongness and it was focused somewhere there in the centre of NuHopetown.

Then he stepped into a bookshop, paced past big bookshelves almost overflowing with books and other publications of many kinds and stopped at a big wooden counter. The young woman behind it gave him a half smile and looked him straight in the eyes. She wore a much cleavage showing floral dress of light tight fitting fabric but underneath were some special hidden extras.

He spoke. "How is the operation going?"

She smiled. "The locals are wary of me though I doubt they suspect I am SEARF, that is most of them. Doctor Sarah Tyler, Sheriff Paris Hilton and Mayor Umbrae all keep giving me side looks when they think I am oblivious of them. I am still considered an outsider here and my story of being an ex-Ormon gains me some sympathy but not much more. Most people like to swap second hand books for a small fee but don't like the fact I put on an extra fee on all popular and special books. Some take care of the free sitting library and read the publications there while reading buying our low priced drinks and snacks."

Eddie'Jo smiled. "Good! They sit comfortably and read while we do sensor scans of them. Have you picked up any localised instability factor or other reason for concern?"

"Instrumentation here is basic but we have begun to pick up some kind of local instability factor. We are not sure of its nature. Have any more come through from the DC-Wastelands?"

He nodded. "Two more SEARF super-soldiers are now at NuHopeHub along with four androids come across and five more androids have been manufactured here from resources sent from the DC-Wastelands. Two more DC-Wastelanders came through being an old man and a younger but not much younger woman. They have been rejuvenated by the process of coming here. They are still being processed in the NuHopeHub Quarantine and Adjustment Centre."

There were three SEARF super-soldiers, three androids and three special robots based at the bookshop, that mainly in the cellar. Eddie'Jo had set up the operation after linking with SEARF units already in Orbis who were based at the NuHopeHub. He wanted SEARF to have tighter links with the humans and to better what they were doing in NuHopetown. NuHopetown was the oldest settlement in NuHopeland, had been the biggest and most important but NewHopeburg was starting to become both easily bigger and more central. Why, because Orbis had put new limits on town growth in the matter of population and construction work. Many in the town were angry about this, especially as Orbis would not talk directly to them. What made it worse for them was that the population limit did not include zhouls or such as SEARF or others. It was one more reason to be prejudiced against SEARF, zhouls, ghouls and others.

Truth was that NuHopetown was in an environmentally sensitive area but most of the NuHopetownies could not, would not, see the wisdom of limiting damage to that.

Which was when a soft tremble went through the ground and a sparkling shimmer through the air. Then both SEARF picked up a deep throoming thrumming of Orbis giving off an alarm. Something had breached its transdimensional barriers, had come through from the DC-Wastelands or had been brought by local forces or both.

Which was when there was the noise of battlebuggies, of the brutal war cries of raiders, the shooting of guns and the screams of victims. He shot out of the building and shot with amazing speed along the sidewalk. The black carbine was already marking targets. He did not raise the weapon but fired it as he ran using Eye-HUD. The smallest of the three battlebuggies ran over a dead woman and shot towards him even as he killed the driver with a 10mLR caseless round. A deputy was blasted with a shotgun and his dead body hit the side of a farmtruck hard. A farmer took up a powerful bolt-action hunting-rifle and blew away a raider, a nasty clad raver woman. These were insane ravers in three battlebuggies that some fools had somehow managed to bring to NuHopetown (Orbis) from somewhere in the DC-Wastelands.

He leapt straight into the smallest battlebuggy and slashed the throat of the other raider in it with his carbine's slide-bayonet. Then he was in control of the machine, was turning it in a roar towards the other two battlebuggies even as one of them exploded. The Sheriff was firing an autorifle from behind her lightly armoured police patroller vehicle, an amphibious 4x4 machine. But a raider was grabbing up a schoolgirl as hostage as the girl screamed in terror. Eddie'Jo put a neat hole in the raider's forehead and he crashed dead to the sidewalk, letting the schoolgirl go to flee madly towards the nearest safety.

Eddie'Jo and two more SEARF killed the last of the raiders but five townies were dead, one a small boy, one a mother with three children and one being a such respected and liked deputy. The other two were a retired couple looking forward to a peaceful finish to their years.

They found the culprits in the basemant of the town hall. The mayor and his five cronies were dead and the jury-rigged human-hybrid machine was little more than a few blackened, burned and melted pieces. The concrete floor was partly melted. Eddie'Jo high doubted that the foolish cunning mayor and his cronies had been able to make such a machine but investigations to discover more quickly came to nothing. Nobody knew anything and any traces that could be used to track down the true culprit or culprits, was gone.

The town was badly shaken up.

People began to gather at the grand public hall in the town hall building and began to demand answers.

Orbis was focusing on the town and that had all sorts of implications to it.

TO BE CONTINUED

THIRTY-THREE
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
ABRAHAM WASHINGTON AT WORK

Abraham finished shifting the life like mannequin of a woman and then adjusted the 2076 style summer dress, like a 1950s dress but with a higher hemline thanks to rationing of materials. He stepped back and admired the angle of the wide brimmed hat, the way the necklace emblem sat on the cleavage and the smart patterning of the dress that he had so carefully cleaned and repaired.

Many laughed at him behind his back and said that the DC Preservation Society was a joke and the Chamber of US History was full of rubbish. Others came down, though, to look at his stuff inside their carefully locked armaglass display cases. In the early days he had trusted people only to have things stolen. Some sat in armchairs and watched holotape programs projected into a clear area backed by a white area of wall.

A protectron helped to guard the chamber's treasures.

The baseball display complete with autographed baseballs, baseball bats, baseball caps and some slightly stained baseball cards. Various famous documents behind armaglass wall displays. A row of NukaCola trucks, each with a slight difference in design and a different year date of manufacture on the underside. A small robotic toaster that could also make coffee and cook two poached eggs at the same time. Some stuffed animals in armglass cases, some fixed up Pre-Doomsday and others of various DC-Wastelands beasties. That is a molerat next to a Prewar dog and so on. A display of Soviet weapons, none of them functional, from the Alaska Campaign. Bookcases of books. Figurines. Other domestic hitech devices. A small electric golfcar. Other clothed mannequins of Pre-Doomsday and DC-Wastelands gear including one with raider gear. A fully functioning NukaCola vending-machine sat lit up close to some armchairs where an old woman slept, snoring lightly as she did so.

There was a binging noise. The mild mannered man turned and made his way to a metal door, opened it and walked into his office-study. He carefully closed and locked the door behind himself. The office-study had a bookcase half full of books, some paintings on the wall, two big metal filing cabinets, a desk with a computer terminal and a desk with a robotyper that looked like an odd typewriting machine.

But he walked past this and to his sleeping area behind a curtain. There was his wide cot, a tapsink, a gas-ring on a metal shelf, a small refrigerator and some other items including a large, ornate wooden wardrobe. But then he did an odd thing. He opened the far right door of the wardrobe, stepped into an empty wooden enclosed space and closed the door behind himself.

Moments later he finished climbing down a ladder to a much bigger, hidden metal chamber. The chamber was clearly designed to keep a small group of people contented and alive, being a combination of many things.

Women were active in the chamber, along with a couple of men, as the Sisterhood of Espionage functioned in the hidden outpost inside Rivet City. Abraham was the front, the apparently harmless old fool with his museum, his fanatical collecting of anything of the old USA and his otherwise dull, limited life. Yet Abraham Washington was also doing as an important task. Amongst the Sisters of Espionage were a few scholars of the Order of Sages. They saw the collecting of historical artefacts as far from futile and they carefully copied anything that came into the centre. The real items went to the DC-Citadel while the excellent fakes went on display upstairs. Sometimes the people in the outpost would sneak out and pretend to be visitors to Rivet City just so they could spend some time away from the confined chambers.

He went to a small, discrete meeting of individuals to one side in an antechamber used for such meetings. He sat and looked around at the local Sister of Espionage commander and her aide plus a few others. Something was up but what was it?

Esmeralda Tyler was the Sister Espionage commander, a tall black woman related to Star Paladin Cross. She sat forward and looked towards the newcomer though she was blind behind dark glasses. She spoke. "A scavenger found this and hoped that somebody in the Rivet City Markets might buy this from them. Our agent there did so for a generous but not too generous price." She was holding a large datachip.

She meant Kim Olsen who 'owned' the Buy Sell Anything Emporium business in the Rivet City Open Markets. There was also the other part of the larger markets, the Rivet City Restricted Markets where restricted goods and services were traded from weapons to drugs, six and first blood gladiator games along with many others.

The woman turned to a 3Dwallscreen that showed the Orders of Steel symbol. "We got the follow 3Dvideo recordings from it."

The words first appeared. "Recording Coded A1-897-1 located in small portable 3Dvideo camera close to dead body of a Wastelander scavenger. Data on body is in main file. This data is to be sent at once to Port Shilling where it will be collected for transferral to the DomniCommonwealth. 2128-UJHY8-ORBIS-TY65RF-COMPLIANCE."

The first recording was rather grainy at first but then cleared up. It was from an odd angle at first but then this also straightened up. It was showing, looking downwards, a courtyard surrounded by crumbling smart-concrete walls. Something was fighting down there but not anything normal to the DC-Wastelands. Figures were moving with incredible speed and agility, striking and counter striking, smashing holes in the concrete walls with near misses, running up along walls. The big surprise was that the recording was on slow-mo mode, that it was slowed down as much as it could but the figures were still mostly a blur. But suddenly there was a muffled scream and the recording went blank. Clearly somebody had not wanted the recording to take place.

Abraham frowned. "Met a SEARF super-soldier once. Damned frightening, damned lethal and damned aloof but not aggressive. There are SEARF troopers there fighting something that seems almost as effective as they are but in larger numbers."

It was difficult to discover that Abraham was a very advanced android of the super replicant type developed by WestTek just a few years before Doomsday. Despite all of the DomniInstitute's over confidence and bragging, the most advanced of its mechasm androids did not go close to matching the abilities of the so called super replicants. Mechasm did match standard replicants.

Then he frowned. "Jagware Augmented Genetic Assault Force. Cyborg clones with some alien genes but nothing like the SEARF human alien hybrids. JAGAF versus SEARF and the rest of us had better hope not to be caught between them."

A man spoke, a scholar with some intelligence experience. "So the data was intended for the DomniCommonwealth, most likely the DomniInstitute."

Abraham shook his head. "To the DomniCommonwealth but not, perhaps, to the DomniInstitute. The DomniInstitute is the most powerful of the factions in the commonwealth but not the only powerful faction there. There is the oligarchy of the DomniGuard, the DomniGov, the DomniChurch and the DomniCorp, that is of military, public servants, official religion and a big quasigovernment corporation. There are also the rebels who control the more remote eastern island but they are of only relatively little power. The elected President has only relatively little power as does the elected Parliament of Senate and Represenate, Prime Minister, Ministers and Members of Parliament; that is Senators and Represenators. Organised crime is divided between the DomniHand, the Mafia, the Triads and the DC-Syndicates who have a crime colony there called Armageddon Park. Then there are more exotic, more mysterious factions such as the AntiInstitute, the Future-Foundation, the Church of Atom as led by Confessor Jones, the tribals of the northern island and the clansfolk of the southern island."

The Columbian Islands were big. In general area taken up, they were bigger together than the British Isles and yet had been created by monstrous robotics and other amazing technologies. The same trickeries had been used to alter the rest of the District of Columbia.

The second recording showed a beach scene in dim light. Palm trees and mutated palm trees were closer to the camera while the sands were in the distance. The ocean stretched outwards into the distance. Then came a large, armoured, chunky hovercraft that moved with surprising quietness. It came to a slow halt on the sand, all dark and with no lights as to blend into the dimness. Then out of it came power armoured figures with black armour trimmed with dull dark gold and the symbol of a bold eagle clutching a sword and a lightening bolt. There were many of the armoured figures and also robots such as MrGutsys, sentrybots and battlebots like bigger versions of sentrybots. Then came hovertrucks, hovertanks and other vehicles coming off the big hovercraft hauler. All were armed and armoured.

Then came the following words: Recording Coded A1-897-2 located in small portable 3Dvideo camera close to dead body of a Wastelander scavenger. Data on body is in main file. This data is to be sent at once to Port Shilling where it will be collected for transferral to the DomniCommonwealth. 2128-UJHY8-ORBIS-TY65RF-COMPLIANCE.

Abraham showed his concern in his voice. "Patriot Guards. If Patriot Guards have survived Doomsday in any real numbers, with enough resources, then we are all in big trouble. Question is do they still serve President James Patriot Jackson, a man who is still alive somehow as far as I am concerned."

The Sister Espionage commander nodded. "Word came through just minutes ago stating that the Orders of Steel now believe that President James Patriot Jackson somehow escaped into some kind of super virtual reality realm, a realm where the reality is perhaps as real as 'normal reality' though with some variations of 'natural' laws. The whole of the DC may have been reconstructed largely to create, conceal and protect the super virtual reality realm that I speak of. All of the Elders have now endorsed this view and when the Outcasts were informed, they agreed with the assessment. Word has also been sent to the President of the Union of Columbia."

Another man spoke now, a male Sister of Espionage. "SEARF and JAGAF super-soldiers, Patriot Guards, armies of super-mutants! What else could we be dealing with?"

The third and last recording showed them a great open valley somewhere unknown where a fortified city was lit up with bonfires, burning torches and more modern lighting. Quietness was on the big settlement with its high wall, long stake filled ditches and warning sign marked mine fields. The city was partly old structures, partly repaired ruins and partly newer built structures. The majority of metal armoured defenders, surprisingly, were often armed with swords and shields, with bows or crossbows. Others carried autorifles, autoshotguns, hunting-rifles, double-boomers and other guns. Then there were figures in exotically embellished power armour of different kinds carrying flamers, lasers, autoguns and other big weapons.

But the green tinged fog came drifting into the valley, moving against the strong breeze, at first in light wisps and less dangerous seeming. It grew quickly thicker and broiled as things moved inside it in a horrible jerky fashion, things that were both familiar and yet alien. Then some showed. They were zombies but not just of humans but of other creatures from molerats to big predators like deathclaws. But other things came with the horrific fog like long whip like tentacles, slimy and rotting, and skeletal like humanoids with spikes, spiky tails and weird bony claws and fangs. There were also great rolling balls of repulsive mingled rotting flesh, bone, fur and other organic matter. These things would engulf zombies sometimes, grabbing and absorbing them but the zombies put up no resistance.

Long range weapons struck the fog from the city. Explosions lit up the fog and incendiaries flashed into flames. Big powerful laser batteries unleashed glowing pulsebeams. A biplane flew overhead of it and dropped bombs that exploded into flames.

The recording ended as tentacles whipped up and dragged the biplane out of the sky with horrifying speed and power. The brave pilot and gunner fell out of it and into the glowing fog, having most likely no chance of survival.

Then followed the following message: Recording Coded A1-897-3 located in small portable 3Dvideo camera close to dead body of a Wastelander scavenger. Data on body is in main file. This data is to be sent at once to Port Shilling where it will be collected for transferral to the DomniCommonwealth. LOP786-UJHY9-ORBIS-FGH123F-COMPLIANCE.

None in the group knew what to say. No reports of anything like the deathly lights glowing fog had come to them, let alone armies of zombies invading strange cities. The symbols on the power armoured warriors were a little like various forms of South American hieroglyphics but the other language glimpsed was unknown.

The three separate 3Dvideo recordings left them with far more many questions than answers but all three hinted at more trouble arising in an already troubled realm, especially the undeathly fog.

They went back to work.

TO BE CONTINUED

THIRTY-FOUR
BIGGER AND BETTER THAN TRANQUILLITY LANE
ROSE'AMA GOES FOR A DRIVE
:lmao:

There were no traffic jams, no heavy flow of cars, out that far from the NeoWashington Hub. Rose'Ama steered her atomic family sedan through traffic that was mainly big atomic motorised haulage trucks and delivery vans. She had to be careful with the drivers of the big rigs who considered this to be their territory and who might give her trouble just because they could.

Manufactories, warehouse complexes, hydroponics complexes, special processing plants, they were all semi-underground, were mostly underground. Neat structures surrounded by small green park areas was the norm above ground.

She parked the big car amongst a row of them in a carpark shared by a row of complexes, the customers that is. The employees parked their vehicles elsewhere or came by public transit. Now in a bizdress, a minidress of a particular style with light shoulder pads, she took her matching shoulderbag, adjusted her hat, adjusted her make-up using a small mirror and then walked towards one of the complexes.

A couple of thuggish young men leered at her as they sat at a table outside of a small diner, under a shop canopy. In NeoWashington bad things too often happened to women but she was always capable of strong self defence on official business. She flashed her official badge at the two men and they sullenly left her alone.

Where was the anomaly? Instrumentation had brought her to that sector. She walked into the small, cheap diner where one waitress and a counter girl were being over worked and harassed by the male thug customers. She bought a bottle of iced tea and a banana at the counter, accidentally on purpose stepped down on the shin of a thug who went to stick his hand where it was not wanted, then smashed her elbow into a thug who was pawing at the waitress.

By the time she had left the diner, five thugs had been injured. The young woman made her way towards Warrington Fine Ceramic Goods Incorporated. It was a fine corporation manufacturing a deluxe range of pottery including vases, cups and even artworks. This was very true. Trucks and vans took away stock from the complex every day and many shops sold Warrington ceramics. But something more than the production of ceramic goods was going on in the building. She ate her banana and drank her iced tea, dropping the rubbish into a recycling bin.

The armaglass doors to the entrance lobby opened for her and for an instant she sensed something pass her with amazing speed, then another and then another. Yet Rose'Ama saw nothing. She sensed power, strength and potential danger. The young woman behind the counter, all blonde hair, cleavage and white teeth, smiled richly at her but the smile did not reach the eyes of the receptionist.

The voice spoke softly into her mind, strong and smooth. "Not a receptionist. Combat Type 3-211a android. You follow your senses. We follow you and protect you."

Something strong and subtle inside Rose'Ama told her to go with the advise. She spoke as she passed the receptionist desk. "I must go and talk to a Doctor Adama who heads ceramic research and development!"

With deadly speed the receptionist android came out from behind the counter and stood in front of Rose'Ama, blocking her. "I am sorry but visitors are not allowed past this point except under exceptional circumstances. If you wish to talk to anybody you must visit our Public Relations Offices in this same complex but about 100 metres along the sidewalk. Go now or I will call security."

Rose'Ama frowned softly. "That is not a nice way to treat a possible customer."

The android spoke. "You are a threat to security. You are not alone." Then she pulled out a handgun from seeming nowhere and aimed it at Rose'Ama, moving with impressive speed.

Something fast and hard hit the android and hurled it through the air. The android struck the desk, flipped across it, came up on her feet and fired off 10mm caseless slimshot bullets. A grey brown splashworked figure of armour came into view and then flickered. The android was hurled into the wall and this time she fell down and staid down.

Rose'Ama turned and found herself looking at a SEARF super-soldier in stealth power armour. It was clearly a young man by the tightness of the armour. He spoke. "Rose'Ama of the Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization, you are also of the rebel cell/network. Know this, the rebel cell/network is a servant of the virtual reality multiple entity that is now President James Patriot Jackson. All that you send to NeoSanctuary become safer from PJP's darker side which he, the Greater PJP, is slowly losing control of. We of SEARF who ended up coming into NeoDC when it was created, are trapped here just as much as you and many others are. Even PJP himself is ultimately trapped here, his planned temporary bolt hole becoming his permanent prison. The situation is bad enough but you need to know that PJP plans to break out even if it means risking much death and destruction to more than one realm and its life."

Then the SEARF super-soldier turned. "Come with me. We will avoid the obvious elevators. They go to dead end levels which become traps against intruders. We go to the secret elevator and from there you guide us. I suspect that you do not know your true nature."

Rose'Ama shrugged. "I lead a fairly simple life. It has always been so. I am the best field agent for the Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization."

He spoke. "You are the only field agent for the Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization. You are a child of President James Patriot Jackson and your brother is our leader. He now calls himself Eddie'Jo. Now, we must go, Rose'Ama, and put a stop to what is going on inside this building."

The secret elevator was hidden partly behind a huge pot-plant that lashed out green tentacles out at the two intruders. Rose'Ama told the creature to sleep and it simply stopped moving. The surprisingly large elevator took them down two levels because she sensed that is where they should go.

Then they were out in a huge chamber stretching out into the distance. Metallic dull silvery floor, walls and ceiling reflected many bright fluropanels. There were many heavy metallic wheel-tables and each had embedded into it a status-capsule. In each capsule was a man, woman or child. The status-capsules were semitransparent in nature. Dataplates were on both ends of each capsule.

The super-soldier sounded impressed. "Every person in the virtual realm is in a status-capsule that in turn is part of the super virtual realm. It is seemingly impossible, like somebody lifting themselves up into the air by their own boot laces, but somehow it has been done. NeoDC is far more than a normal virtual reality realm. Such disguised Status-Life Chambers are concealed all across NeoWashington."

Rose'Ama sensed danger. In distance a worktron robot was adjusting something but it was no threat. She once again began to move in the direction that she sensed was the best one. She found herself moving down a wide clear laneway and in the distance was visible a big set of elevator doors.

She spoke. "I have dreamed of such places. There is trouble. Less children are born every year. All grow slowly and have long youthful life but increasingly the oldest citizens are deforming into mindless monsters, literally ceasing to be human. There are also the other strange monsters reflecting the Mad President's fears; the clowns, the mimes, the brain eating zombies and some odder than that."

She began to run, so did he and so did the two stealth invisible other super-soldiers. They were almost to the elevator when the things came rushing from their left. Each was a giant two thumbed hand with five fingers between each thumb. They came rushing with amazing speed and agility, each being of a variation of skin colours, a patchwork pattern.

Rose'Ama turned and frowned at the things coming at them, each of which had a great black ring on its middle finger with a black disk face and a golden symbol. The symbol was the personal symbol of President James Patriot Jackson, being a bold eagle holding a crisscross of a sword and a lightening bolt. Such was also the symbol of the Patriot Guard. Then she raised her hands and the black rings on each hand became suddenly visible with their golden symbols of a sword on the right and a shield on the left.

The handzrol creatures, all five of them, vanished.

Rose'Ama had no idea how she had done what she had done but she did know that the psychic energy creatures, psyker-elementals, would have tested even the SEARF abilities of fighting and survival hard. They were powerful monsters.

The elevator took them down five levels. It could have taken them down further but this was where she needed to get out. Followed now by three visible SEARF super-soldiers, two women and the man, she walked into the great dome shaped chamber of dull silvery metallic nature.

In its very centre a great weirdness of flickering black energies, like flashes of darkness, darted up and around a dull silvery orb. It was three metres wide and floated three metres above a three metre wide cylinder that was three metres high from the floor. There were scientists in white labcoat outfits, technicians in white coveralls, robots of various kind and cables ran from the platform to temporary set up control consoles. There was other hardware, soldiers in light power armour suits, workers in light power armour moving more hardware about and androids.

Professor James Patriot Jackson, a so called superclone extension of the Mad President, was overseeing the experiment. He was identical looking to the tall, handsome, charming, mature president but wore a white labcoat and other 2077 style scientist gear.

He turned and scowled at the newcomers. "The Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization has no jurisdiction in this place and the SEARF are traitors. Of course, this is the work of the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Reality Stability, the supposed good conscious of the president himself."

Prime Minister Elaine Patriot Jackson was Rose'Ama's real boss. Elaine Patriot Jackson was the wife of the President and the soft nurturer of NeoDC. Or so went the Public Relations spin. But EPJ was tough, very tough, and very canny. She was slowly losing a battle against her husband's growing madness and his desperation to escape from the virtual reality prison he had created for himself and that had ensnared so many others. The Prime Minister also held the position of Minister of the huge Ministry of Reality Stability.

Rose'Ama spoke. "What you are doing here must cease. You are causing dangerous instability through out this sector of NeoWashington."

The Mad Scientist grinned at her. "Freedom, what price freedom? We will have freedom and power!"

Which was when everything seemed to explode, to implode, to go crazy with unleashed exotic energies and effects. Rose'Ama found herself being protectively wrapped by three SEARF super-soldiers even as she found herself vanishing. She heard the shouts, screams and other noises from people there. A protectron robot was attempting to calm people with its electronic voice.

Then there was just darkness.

TO BE CONTINUED

The matrix taken to new heights of brilliance

:woot:


"Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization," :rofl:
sounds like it's straight out of Brazil.
:)

Thanks for your feedback, old andy.

Truth is my writing always has a bit of 'tongue in cheek' to it and 'BRAZIL' is one of my influences. On the other hand the name Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization is actually not as silly as it might sound for in a virtual realm of the kind I am writing about, keeping stability is essential and concentric stabilization is a fancy way of saying that the department 'concentrates' on particular troubling events etc. Another influence on my writing are the Diskworld novels and Monty Python works so there is always a hint of the silly, of the slightly mocking, in my stories.

Again thanks for the feedback.

THIRTY-FIVE
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
REFUGEES
:swear:

Refugees were coming more frequently in convoys from the Washington DC area closer to the Grand National Mall. But they also came from other areas where the super-mutant forces were more likely to strike and where raiders fought super-mutant forces savagely.

They went to Rivet City where a big old oil super-tanker was being reconstructed to house them with a Megaton style internal pattern of buildings, platforms, buttresses, rampways, walkways and other structures. Five great tanks had long been cleaned of all crude oil and many adjustments had to be made.

They went to Rivertane and the floating slums there expanded.

They went to Sugartown where the old factories were being swallowed up by the expanding settlement.

They went to Greyditch. Greyditch grew larger, added some walls and attracted traders and trade.

They went to Arefu that expanded across the great highway bridge over the Big DC-River and out from the bridge ending at the end which was not broken.

They went to Canterbury Commons where the settlement was expanding with newly added walls and a Free Trade Zone that included a large markets.

They went to Radiotown established in the massive monolithic GNR Tower but at the base and in the basemant levels far below GNR Station.

They went to Duckstone, the settlement on the shores of a big secondary DC River, which expanded to accommodate them as new citizens.

All these settlements belonged to the Union of Columbia but some few refugees went elsewhere.

They went to DCTektown run by the growing, ruthless but surprisingly fair dealing TekCorp survivor. There they became second class citizens and so called subcontractee workers but in general they were treated fairly.

They went to the Republic of Dave where the women ended up inside the inner wall and the men ended up outside the inner wall.

Some made it to the secret settlement of Rockopolis where they lived a fairly good life for existence in a series of caves and small bunkers.

Some few ended in Bigtown outside of the main entrance to the Lamplight Caverns of the Lamplight Mountain where stood the mighty Lamplight Tower, a monstrous monument to the Mad President's love of lighthouses; yes, it was a giant lighthouse complete with giant slowly revolving lights. Bigtown was not much of a choice but was better than being out there in the DC Wastelands with out shelter.

Some ended up in the Ormon settlement of Holy Lambs, linked to LifeVault-103 where Ormons still dwelt. They called it the Holy Vault of the Sinless Savour of the Three Books of Wisely Wisdom that were cleansed by the Pure Tears of the Divine Messenger. Mostly they just called it the 'Holy Vault'. The refugees were welcomed warmly and then became little more than slaves in various labour camps.

And some went unwillingly to Paradise Falls as slaves while others ended up vanishing unwillingly with the super-mutants.

Others went?

TO BE CONTINUED

OMG, that's a lot of locals you just listed

You just reinvented the wastelands me thinks..

I really wanna here more about this super tanker annex they're converting and re-building next to Rivetcity

Thanks for the feedback, old andy.

I added some settlements just to make the DC Wastelands seem more populated but all the old settlements are there. I found I had to alter things just to write a proper long story just as I ended up expanding the size and populations of many settlements to make them more believable. In reality any settlement below a certain size and population fails to be viable, especially if it is under heavy survival pressures.

As asked for, I will be happy to write more about the super-tanker and the new settlement extensions inside it.

:flamethrower: :celebration: :fallout:

THIRTY-SIX
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
MEI WONG IN RIVET CITY
:cookie:

The three young men ambled along the newly constructed walkway taking them across the midway of Riverhold Two. They only gazed lightly at the nervous oriental woman but she did not like even that much attention. She darted away into the crowd even as a new diner was opened right where she was moving. People had been waiting to go into what was a big metal and wooden box with a neon-sign flashing above its door. The smell of fresh cooked squirrel and molerat meat floated out through the doorway.

Refugees were now former refugees, had gained citizenship of Rivet City, giving the Rivet City Government a big headache in the process. The Orders of Steel, based at the DC-Citadel, had sent trained administrators to assist. The Union of Columbia had also sent assistance. Nervously, Mei Wong had applied for citizenship and, to her astonishment, had been accepted. The Union of Columbia formerly opposed slavery and on those grounds alone, as an escaped slave, she was given asylum.

Walkways went across the Riverholds but ended in airlock style door doors put there in case of flooding, sinking. Security guards and sheriff's deputies stood at the doors, a couple of each, with a big deputy dog lazily sniffing at passers by. The big walkways sometimes had small electric vehicles humming across them taking people or delivering goods.

The young woman moved nervously out of the way of a makeshift electric bus crowded with school students, teachers and armed escorts. Thanks to poor fertility rates, children were precious in the Wastelands, indeed across much of the world, and were always a target for slavery.

Above her a box structure was being finalised. A big constructor robot had put the wall unit into place but that machine was now working inside Riverhold Four. Windows were completed as a worker in specialised light power armour worked a portable welder. The rush to complete work meant safety standards were not as high as they should but, amazingly enough, there had been no great injuries or death.

That was when she bumped into the frightened looking teenage girl, a dark brown figure with frizzy black hair, who was clutching a bundle complete with a small sleeping baby figure and the hand of a small boy with albino features. Mei Wong knew at once that they were escaped slaves. The marks on the necks of the teenager and the smaller boy were enough to confirm it to her.

Despite her fears she would not leave them, could not leave them.

The teenage girl smiled hopefully. "I am Ellen and this is Frankie. The baby girl is Gigglie, her special name. You were a slave also, weren't you?"

Mei Wong nodded. "Yes, I was one of Tenpenny's slaves. Where do you come from?"

Ellen bit her lip and then spoke. "A very dark place underground where the lights are dim, where food is horrible and water tastes funny, where showers are cold and guards are brutal if one breaks the laws. Bad things move in the dark and sometimes they drag away a slave and never more is the slave seen. Our parents hid us in a tram taking oremok to the surface and we got away from the guards, turrets and robots with.." She shrugged. "The voice in our heads that helped us."

"Ormok?" The oriental looked puzzled. "Don't you mean ore?"

The teenager pouted. "I know what I mean! Ormok is like soft rock that grows. It smells horrible and sometimes makes people sick, even the guards who wear special masks. They give slaves only simple masks. This place is amazing. All those big metal boxes up high and down low. Look up there, what is that?"

Mei Wong looked up briefly. "Cable-car! It goes above and along the big old super-tanker ship so people can travel along the whole ship faster."

But when she looked down again the children were gone. She looked around in astonishment but could not see them. Yet she sensed that they were still close. She sighed and spoke. "Come back, please! I will help you."

The three were suddenly there again. The teenager was pouting. "Gigglie woke up and got panicky with all the people. Look at those ramps going down. There must be many levels."

"Four levels including the ground floor, which is the first floor of course." Mei Wong found herself being studied by a pair of large brown adorable eyes as the odd little baby girl studied her intently, knuckles in mouth being gnawed gently. The little boy yawned tiredly, miserably.

Mei Wong picked up the boy and began to carry the child on her hip. The boy yawned and went to sleep with his head on the oriental woman's shoulder. "Follow me. My place is fairly small and bare but it will have to do."

They found a basic cage elevator and went downwards past a hotel, a small community depot and then they were walking along a walkway on the second level. They were in an area where old shipping containers were turned into huts and lined up along side each other. They walked under a gurgling water pipe.

Mei Wong unlocked her front and only door and soon they were inside the one roomed hut with its basic metal lockers, a simple tap-sink as the only source of water, a single bunk with a single sheet and a blanket, a much patched cushion and some boxes filled with various items.

It turned out that the newcomers had more food and drink than did Mei Wong. They shared foodbars, grilled fishcakes, steamed rivervish, a kind of edible water plant, and three large fresh hydroponics grown pears. They drank some tepid water from the low pressure tap. They even washed a little. Then they all went to sleep.

When Mei Wong awoke there were two bunks, identical to each other. Indeed everything had been not only doubled but fixed up as brand new, it seemed. Each brand new locker had brand new stuff in it.

Gigglie was sleeping sounding in her baby-pouch on Ellen's chest. Frankie was reading a big colourful children's book.

Mei Wong smiled. "Which of you can do the 'duplicating renewal' trick?"

Ellen was sitting on the other bunk. "We all can but Gigglie does it best of all. Gigglie can make sure that others do not sense us doing this. She is a special baby but she misses her mummy. We all miss our mummies. We want to free our people from the deep dark cold hot place."

Mei Wong looked puzzled. "Tenpenny used to let me read some of his books and I learned much about the DC-Wastelands. Do you mean a vault?"

Ellen nodded. "There is MineVault-002 where the guards, administrators and officers live. Oh, lots of people live there but not us slaves. Us slaves live in the Slave Dormitories. Actually our quarters are just like these but much more crowded. The oremok devours our poop and piddle, which helps it to grow. We eat food that is not good tasting but which keeps us working strong and healthy. Many people up here on the surface are more hungry than the slaves are down there in Paradise Deep."

Mei Wong cursed softly. "The legend of Paradise Deep. A network of different kinds of vaults designed and built by VaultTek, WestTek and FutureTek together. It was supposed to be a paradise where all lived the good life and then returned to the surface in big numbers to colonise the surface, to build a brave new world. But things went wrong and they never came up to the surface except for a few who fled dark things happening down there. They were insane and so the true story was lost. When any dared go down to investigate, even large well armed groups, they found nothing and so people stopped believing. But I know it is real."

Ellen frowned. "How do you know about Paradise Deep?"

The woman nodded. "My grandmother was one of the insane ones that was found so long ago and ended up as a mad slave in the infamous Longbone Asylum that the Regulators and Antislavers closed down about ten years ago. Before that my grandmother died and her daughter became my mother. My mother, father and I were sold to Tenpenny as slaves because he likes to buy slave families; he thinks they are more stable workers and that family members can be used as hostages to keep other family members from escaping."

The brown skinned teenager looked impressed. "Will you help us?"

At that Mei Wong nodded. "As much as I can."

TO BE CONTINUED

THIRTY-SEVEN
BIGGER AND BETTER THAN TRANQUILITY LANE
PRESIDENT JAMES PATRIOT JACKSON? HIS RETURN?
:rock:

He awoke in confusion and pain. He awoke and found himself standing and looking out from a large bare chamber and through a great armaglass window to the cityscape of NeoWashington. The room moved steadily for it was a great disk shaped one that revolved at the top of a great cylinder shaped tower. Nobody else could see in but he could see out. A large passenger vertibird swept by, moving in an odd pattern as if the pilot feared that something might attack the flying machine. In the distance circled giant eagle creatures, mutated and terrible, so the newcomer supposed the pilot was being wise. Mostly the city was peaceful, was safe, but he could sense a troubling influence of malice, of violence, that flowed through it. Most disturbing was that he knew this influence was utlimately linked to and was driven by himself.

He was tired of this existence, was tired of life, and he wanted to be free. But there were two at least two other aspects of himself out there who would fight him and his plans along with a whole lot of superclone and clone extensions of himself that were of concern. Then there was the darkness of self, the horrific aspects of his subconscious, along with something worse, an alien darkness somehow trapped into the super virtual realm. He had to deal with them all and in doing so he needed to make contact with various forces to form an alliance with them.

But there was also hope in the form of his more enlightened self and the lighter side of his subconscious. Along with something else, a source of Light outside of himself.

So he renamed himself Seeker James Patriot Jackson, no longer president but more basically just a seeker of truth and freedom but not just for himself.

He was hungry and thirsty. The young attractive woman came to him then, walking into the room in a silky orange kneedress, and she brought with her a tray of food and drink. Seeker James Patriot Jackson summoned forth a table and two chairs, basic in appearance but finely made of wood. He sat and ate a large healthy meal and drank mostly water from a large jug but also one cup of percolated coffee.

Yet even as he sat there his mind roamed NeoWashington and beyond to the rest of NeoDC and he began to summon various forces and other factors into place to help the people against the growing darkness. He had to be subtle, had to be careful, for he was under threat from both his own fragmented mentality and from something else.

Then he sensed Rose'Ama and the others in NeoLimbo and, reaching out carefully, drew them towards himself.

TO BE CONTINUED

THIRTY-EIGHT
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
DEALING IN THE GHOUL UNDERWORLD
:goodjob:

Movement! Explosions in the distance like puffs of brown smoke as Brotherhood of Steel lay down an arty barrage against the super-mutants. Willow, the ghoul and self proclaimed sentry of the Ghoul Underworld, was standing close to the entrance to the Museum of History. She didn't like the Brotherhood of Steel but she had no real liking for the super-mutants either; even if the big brutes did not bother attacking ghouls, once the fighting began they had no care if ghouls got caught in the cross fire. Brothers of Steel did shoot at ghouls but rarely came close to hitting, which had Willow wondering if they really intended to hit any ghouls for they were fine shots.

Today she was not alone. Two other ghouls were helping her as sentries. They all wore metal armour. Willow had her AER9 laser-rifle, Bron had his assault-rifle and Shep had her Soviet style combat-shotgun. If anything they were far more nervous than she was because she was used to being on sentry duty up there. They belonged to the Ghoul Underworld Guard, or GU-Guard, which in truth was something of a joke amongst most Underworlders.

In the distance moved armoured vehicles of the UC, being a mixture of types but being led by two monster Hammerfists.

Shep hissed. "Why don't the fools leave the super-mutants alone to get what they want? That way there need be no shooting."

Willow frowned softly. She wondered sometimes if many of her people had suffered from rotting of the brain cells along with the skin. "What ever super-mutants want isn't likely to be harmless and if they do get it, then they might just do something very nasty with it."

Bron softly scratched his face. Ghouls soon learned not to scratch too hard against an itchy patch of rot-skin but perfected ways to relieve even a painful itch with less damage done. "Well at least from here we can see anything coming long before it gets here. Just the three of us here and nobody else, which is just the way I like it."

Which was when the young SEARF man spoke from where he stood just behind and one side of the three ghouls. "Yes, it is a good place to see anybody coming but it is too exposed to you being seen and to sniper fire. I suggest you dig in and perhaps even build a small gun-bunker."

The other two jumped in surprise but Willow turned around casually and looked at the youthful young face of the super-soldier. "Well if it isn't super smoothskin. Hello, handsome boy." She then surprised the other ghouls by leaning forward and kissing the SEARF trooper on the cheek before standing back. "I talked to the Underworld Leadership Council, such as it is, with Doctor Barrows, with Carol and with Winthrop. The last three have much more influence than do those pompous, foolish Councillors. You help us train and equip a proper Underworld Guard and we let you set up an outpost here in the Underworld."

"Very good then!" The SEARF trooper smiled at Willow. "We have other offers to make, some as gifts with no expectation of anything in return. My people will be moving in now."

Then a dozen more SEARF seemed to melt out of nowhere with a flicker of motion. Some carried armoured carry-canisters and big backpacks that looked far too big and heavy for them but which did not seem to slow them down at all.

Willow led them not through the big doors, which were normally locked heavily, into the Dante Exhibition Lobby; instead she used a smaller door to one side. In the lobby chamber was a big circular console-desk. A protectron stood guard. There were three ghouls playing bone-dice close to one corner; they looked up in surprise at Willow's companions and edged closer to the corner. The newcomers went up a big gentle ramp but again not through the main doors but through a smaller door to one side.

The building shook as a big rocket hit too close to the big building for comfort. Thankfully it was both heavily fortified and made of smart-materials.

Willow never stopped being surprised somehow every time she walked into the very big exhibition chamber just off the lobby. Armaglass cases protected mannequindroids, basic androids used as mannequins in many displays, made to look like sufferers in hell, demons, the rewarded in heavy, angels, the waiting in purgatory and many other of Dante style figures. Each case held a whole scenario with many effects and at least half a dozen of the mannequindroids.

There were paintings, sketches, sculptures, books and other works based on Dante's works. There were scenes from a famous 2049 holographic movie based on it and a 2051 virtual reality realm. While some things had been scavenged, many things had been left where they were. It was as if the ghouls felt somehow linked with the mood, the story of the displays, and were reluctant to interfere with them.

Winthrop was busy trying to salvage technical stuff from a display so as to help keep the Underworld running well for the living. Behind him and to one side was his son and apprentice, Belgium. A MrHandy hovered behind both of them on hoverjets. Belgium, like many ghouls born to ghouls, was a semighoul with less marked features. Many ghouls were sterile or weakly fertile so only relatively few such children were born.

When the SEARF came to him, Winthrop stood up and looked at the newcomers with his usual dour look but Willow could sense he was surprised. Then a SEARF trooper put down a canister, opened it and showed the contents. He spoke. "These tools and modular parts are a gift from us to the citizens of the Ghoul Underworld."

Winthrop grinned. "Damned it, some repair minirobots, a gravity wrench and? yes a part that I need to get the matoreplicator working. Yes, something to get the water purifier #3 functioning more smoothly. Grand indeed. Belgium, go get Hank, Frank and Tank. They are my assistant caretakers now trying to stop another system from breaking down."

They left Winthrop with two carry-canisters and a big backpack worth of stuff while he carried on with dour happy astonishment. They left the big exhibition room through a service door and went along a utility hallway that ended in a stairwell. They went downwards for three levels, went along a wider hallway and then down a staircase into the main part of the Ghoul Underworld. A great basemant chamber was three levels high with two layers of wide balconies and mezzanine floors. There were no exhibitions here, just lots of basic utilitarian architecture, lots of ghouls and some efforts to decorate the place that achieved mixed success.

Next stop was Carol's Place where one could rent a basic bed cubicle to sleep in or pay for a shower or buy food, drink or some other items. Carol treated the SEARF with welcoming warmth, insisting they have drink and food for free. They put much stuff into Carol's care, into her storeroom, knowing that it would be safe there. Not only did most ghouls in the Underworld have great respect for Carol, three of them guarded the storeroom at any one time just in case. That is three GU Guards with metal armour and automatic weapons or lasers. Cerberus, the MrGutsy, would also pause there in its patrols of the Underworld to make sure all was well. Distribution would take place through community meetings which were always rather excitable.

After that was a meeting with the newly appointed Captain Rear Admiral of the Ghoul Underworld Guard. Confused of mind in some small ways, as shown in his name, Captain Rear Admiral was none the less a fine commander and fighter with much military training. He kept saluting the SEARF, who kept saluting him back, as he took delivery of military equipment and supplies including a hoverjet lifted eyebot. He showed of his Wall of Honour with various pictures of his past reincarnations of Ceaser, Rommel and other great military leaders. For some reason he also considered that he was once the actress Doris Day but also Moony Mouse, a 2060s 3D animated mouse character. The SEARF seemed quite fascinated with Captain Rear Admiral.

Last visit was with Doctor Barrows who kept smiling as he examined the medical equipment and supplies he had been handed. With out being asked he handed over datafile copies of all the research he had done with his assistants, and the various conclusions that they had gained from such.

Barrows gave one of the SEARF a speculative look and then he spoke. "You know, your body tissue could make for very?"

Willow stepped forward and smartly slapped the surprised doctor across the face. "Don't you even think of it."

Nurse Graves also frowned at the doctor. He sighed and nodded. "Seems SEARF are out of bounds."

A SEARF woman spoke. "We are forbidden to do as you would have asked, doctor, but we can get you other small blood and other samples of many forms of life be it super-mutant, human, zhoul, mirelurk or others."

So arrangements began.

TO BE CONTINUED

THIRTY-NINE
TWINS IN LIFEVAULT-101
STRANGE ABILITIES AND STRANGER HAPPENINGS


Aaron focused on the damaged DTL fibre-optic module on the table in front of them. Then his twin sister held his hand and did the same. They were in their bedroom but tucked away in a blind corner where the hidden cameras could not see them. The DTL module was a very special item of a kind not even common in the years just before Doomsday. Finding it underneath a filing-cabinet in a chamber they were clearing out, along with the rest of a work party, had been a minor miracle.

Both wondered if they were mad but what they were doing seemed somehow right.

They were special, had been born outside of the vault, and were different from vault born Vaultfolk. They had a far greater psychic potential and there was something else that niggled at them. Lately their extra sensory perception, ESP, had been growing stronger as they matured.

They had driven off the radroachaks and the radroaches, had caused the old High Overseer to vanish, had probably saved LifeVault-101 from some horrible fate.

They focused in a way that felt right but logically made no sense. The damaged DTL fibre-optic module vanished with a sparkling shimmer. Then two almost identical copies of it appeared except they were no longer damaged.

Gingerly, as if it might vanish at any moment, Aaron picked up one module and examined it carefully. Aarie did the same with the other. Then they looked at each other and smiled.

They tested the two modules carefully before slipping one into the special device they had been making to help them further infiltrate the vault compunetwork. The machine began functioning and then they were putting it to use. In minutes they were hacking into the network-systems in ways they could not do before but they did so with very great care.

Thus they found out about Project New Flavours, which had nothing to do with new flavours, that was testing captured radroachaks and doing autopsies on dead radroachaks. The same was being done on radroaches. Scientists and others were busy working on the project including their father, Professor James Ashworth. Lab techs, some vaultdroid androids and labtron robots were also there.

They found out that the main vault was in twelve officially used sectors. One was Vaultgov political and administration. Two and Three were commons, that is services used commonly by all. Four was security, defence and policing. Five and Six were general residential plus other services. Seven and Eight were technical service and support plus manufacturing and maintenance. Nine was agricultural. Ten was stripped, abandoned and sealed off. Eleven was storage depots, service-support, workshops and miscellaneous other. Twelve was prison, the zoological centre, the botanical dome, a research-development centre, the virtual reality hub and miscellaneous other.

But Sector Thirteen was unofficial and in that zone was a large research and development centre that was much bigger than the official one in Sector Twelve. That was not all. There was a residential centre with services, what seemed to be a garrison barracks of some sort, a prison, a manufacturing and maintenance centre, a VR hub and much else. Sector Thirteen was big enough to be two official sectors and it was not in the main vault, was not inside the main vault's hull. It was a true subvault. Much of it was filled with something called special security status storage or SSSS but with no data on such.

They learned in a general manner what was going on and then their new device beeped a warning and stopped the hacking. Some form of security program had detected their infiltration of the vault compunetwork and had begun to hunt down the source of that infiltration which was, of course, the twins.

Aaron spoke. "Project New Flavours is taking place in Vault Twelve, in the official research-development centre, but we did find his (father's) fingerprints in an unofficial area."

Aarie frowned. She inspected the module that was not in the hacking device. "There is a link between the brainabugs and the radroachaks but what is it?"

Her brother stretched. "Brainabugs were further developed from brainworms as found by the zetan aliens on a distant world. Radroachaks were developed from radroaches, or so we have come to believe. The link could be?"

She nodded. "The means used to develop both further. Perhaps a form of mutagen or even a variant of the FEV."

Aaron nodded right back. "A catalyst of amazing change."

Suddenly, with a sparkling shimmer for each object, a black ring appeared on the middle fingers of each twin. Each had a black disk shaped front. Each left hand ring had a golden shield emblem and each right hand ring had a golden sword emblem. The rings felt naturally in the right place.

Aarie examined her rings. "Like just what happened now?"

Aaron examined his rings. "Couldn't think of a better example."

They had much to learn about the amazing new rings and the possibilities that they promised.

TO BE CONTINUED

FORTY
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
THE MAD PLAN OF DESPERATE HEROES
:frog:

The big old powerful motorbike came screeching to a halt inside the vacant building and Argyle the ghoul switched it off. Grateful quiet fell in the cooler shadow as he leapt off and went to peer out of a window through a hole in its closed storm-shutter. As for Daring Dashwood, he was clambering painfully out of the sidecar thanks to his wounded left leg.

Argyle crouched next to a hole in a wall and looked out over a grey ruined landscape hoping to see the ones chasing them. He was special, he had always known that, a rare kind of ghoul who was enhanced and who could take more damage than most others. Yet he had barely got DD and himself away alive from the damned fast moving figures, superhuman fast and agile.

It was Dashwood who wanted to investigate reports of odd activity around a abandoned (of course) VaultTek office building in the Virgin Woods ruins. Virgin Woods was a city area made of tough genetically engineered trees that grew high and wide as living buildings. Somehow most of them had survived Doomsday but had become mutated, some more than others. Now distorted hometrees were spread thickly across the area. But the VaultTek office was a block tower made of smart-materials, an older type structure, now lost in the plant madness.

They were at the very edge of the bizarre forest of massive trees. They stretched upwards and outwards. From one branch hung a cluster of armchairs that also grew out of it on thick vines. Argyle saw a flicker of something darting along the branch and the vanish into a tangle of shower cubicles.

Argyle picked up his MXM16A2 assault-rifle with its 5.56mm2025 enhanced calibre bullets. The assault-rifle could take older type 5.56mm cartridges but the 2025 version were far more effective, especially against such as power armour. He had to admit it, he felt fear.

Dashwood sighed and sat with his back to the wall. He held a 10mm submachinegun with a high powered calibre version that sometimes made the gun more difficult to aim; but it was damned more effective in other ways.

Something darted across in front of them, a flash of black and grey. They were toying with the pair of mad adventurers, who and what every they were.

Dashwood sighed. "It looks like the end of the road, my good Argyle. Perhaps now you can tell me of your real nature. That is what you were before you became my 'stalwart ghoul manservant'."

The title was a false one allowing Argyle to move more easily with Dashwood in areas where ghouls were less accepted.

Argyle grinned. "Didn't believe my story about my amazing natural fighting abilities."

Herbert Daring Dashwood nodded. "At first but that day you dropped three super-mutants so fast I didn't see it happen, well on that day I knew better."

"SEARF!" Argyle shrugged. "First Generation Special Encounter Assault Recon Force. Super-soldier converted with much burning agony from a five year old child. Nearly half of us died horribly and others went insane or became Specials. They are out there, the SEARF super-soldiers. I meet with some of them now and then. They are amazed that I became a ghoul. It is supposed to be impossible for that to happen. I never introduced them to you directly but you have actually met some of them disguised as young people."

Dashwood grinned. "Like the pair of young women we met at Tiffany's Club in Rivet City that time or the young man and woman who travelled with us all the way to Lamplight Mountain that other time. Sensed something different about them and others, something that reminded me of you."

Argyle snorted. "What about your confession?"

Herbert Daring Dashwood lost his grin. "Well, my fine Argyle, I am what one might call a mystic psyker. I sense things, I glimpse future possibilities, I have other tricks that I do not always appreciate. I came from a secret settlement of such people many years before I was fortunate to meet you and steal your girlfriend, turning out to be a mistake that I regretted for more than one reason. I escaped from what you might call a damned strange psychic spiritual personality cult. The main reason that I always moved around so much adventuring was to make it harder for the psyker hunters to find me; yes, they are chasing me but there are only few of them and I am a more power psyker than any of the hunters."

The ghoul did not seem in the least surprised. "You talk in your sleep, mostly in some strange language I do not understand but sometimes in English."

Dashwood nodded. "Perhaps, secretly, I wanted you to know the truth as did you, for you also talk sometimes in your sleep."

There was some odd sounds from outside, short cut of cries, scuffles. Something crashed against a wall. A wall shuddered slightly. There was fighting going on outside that was carried out by super-soldiers.

Dashwood snorted. "Your friends are fighting those cold minded killers who were chasing us."

"Fighting JAGAF super-soldiers!" Argyle shook his head in wonder. "They are striking at each other but they do not seem too intent on killing each other." Then he stood up. "We have to go now. There are SEARF troopers out there but they are outnumbered by the JAGAF."

But Dashwood was already getting up. Argyle helped him get to the sidecar and then he was riding out of there as fast as he could. Soon they were racing along a hard packed dirt road.

Dashwood was smiling in a particular manner and that could only mean that none were killed, either SEARF or JAGAF. How did he know? Well the ways of Herbert Daring Dashwood were often a mystery.

They halted about a kilometre up the road and shortly later three figures in stealth power armour came flickering out of nowhere. It was then that the pair learned that they would need to disappear and do so in such a way that they left behind a realistic cover story. Dashwood would end up, supposedly, as a man suffering early dementia retired in Tenpenny Towers, his accommodation and other services being paid secretly by wealthy admiring fans. Supposedly Argyle would die and his body would be found in the attacked and destroyed Rockopolis, the secret settlement. Except it would not be the real Rockopolis. The real Rockopolis had a special secret beyond that of being a secret place for slaves and ghouls to flee to.

It was the only way to stop JAGAF endlessly hunting for them to find out what the pair had learned of JAGAF activities. If they caught the adventurers, they would most likely torture both of them to death to make sure of matters.

In reality the real Herbert Daring Dashwood and Argyle would go on to do other things in another, special place.

TO BE CONTINUED

FORTY-ONE
MAN FROM SEARF
MORE TROUBLE IN NUHOPETOWN
:gun:

It would be painful but he would do it! He would become three as one as three. Eddie'Jo would remain in NuHopeland for now while Eddie'Jon would return to the DC-Wastelands. What of the other? Eddie'Jane, the female version of himself, would go to the DC-Wastelands but to a different location.

Eddie'Jo would remain with Lilly and all of her companions as her daddy. The decision was, in a real sense, already made. They were moving to NuHopeHub to live and others from NuHopetown were also going, including Lilly's friends and their families. The move was being made because of the troubles in NuHopetown caused by the majority who, for a variety of odd reasons, had turned against the SEARF.

Mayor Sharon Rock, the new mayoress, had even tried to have the NuHope Guards banned from the town. Her attempted ban against both the SEARF and the NuHope Guards had failed badly. Now the NuHope Guards had a larger garrison in NuHopetown made up of people who did not come from the area. SEARF kept a tight watch over the new NuHopetown Independence Party, the NHIP, and its followers. The creation of a NuHopetown Guard, little more than a bunch of poorly trained NHIP thugs, was a further matter for concern.

As Eddie'Jo came to pick up the girl for the last time from the NuHopetown Combined School, he sensed tension but also trouble of another kind; it was linked to his daughter, Lilly.

Eddie'Jo slowed down the electric zipcar, fairly sleek but also very practical, and parked it outside the school. In the back were two dogs, a molerat and the dogdroid. Above, high above, was the dome of the NuHopeHub. Lilly clambered into the front passenger seat in the semi-enclosed vehicle, got a kiss and a hug from daddy and licks from three dogs and a molerat.

But Lilly was upset and angry. At the door to the school was hovering a couple of NuHopetown Guards in their new black and red fatigues, the red markings looking impressive but making very good targets. The thugs carried automatic weapons, basic local manufactured submachineguns of a kind called stenguns. They were a type of World War Two vintage weapon.

A sheriff's deputy was there but he had been disarmed and was handcuffed to a bicycle rack. He was fuming mad.

But next to him were two SEARF, a young man and woman, and one was undoing the cuffs. The super-soldiers were calmly threatening and the two thugs were obviously frightened.

Eddie'Jo invisibly signalled the SEARF troopers and one came over to guard the zipcar, Lilly and the others. The dogdroid climbed out and took up sentry position. As Eddie'Jo passed the thugs to go into the school, he touched each thug and they vanished with a sparkling shimmer. His 'powers' in Orbis were growing slowly but steadily but he had to use them with care. The two NuHopetown Guards would already be floating unconscious but safe in security status capsules in NuHopeHub, naked and with their gear inside evidence lockers.

Some fool shot a pistol at him. The 9mm bullet did not even hit him. He plucked it out of the air after slowing it. Then, moving so fast as to be invisible, he hit the shooter. Captain Oren Boyle flew backwards, his metal armour doing him no good, his gun flying from his hand. He was a big man but was thrown as if a small child. He vanished before he hit the floor.

A young looking but mature woman screamed in horror and rage. She was dressed not as a NuHopetown Guard, they only had men in their ranks, but in the minidress uniform of a NHIP woman party worker. She went for a pistol but then vanished with a sparkling shimmer.

He freed the receptionist who was tied to a wooden chair. She was badly shaken. "The thugs came in and took the children hostage except those of party members and supporters. One of the teachers was helping them. Also a caretaker. Everybody else was taken prisoner. Then two thugs took Lilly and went to walk her outside. None of us could do anything. It seemed helpless."

He smiled, sort of, at her. "Lilly is safe outside. SEARF troopers intervened. Go out the front and?" Then he stopped speaking and studied her carefully. He reached out and made her vanish with a sparkling shimmer. Physical and mental impressions he gained did not add up with her story. She had willingly gone along with the thugs and her being tied up had been a falsehood.

Vanishing with a flicker, he slammed through a doorway and into a big common room. As he smashed into two thugs, other SEARF troopers came down through the ceiling and SEARF androids came through other doors. This time those thugs who tried to surrender were made to vanish, the others were terminated.

He had already been gaining data from the SEARF Hubmind of the situation in the common room including layout, positions of everybody and other important information. The data had even included what thugs were seemingly more dangerous and more willingly there than others. Body language and other clues were used in anolysing the thugs such as amounts of sweat, heart beats and surface mind impressions.

He slashed his finger, chopping style, through one throat and twisted the body away so the blood spurted away from him. Even as he did so he drove his elbow into the solar plexus, through his metal armour, of the other NuHopetown Guard. Both bodies hit the floor even as he was gone from there.

The children witnessed none of this because they were all lying on mats with their eyes blindfolded. The teachers and other school employees were tied to chairs and wore blindfolds except for a male teacher and a woman in a caretaker jumpsuit who held weapons. But even as he noted this the thugs were falling or vanishing.

Eddie'Jo punched dead another thug but made three more vanish, each with a sparkling shimmer. Most of the thugs had been reluctant hostage takers, it seemed, driven on by the fools leading them.

After some moments the dead bodies began to vanish, each with a sparkling shimmer, as Orbis claimed them. All were thugs. The SEARF had not even come close to being hurt. As for Eddie'Jo, he was as deadly now as whole SEART, a Special Encounter Assault Recon Team of at least four combat squads and other elements.

OrbisMind spoke to him and only he heard it. "Why did you kill and not interrogate them or have me do so?"

Eddie'Jo responded only to OrbisMind. "We picked up fifteen party members, including five armed thugs. All of their minds were found to be under the influence of some kind of dark psychic and powerful but subtle force. I scanned the minds of those here in the school and found the same state. None have any idea that they are being secretly controlled let alone the actual identity of the controller. You already know this."

OrbisMind: "I need, at times, to hear your feedback and your ideas. Orbis is great and powerful, sophisticated and versatile, but functions less well on a more mundane mortal scale than it does on a grander world scale. The illegal ways opened to Domeland are small so far, the biggest being the unwanted appearance of the rebels in NuHopetown, but Orbis fears bigger ones will occur and greater threats will come through. Some force is undermining OrbisNetwork."

Eddie'Jo began undoing a teacher's blindfold. Something was wrong with all of the captives, advlts and children. It was as if they had been mind stunned. They were in no real danger. He doubted that the thugs had been able to effect the minds like that. Below the town was a SubHub of the HubNetwork that was in turn part of OrbisNetwork. One way to access it was through a secured utility hatch in the lower of two basemant levels of the main school building.

In a short time he was moving down a stairwell to the lower basemant. Students were not allowed this far. Indeed most school staff were not. Eddie'Jo used a special master keycode to get into the basemant. SEARF super-soldiers followed him as did some SEARF combat androids and robots that flew low through the air. The robots were sleek brown and grey machines, saucer shaped with a pop-up and a pop-down weapons turret plus other tricks. All the SEARF wore stealth power armour now, except the robots of course.

They found what was left of a dead caretaker down in the lower basemant level, a single big elongated chamber of metallic nature and much machinery. In one of the big wide hallways, there were two going in each direction, was the skeletal like body of the victim whose organic substance had been devoured along with his life energies. It was a horrific form of cannibalistic vampirism. Eddie'Jo had seen such things before but, thankfully, not too many times.

The JAGAF super-soldiers came dashing out of the ambush but failed to take the SEARF troopers by surprise. Fighting was damned quick, agile and deadly. Bodies flickered from place to place. The SEARF androids and robots pulled back to allow the troopers more freedom to fight. There was a scream of enraged pain. A SEARF trooper fell and a comrade whisked her away before she could come to more harm. A JAGAF super-soldier bounced off a metal wall in a way that would have instantly killed a standard human but came up fighting. No weapons but bodies and power armour were used. It was an unwritten agreement based on the fact that as soon as one side started using weapons, the other side would also do so.

Somehow it failed to surprise that there were JAGAF troopers in Orbis, in NuHopeland.

As fast as they had come, the JAGAF retreated, vanishing through three recently made holes in the floor of the basemant chamber. Eddie'Jo knew then that if he and his forces went any further that there would be JAGAF ambushes and other threats waiting for them.

Which was when Orbis intervened indirectly through OrbisMind and OrbisNetwork. Silvery orbs floated through the air, a metre across or ten centimetres across, each glowing translucent. There were nine of the bigger ones and eighty-one of the smaller ones. Then came three even bigger ones, each being three metres across. These were OrbisOrbs and they were multiple purpose.

The armoured hatch to the elevator and rampwell that led down to the SubHub below was blasted open and hung against a wall. The smallest of the OrbisOrbs darted through the entrance and down the holes in the floor in glowing clusters though many also remained with the main group.

Eddie'Jo reluctantly split his forces in half. One half went down through a hole in the metallic floor and the others went with him down a big gently sloping spiralling rampway. It was not long before the other SEARF force was fighting JAGAF in a maze of smallish tunnels and chambers carved out of the rock in a crudely useful fashion. The OrbisOrbs did not directly attack the enemy super-soldiers but slowed them down, highlighted them as targets and muddied their senses. The JAGAF turned and fled except two that were captured and were soon floating each inside a three metre wide OrbisOrb. The stealth power armour clad figures were quite safe.

Eddie'Jo's group was met by a wave of radroaches and radroachaks. They flowed up the rampway, giant cockroaches and the even more monstrous chak-creatures. Super-soldiers, androids and robots formed a defensive line, with some keeping guard at the rear, and unleashed firepower at the on coming creatures.

But the SEARF leader had the strong impression that the roach creatures were expendable attackers being used to slow down the group's movements so that others could achieve something. This could simply be them getting away.

But the OrbisOrbs began to act and to capture roach creatures while the smallest ones zipped amongst the radroaches and radroachaks, confusing them, panicking them and sending many of them fleeing. Then they were all fleeing away, running away as quickly as they had charged in the first place.


Half an hour later Eddie'Jo sat in a hastily abandoned SubHub chamber with computer and other hardware neatly stacked up, with colour coded cables trailing across the floor, with a big console-desk made from three portable rigs and other gear left behind. Cables led to the ancient SubHubInterface itself.

All of the SEARF forces were now in or close to the big chamber as were all of the OrbisOrbs.

The grimmest remains though were five drained skeletal remains of soldiers in scout power armour of Patriot Guards. Elite enhanced soldiers, super-soldiers of a different kind than the SEARF or JAGAF, but something had done the same vampiric cannibalistic trick on them as had been done on the caretaker.

Eddie'Jo scowled. "I sense a superclone of President James Patriot Jackson. The superclones were bad, very bad, but were like many of the Mad President's ideas, especially during the collapse of his regime."

How had such an amazingly bad event taken place as a superclone of President James Patriot Jackson appearing in the supposedly safe Orbis itself?

Just what was going on?

TO BE CONTINUED

FORTY-TWO
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
A JUMPSTART FOR GALAXY NEWS RADIO


Galaxy News Radio was yet to broadcast anything for getting together the equipment and supplies, along with the expertise, was proving to be far more difficult than 3Dog had assumed it would be. With some difficulty he had formed an agreement with the Brotherhood of Steel, easily the largest of the Orders of Steel, to put a garrison at the tower to protect both it and the small settlement of Radiotown. In turn the Brothers of Steel gained a base of operations and the chance to spread their propaganda through the use of the GNR broadcasts.

He sat brooding at his work-station with the working computer terminal, the 3Daudiotapes and other items before him. The Brotherhood of Steel was starting to hint at getting impatient with the progress of the radio station. He was glad to know that he had strong support in the form of Sarah Lyons, the daughter of Elder Owyn Lyons and a few others.

The Union of Columbia had sent him Margaret the mature woman of a technician along with some equipment and supplies including MrDJ. MrDJ was a MrHandy type robot with some special alterations and additions. MrDJ was part technical support and part actual DJ back-up.

There was also a protectron that patrolled the front entrance area and another protectron patrolling to the back.

Margaret was in one of the storerooms full of hopefully useful stuff. She was trying hard to find something that might get part of the radio station up and working.

The room he was in was the actual studio with places for up to four people to use mikes and central, in the big old console, much hardware. A glass booth to one side was where Margaret sometimes sat. Now a Radiotown volunteer, a young woman called Eliza, was there.

MrDJ was jacked into recharging and was only semiactive.

He was alone and then he was not alone! He looked up to see that Eliza seemed now to be sleeping, to be slumped forward peacefully on her console-desk. Yet there was something odd about her position.

Somebody was standing just behind him. He had sensed this kind of presence before and he became quite cautious.

She spoke, youthful and very calm, almost emotionless. "Eliza is simply semiconscious. I am SEARF!"

At that he sighed with relief. "I was fearing you might be that other lot." He turned to find himself looking at a lithe young woman in typical Wastelander gear including leather armour. She was holding two kittens, almost adorable and cute, that were sleeping curled up in her arms. Almost cute an adorable because each was a little on the scarred and scrawny side. "I am 2Kitty. These are Sweetfur and Sweetfangs. They tried to bite and claw me when I first picked them up but they soon realised that their fangs and claws had no effect on my skin. They tried so hard to damage me that they got all tired and slept. How lovely!"

"Aaahhh, yeh!" 3Dog sighed. "What would you like?"

She smiled. "To be your bodyguard and assistant in turn for being allowed to gather intelligence data to pass onto my people. I have brought some friends with me including my lovely little kitty cats."

3Dog frowned. "What is SEARF up to?"

2Kitty smiled at him. "You know there is a limit to what I can say to you but as of this time we are mostly trying to learn as much as possible about what is happening in the DC-Wastelands. We are also dealing with JAGAF though carefully as they are with us since neither of us can afford to waste valuable units on foolish fighting."

An identical young woman, except for her gear, entered with one kitten who actually looked peacefully asleep. She spoke. "I am 1Kitty."

Then another came in, again with different gear but holding three kittens. "I am 3Kitty. We are to be identical triplets. We adore you. We will do anything for you, anything."

He looked up at the supposed triplets. "Okay, the deal is on but? anything?"

1Kitty smiled. "Yes, companionship."

He grinned mildly. "Sounds good. Time to have a group conference. Time to wake up Eliza."

Eliza sat up abruptly and smiled at 3Dog.

3Dog groaned softly. "I should have known but your story about being a martial artist and a dancer was a good one. It explained your movements."

Eliza spoke into a microphone. "I am a SEARF follower, not SEARF."

The man looked puzzled. "I didn't even know there was such a thing as a SEARF follower."

Then a MrHandy drifted in on its fanjets followed by two worktrons and two baseline duplicant androids who had mannequin like appearances. The duplicants were in coveralls, boots and caps with webbing of pouch and tool dotted belts.

MrDJ became fully active and, looking around, it spoke. "MrDJ is in the house. Hhhaaa, this is good. Now MrDJ can boss around somebody like a MrHandy and two worktrons."

The MrHandy replied. "This unit only responds to commands of humans."

MrDJ made a rude electronic noise and somehow managed to look sulky.

A meeting was soon being held with 3Dogs, the Kitty Triplets, MrDJ who hovered in the background still looking sulky, Margaret and four volunteers. Margaret was a semighoul, that is human norm appearing with streaks of ghoulish ruin. She was very old and had been a teenager on Doomsday. Though classed as a technician, she was more of a technical genius. She sat quietly and mostly said nothing but she did quietly observe the Kitty Triplets at times. The cats moved around under the table, none of them hostile, and explored the meeting room as cats would do. They staid away from MrDJ because of the hoverjets.

TO BE CONTINUED