NOTE: SLASHES THAT DISTURBED READERS HAVE BEEN REMOVED/REPLACED.

NOTE: BERSERKERS ARE RENAMED RAGERS SO NOW SPECIAL RAIDERS ARE NAMED RAGERS, RAVERS, REAVERS AND ROVERS WHILE OTHER RAIDERS ARE GANGERS, CANNIBALS AND BANDITS. ON THE EDGE ARE SLAVE-RAIDERS AND FAITH-RAIDERS.

NOTE: SPECIAL SURVIVAL BULLETS OF DIFFERENT KINDS ARE NOW THE MOST COMMON CALIBRES IN THE DC-WASTELANDS. THEY WERE DEVELOPED IN THE 2020s.
SSLR = SPECIAL SURVIVAL LONG RIFLE
SSSR = SPECIAL SURVIVAL SHORT RIFLE
SSLP = SPECIAL SURVIVAL LONG PISTOL
SSSP = SPECIAL SURVIVAL SHORT PISTOL

1
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
DEATHCLAW SURVIVAL INSTINCTS


A huge deathclaw, massive and deadly, roared as he hurled himself over a fallen tree and struck the group of raiders. These were hot raging ragers as versus mad doing anything ravers or ice cold reavers. Around them were the ruins of Old Olney, partly collapsed buildings made of self repairing smart-materials but also buildings in surprisingly good condition because of the same sort of smart-materials. The deathclaw's howl of rage echoed through the ruins as great claws sliced the head off a rager woman, her hornlizard leather armour doing her no good.

Like typical rager female armour it was black and steel studded with a surprising amount of cleavage and midriff showing. The headless body danced crazy as the other ragers leapt away from the deathclaw with enhanced speed and strength but not before claws ripped open a second rager, a man this time.

Ragers turned to fire mostly basic guns though one swung a sharpened fire-axe at the deathclaw. The blade cut but not deep enough as the aim was off despite the best efforts of the veteran killer human. He was hurled backwards with cracked ribs and a broken arm.

The other three rager raiders, there had only been six of them, fell back and raised their guns to fire at the deathclaw. But they only got to fire off a few 12 gauge shotgun shells from a double-boomer (double barrelled shotgun) and SSLR bullets from two hunting-rifles when the second deathclaw struck at them from behind, tearing into them.

The pair of deathclaws, a female and male, made sure their hidden deathclaw cubs were okay. The cubs were hidden in a crude chamber made by the clever deathclaw parents from bits of metal and some bits of masonry. Despite their reputation, deathclaws were survivalists and were wary of attacking humans with guns but this time their cubs had been at stake.

Soon deathclaw cubs were svcking at mother's teats while the father crouched and waited to play with the young.

In the distance an unstable atomic motor blew; the wreck of an atomic motorised family sedan exploded dramatically.

TO BE CONTINUED


2
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
ROLLING THE ROADS

A big old convoy of big old robotic machines rolled along once paved roads, repairing them as best they could. Security was tight! The machines had learned, somebody unknown had changed them and turrets covered all directions. The robots had not learned that the world they once served was gone but still, who was to complain, they did do repairs to much needed roads.

The Brotherhood of Steel patrol watched them trundle along in the distance, they and their robot companions. Close to the Paladin and Knights in their standard power armour were a bunch of Wastelanders who had just dumped some useful stuff where the road repairing robots could find them and use them. They were Union of Columbia citizens, proudly part of and yet proudly independent from the Union.

Even the most stupid of raiders left the robots alone because repaired roads meant safer, more efficient and faster travel even for them. Anyway the robots were heavily armoured and armed along with the fact that many heavily armed folks would not appreciate the gesture, even other raiders.

A dust devil moved in the distance and beyond that, across an area of broken, twisted bits of material, an area of softly glowing mist. Inside the mist were figures of many shapes and sizes. They moved even as the mist moved and people kept clear of both.

The area was pale green, was known as a fairly fertile area fed by low rad water springs. There were fortified clusterfarms, agricultural co-ops and communes in the distance, belong to different factions of local folk. Sugartown was just over the horizon, a place of low hulking fortified factories and other industrial complexes, where people managed to live fairly well.

When the road fixing robots were a long way in the distance, the Brothers of Steel began to move again along with the two sentrybots that travelled with them. They would go another route than the robots until they reached Sugartown and the Orders of Steel outpost there.

In that area the situation had been quiet for some months and it was hoped that things would remain that way.

TO BE CONTINUED

3
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS: SEARF
CLOSE TO ZETAN CRASH SITE A1/011

When the raiders saw the naked young man standing close to the crash site of the alien saucerscout, UFO, they did what raiders normally did. They saw an easy target, a crazy and somebody they could have fun with before they killed and ate him because he looked clean, fit and healthy enough to devour.

It was an area scattered with buildings and ruins, with other broken landmarks. It was a lightly hilly area with low hills and many gullies. Darkness was coming slowly but steadily and rain was threatening, hopefully clean rain. There were dark clouds and flashes of lightening to the distant east.

People tended to believe raiders were all just humans or ghouls gone wild. In the case of those who acted like raiders, they were right, but at the core lay more dangerous kinds. A minority of people knew the truth but they either kept it to themselves or were not believed by most other folks. Anyway, people would say, what does it matter; a raider is a raider is a raider. But it mattered!

The young man did not seem to even notice the three enraged cannibal raiders screaming as they charged with amazing speed at him across the broken pavement of the highway. The highway was made of self-repairing smart-materials but even that could not fully repair the road. The raiders clutched between them a sharpened fire-axe, a combat longknife and a spikebat that was a metal spike and plate altered baseball bat.

It was semidarkness and in the distance an unstable atomic motor exploded, blowing apart a large delivery van marked ‘Madam Mim’s Tasty Pasties and Pies’. It had long ago been stripped of any food from its perishables status storage bins, or PSSBs. That was one reason one could still find Prewar food that was edible; because of status storage systems.

The cannibals automatically turned to note the sound, just a second of shifting their attention from the crazy, but when they looked back he was gone. It was impossible! He had been standing in a fairly wide open space and on hard ground. How could he have vanished in just a second? A stealthboy would not trick their cannibal enhanced other senses and anyway they had seen he had worn nothing let alone a stealthboy.

They came to a wary halt, now quiet and ready for trouble, at the spot where the naked young man had vanished.

There was a flicker of motion and he came from the side, from where he had been hiding behind a stack of trash including a fallen over NukaCola vending-machine whose lights were still blinking. The woman raider died as he snapped her neck, hitting her with such force that she was hurled through the air to knock down one of the two men. The other man, a cannibal after all, whirled with impressive speed with his combat longknife but even as he did, a very well focused force smashed into both his solar plexus and throat. Dead before he hit the ground, he flew through the air. Then the last man died as the stranger sliced his throat with the captured combat longknife.

Cannibal raiders, their physical abilities enhanced along with their senses, were amongst the greatest fighters in the DC-Wastelands and beyond. Yet, having easily killed three of them, he stood there totally at ease. Then he began to loot the three bodies and to work out what he could do with what. As he looked through the stuff he came upon a name he liked and then another so he combined them to come up with Eddie’Jo. He figured he could change it later if he had to. Sometimes he touched smaller items and they vanished with a softly sparkling shimmer as he put them into what he called his Secret Inventory. Other items seemed to alter as he touched them, to change to better suit his needs.

He slipped into the most basic, less bizarre gear he could find of the raiders. This was an altered outfit of now brown leather, some spikes, boots and under that both undershorts and a Tshirt that were now clean. A .32 revolver-pistol was holstered at his left side. Various knives were sheaved at his main belt. Other stuff was in pouches. There was canteen with two litres of dirty water, which was far from purified but also far from too much of the water found in the DC-Wastelands.

It was getting darker.

He could sense other raiders around but also other threats along with less threatening life.

Eddie’Jo began to move, to pace smoothly and quietly like some dangerous predator across the war broken landscape.

TO BE CONTINUED
4
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS: SEARF
LEAVING ZETAN CRASH SITE A1/011

A convoy of typical Wastelander WSVs (Wastelands survival vehicles) moved in the far distance. They were jury-rigged and altered coaches, trucks, cars and other machines. All were at least lightly armed and armoured. Protecting them were heavily armed and armoured guncars and guntrucks. They travelled a different road than did Lucky Eddie as if trying to avoid local raiders.

More houses, a pseudo-Swiss hamlet partly burned and partly busted, where some robotic garden gnomes still strived to keep the gardens neat and tidy. Some ghouls had taken over one once cheery continental fake chalet and had peered anxiously at him from some windows. He left medical supplies, food rations, a couple of pocket-knives, a ball of super-string and some other items for them. Cautiously they came out and got the items, nodding thanks to him when he turned to look back briefly.

But then a ghoul came after him, a woman in leather armour and with a lever-action rifle, but not in a hostile manner. He waited calmly and with stillness as she approached him and then he just nodded.

She was obviously a ghoul and she smelt of it but he did not find the scent of her offensive and neither did he judge her looks. He gave her a mild grin. “The goods were a gift but if you wish to give something in return, go ahead.”

“Information but it is not just for you sake. Something tells me that you have much more power than is easily discernable, especially by most smoothskins.” She pointed ahead of him. “Almost at the horizon, where those big billboards are at the crossroads, there are a whole lot of nasty rager raiders nested in a bunker they invaded and a series of half collapsed buildings. There is a girl there, in a cage, but she is not alone. With her a young advlt killclaw, two dogs and a molerat that for some reason are friendly to her and each other. There is something special about her.”

He nodded. “You did not see this!”

At that she shook her head. “Uncle Leo did with his mindeye, a wandering super-mutant of peaceful intent and wondrous abilities of the mind. He spoke of you appearing one day, though he gave only a few details. He mentioned your generosity, which is something rare in the DC-Wastelands. He asked me to ask you to rescue the girl and her friends; that is the animals, including the killclaw. I do not suppose that you can take on so many raiders by yourself.”

The ‘mindeye’, a tricky melding and focusing of various psychic and other senses plus other abilities.

He nodded. “Not alone but there are some tricks I can use that I will not speak of, no offence intended.”

The ghoul woman nodded. “My name is Evalene. It is a wonder to me that you can look at a ghoul with no evident distaste or even a sense that you are concealing it well.”

“Compared to what I have experienced, you are very normal.” He gave a subtle shrug. “I sense your pain and that of other full ghouls.” He pulled out a plastic bottle of compacted powdery white-yellow-red spotted pills. “Instruction in English, Esperanto and Spanish are on a label but I will also.” He touched her hand lightly and for a couple of seconds she looked surprised. “Now you know the instructions to use it. Get a antighoulification pill and put it into a litrejon or litre bottle of dirty water, shake it, let it wait for about a dozen minutes. You now have antighoulification water. Spray it lightly over your ghoulified skin and let it dry by itself. Every such treatment will lightly ‘smoothskin’ a ghoul take some of the pain away permanently. You also have the instructions on how to make it or variants of the same medicant from various mutated plants and other ingredients found in the DC-Wastelands.”

She looked shocked and more so when he took out nine more bottles from the same pouch that only looked big enough to carry one such bottle. Then she frowned softly. “We do not need charity.”

“Everybody has needed, needs or will need charity of some kind in their existence, including myself. Be charitable in return. Do not make greedy profit from the antighoulification medicants and, when necessary, give it away for free.” The young man sniffed the air lightly. “I smell troublesome scents on the air. I am Eddie’Jo, once known as Lucky Eddie or Bloody Eddie.”

She shivered. “I was saw super-soldiers slaughter unarmed protesters.”

He looked into her eyes. “So you are older than Doomsday. I am, was SEARF. Those were not SEARF. We were too expensive, too important as military assets, to use against unarmed citizens. Normally we fought elite enemies who could fight back quite well. I glimpse your mind. They were Patriot Police who carried out that particular atrocity. They dressed in black while we wore grey and black or similar combinations. They used riot power armour or combat power armour, both of which are forms of light power armour. We used stealth power armour. Still, we sometimes wore black outfits as a disguise. There were many other differences between us and the Patriot Police. By then we SEARF had joined the rebellion against President James Patriot Jackson and his madness.”

She snorted. “For your own reasons.”

“Of course!” He responded. “What other reasons would we do it for? But those reasons are not so clear cut as you might assume them to be. Danger is coming. I suggest you go into that basemant bunker hidden beneath your house.” He slipped a compact, solid-state grey laser-pistol out of a pouch and handed it to her. “It may help in future. You were a doctor involved in peaceful research with a good knowledge of biochemistry. Now go and use it for the good of ghouls.”

She frowned.

He sighed. “I am merely carrying out part of a very extensive mission by giving you the antighoulification medicants and knowledge. Now are you satisfied?”

She smiled. “So you really do care for ghouls. How odd. I look forward to meeting again. You are a poor liar.”

So the ghoul woman turned and ran back to the house clutching the laser-pistol and medicants to herself.

He turned away and headed along the road even as the first of three battlebuggies appeared, racing along the battered smart-asphalt made strip. Not typical raiders, gangers or bandits, this time but ragers. As they raced towards him, the leading vehicle’s gunner opened up at him with a general purpose machinegun, a bullpup configured MS60A1 firing Military Standard Short Rifle Calibre Bullets or MSSRCBs.

None came close to hitting Lucky Eddie. He flickered and was gone from sight but as the battlebuggy passed through the air where he had been, he landed amongst the three raiders in the machine. Two reacted quick with rager rage and speed. He moved quicker with super-soldier lethalness. Blood splashed, flesh and armour was ripped, raiders died. The battlebuggy, filled with dead bodies now, raced off the road and crashed violently into a smart-concrete wall, exploding.

Fast Eddie flickered over the wall, leaving the vehicle before it could explode.

The real battle had just begun as the other battlebuggies roared to a halt and out leapt some of the raiders with their crazy thirst for revenge, to kill this one who dared to strike at them thus.

TO BE CONTINUED

5
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
ATTACK OF THE GIANT ANTS

The giant ants were not really giant ants for they had skeletons and lungs of sorts along with their exoskeletons and armour plating. The big two metre long soldiers came swarming over the stockade of long abandoned vehicles, drums and other gathered stuff. The settlers fell back firing basic shotguns, rifles, revolver pistols and two jury-rigged flamers. Ant soldiers exploded into flames but others took their place. One man used a longbow with amazing deadliness, firing flaming arrows that set the monsters aflame.

The settlers had been warned that the area was too dangerous to settle in, that the low rad count and fertile earth, along with low rad well water, was not enough to risk it. The settlers had been desperate and they had ignored the warnings. Instead they had hoped that the barriers, some guns and two home made flamers would do the trick.

The giant spiiter ant soldiers were surprisingly quick and strong though they could not lift many times their own weight as normal, small ants could. They spat toxic venom and their pincers were terrible and strong. A man screamed as a glob of toxic venom engulfed his face. He fell to the ground, shuddered and died.

Firing guns and shooting arrows, the settlers fell back. Some panicked, turned and fled, dropping their weapons as they did. One fell as toxic glob splashed into her back, burning and soaking through her shirt so that soon she was lifeless.

The settlers were overwhelmed as more and more of the monstrous insects swarmed over the wall in a seeming endless stream. The worker spitter ants did not spit toxic gloop and they were smaller with smaller pincers but there were more of them. They focused on less dangerous targets. Before the penned up goats and brahmins could escape, or the cooped up chickens, they were devoured.

Two teenagers, a baby boy, a horse and two dogs fled along with a young cat that staid in a basket. As they walked quickly through the wilderness feeling frightened and alone, the teens did not turn back to watch the swarms of giant ants devouring the last of their people. The last gun shots were heard, the last scream and then there was only dreadful silence.

They did not see a very quiet, odd young girl being carefully picked up by a worker ant and carried off. The infant, an older baby, was gently taken and was sung to in giant ant fashion, a sound that soothed the small one, a sound that most humans would not even hear.


TO BE CONTINUED

6
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
PATRIOT POLICE POLITICS IN AREFU

A two rhorse pulled cart came trundling into the Free Trade Zone at the foot of the great wide highway bridge of Arefu. Well at least it was part of the area which also had some farms, workshops, a Union Guard garrison and other facilities. Rhorses were knobby skinned, hairless horse like creatures that were shorter but stronger than the average horse. They were not so common in the DC-Wastelands but their numbers were growing thanks to imports, the coming of wild herds and local breeding programs.

Locals did not know it, would be astonished to know it, but the three men were Patriot Police serving still the cause of President James Patriot Jackson. They did not wear uniforms or official armour for excellent reasons; many people would have killed them. After Doomsday garrisons of Patriot Police had survived including PPSWATs (Patriot Police Special Weapons Armour and Tactics) and had made lives of general survivors miserable. Many were killed in savage battles, many had become raiders but a few had gone underground, literally; these remained loyal to the cause.

Not a lost cause because President James Patriot Jackson still kept in contact with them and still kept sending them orders while gaining information from them.

One older man rubbed his unshaven brown face and spoke gruffly in Spanish. “The Chief Detective has gone mad and needs to be put down; we are only doing our duty.”

The other two knew that this was a total lie. The man speaking wanted Chief Detective Renalto’s job. Dressed like poor scavengers and junk traders, the two observed him but not directly. They said nothing against or in support of his words. One of them looked out towards the big wide flowing river that passed under and a big old hovership poking half sunken out of the waters at a low angle. People lived and worked there, fishing and scavenging, but at times they had problems with mirelurks, diresharks and other aquatic or amphibious threats.

It was like the fishing platforms that were lowered down from just under the bridge, reached by old utility hatchways and the walkways under the bridge. It was a way for the local people to feed themselves, obtain other resources and to get tradegoods for the traders that came along.

Why had Chief Detective Renalto gone to Arefu? With only one companion, he had rushed there as quickly as he could in a trade-transport convoy. It had seemed like madness and now O’Reilly wanted to take advantage of it. Except that nobody really liked O’Reilly or trusted him while many respected Renalto. O’Reilly was not true to the cause, was corrupt and wanted to make himself wealthy and powerful no matter what it did to the cause.

They passed the ironic scene of slavers in chains and manacles, looking just like a bunch of slaves, being moved into the settlement. Antislavers were guarding them, ex-slaves with good reason to murder who had chosen justice instead. To the Patriot Police the only real justice was what President James Patriot Jackson said it was.

While one man took the rhorses and cart off to the stables and wagon-cart yards, O’Reilly and the other made their way to a cheap-easy saloon, a place of barred armaglass windows and bolted down chairs and tables where glasses or bottles were not served or allowed.

The big dark skinned Irishman figured that the Chief Detective was vulnerable and that he could replace the fool. After that he wanted to take the position of Chief Superintendent of the surviving Patriot Police in the DC-Wastelands. Then he would have influence over the Patriot Folk underground settlements, all three of them, and then he and his cronies could make a fortune.

It was just a matter of time.

He thrust his way through the crowded saloon where topless smoothskin waitresses served trays of cheap alcohol filled clay mugs. The clay mugs were easily broken and cheap to replace but they were not good at damaging people or property. Somebody thrust him back, a tough looking mercenary who thought inferior lowlife scum should have better manners. O’Reilly went to retaliate but thought better of it despite his pride and quick temper. The mercenary was a veteran, was well armed and surrounded by comrades. Also the Patriot Police Officer could not afford to draw unwanted attention to himself.

There was the door, the one with the yellow streak of paint, and behind it was the target. O’Reilly grinned, thrust open the door and as he strode into the room he drew out a semiautomatic pistol that used Military Standard Long Pistol Calibre Bullets (MSLRCBs). He stopped in shock and his grin slipped away.

Chief Detective Renalto was there but was in a mercenary outfit. Nor was he alone. Two others were there disguised as mercenaries being Patriot Police Constables. Patriot Police were organised military fashion so their constables were equal to privates, they had NCOs and then officers above that. The three were seated on basic wooden chairs behind a large square table.

The man behind him and grinned, moving back into the other room to shut the door behind him. It was a trap and it was O’Reilly who was the fool.

The he noticed the other man, the one who looked like President James Patriot Jackson himself. The man was dressed as a mercenary officer of sorts but his presence was very strong and very dark. O’Reilly was suddenly very frightened.

The man spoke even as he paced smoothly towards O’Reilly. “Your evil stupidity will do nicely. Did you really think you had fooled anybody? You have been chosen, along with a few others, so that I can feed. I am ”

O’Reilly turned his gun at the ‘mercenary officer’ but the superclone of President James Patriot Jackson moved with astonishing speed and power. He plunged his fingers into the chest and forehead of the Irishman who screamed in agony and horror, his whole body shuddering horribly. Somehow the scream was muffled. Then the flesh, bones and skin simply withered into nothingness. The empty gear fell to the floor except for the pistol that the superclone grabbed out of the air.

Supreme Superintendent James Patriot Jackson turned to the others, all who concealed their horror and revulsion with great skill, and then he spoke. “I have fed now and we have eliminated an internal threat to our cause. As a superclone I am, of course, linked to the Great President himself, and he is pleased by what has just happened. Now for our first meeting to plan our part in the return of our great leader, President James Patriot Jackson, who will not just be the president of North America but of the whole world.”

He sat at the table and so began his first meeting with the Chief Detective. It would be just one of many to come.

TO BE CONTINUED

7
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS
AARIE, APPIE AND AARON
HAPPY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY


The triplets, Aaron, Appie and Aarie, were not really surprised by the surprise birthday party held by their friend Amata. In a big dining room they were confronted by over two dozen people but that left much of the chamber bare. A lot of people cried out ‘surprise’ in the language of Esperanto and then they rushed forward a little before speaking out again ‘happy birthday’.

Amata was at the forefront of course, sixteen years old like the twins now and very organizational of others as always. She came forward and spoke with evident excitement. “I bet I surprised you. I was worried you would find out about the party from Butch and his other idiots; other than Butch himself, that is.”

Aarie smiled and lied sweetly as she held the plump muscular baby like figure, Appie, to herself. “Of course you surprised us.”

Amata knew she was lying, of course, but she loved such social games. “Then I have a wonderful gift for each of you.”

Butch and his friends were in a booth to themselves, all six of them crowded into the space being four males and two females. Butch DeLoria, Wally Mack, Paul Hannon Junior and Fred Yao Ming. The two females, Sandra Matos and Freda Matos, were honouree gang members only as only guys could be full members.

There were real friends there like Google, Colaboy, Trent, DJ-Girl, Fred and Shandie. They were in another booth, just as crowded.

Dad was there, standing fairly close and smiling. As usual he wore not the normal dull dark blue or dull dark pink jumpsuits but a scientist’s outfit with LifeVault-0101 symbols on the upper left chest, shoulders and upper back of the coat. The Security Overseer of LifeVault-`101 was there of course, being Amata’s father. He would have their pipboy and pipgirl; he would be happy to put more constraints on the older two triplets whom he saw as overly questioning and smart for the good of LifeVault-0101 society. Appie already had a pipbaby as all babies had to help keep them safe but neobabies like Appie kept theirs.

A reporter was there to take AV-recordings for the official social celebrity website, was trying not to look bored. The only reason she was there was because of the presence of the Security Overseer and his daughter. The Public Relations Office had probably sent her, PR meaning propaganda.

A jukebox was playing quadraphonic quality music except it was all silly birthday songs. They guessed Amata’s father would have suppressed any music songs that even hinted at being restricted. It was the sort of thing he would have automatically have done.

Amata passed over a thick comic book to each of them being Grognak the Barbarian for him and Annie the Adventurer for her plus Rompy Rabbit for Appie. They were slightly crinkled and had probably been found somewhere in the great big unofficial storage depot somewhere. Lots of stuff had been dumped there in the dimly lit hallways and archival bins, shelves and spaces before the LifeVault was closed up.

Truth was they all three thought that Grognak was overblown and too aggressive while Annie was prissy and too meek. Rompy Rabbit was just right for Appie. It was the sort of gifts that Amata’s father thought she should give them so they were given at the party. The real gifts would come later, away from presence of Alphonse Almodovar, father to Amata Almodovar.

The Security Overseer came forward with a predatory smile. “Young man and young woman, you are sixteen years old now, both of you and from now on you will be expected to be part of the work roster. Work will be allocated to you as of tomorrow. Have a good birthday; it’s the last you will have with out real responsibilities.”

Then sixteen year olds only did casual light duties for they still had to attend school and they were still children but the Security Overseer’s attitude rankled. He gave them a pipboy and a pipgirl. They exposed their wrists, including the nerve-sockets exposed there that had already been emplaced, then they carefully put on the devices. For a moment each of the bigger triplets winced a little as the cyberlinking was attained.

Their dad stepped forward and quietly, efficiently adjusted each device, showing a good deal of experience and skill. The overseer walked away to sit in a booth with some older Vaultfolk.

Each of them kissed Amata on the cheek, opposite cheeks at the same time, causing her to blush sweetly. Then the triplets started doing the rounds, the socially proper thing to greet people. Coloured balloons floated in the air along with basic colourful holographic projections of small moving animals.

Herman Gomez was a friendly security officer. He wished the twins happy birthday and gave them a 100cred each to spend.

Stanley Armstrong admitted he chose the Model 3000A Basic pipboy and pipgirl for the twins because it is a more basic but more reliable model. Then he whispered to them that he had made a few small but nice ‘additions’. Picking up that Stanley did not want the Security Overseer to know about this, Aaron and Aarie thanked him. He also gave each a small clever multitool each that he had made, that could fit easily into a jumpsuit pouch or citizen utility-belt, and a small bip-box thing for Appie.

Truth is the young geniuses had helped the technician overcome some tricky vault maintenance problems over the last year or so, secretly assisting him while he surreptitiously gave them access to his workshop area. The Vaultdroid Series Nine-A androids had gotten a bit wonky until the twins had managed to track down a misplaced manual in the Archival Depot; they had an amazing ability to find valuable things. Now the vaultdroids were serving a wide range of valuable services with much efficiency. The older two triplets had helped with the other network-systems and had secretly mapped much of the security in the vault.

They had a plan!

Actually they had more than one plan, just in case.

It was ironically funny for the twins when Butch and his friends had to, out of good manners and because advlts were there, to give the twins each a 5cred. That was Butch DeLoria, Wally Mack, Paul Hannon Junior and Fred Yao Ming, Sandra Matos and Freda Matos. That was altogether 60cred. Of them all Paul Hannon Junior and the Matos Sisters were fairly friendly.

Google, Colaboy, Trent, DJ-Girl, the Bran Twins, Fred and Shandie were friends and happy to each give up 50cred to each twin. Anyway they knew that later there would be a secret party and that the vault-credit would go on treats. Google was actually Adam Adamson, a wicked hacker, and the Security Overseer was highly suspicious of him. The Bran Twins were neobabies, like Appie, and happy to go along with spending money that was given to them to give away while they got fussed over for their generosity. Appie also got fussed over in case he got jealous.

There were others in three booths and in other spots. Friendly neutrals mostly who were invited simply to make up numbers. Some were chimpman teenagers, genetically engineered chimpanzees, allowed to come to make the party seem more tolerant.

Beatrice Armstrong, attractive mature woman, gave them each a 50cred and both a poem she had written. She smiled warmly at them. “I remember when I used to help your father change your nappies. Here is a poem I wrote just for you. I hope you enjoy it.”

They thanked her warmly and they took the poem. Beatrice was a kind of sixy, eccentric kind aunty to a lot of young people and was generally considered harmless. For now they did not read her poem. The taller twins kissed Beatrice on the cheek and Appie got a kiss from Beatrice.

Then Lucy Palmer, normally known as Old Lady Palmer, gave them each a sweetroll, even half sized one for Appie. The taller twins each gave her a kiss on the cheek, pleasing her a good deal and the neobaby got kissed.

Fresh made food like that was uncommon in the LifeVault were food was normally rations from the hydrovat network-system and slowly dwindling status stored reserves. The hydrovat farms had never fully recovered from the bacteria attack some thirty years ago but were close to 71% functionality again. The Fringers farmed blindfish, mushrooms, meatworms and other stuff in the big caverns they were forced to work but they could only provide about 10% at most of LifeVault needs. Back in the short lived but dreadful famine the chicken, rabbit and goat stocks had been decimated, were only a shadow of their old selves. As for mattercated food, well if one really had to…

When the MrHandy smashed the cake up it was handed out on plates anyway. Butch grumbled and demanded that the twins give him the sweetrolls that Old Lady Palmer had given them. But they had already eaten part of the sweetrolls after sharing the rest with Amata and their other friends; just a taste each but a nice taste.

Butch threatened but he always did that though in truth the bigger triplets frightened him and even Appie seemed to disturb him somehow.

The party went on!


TO BE CONTINUED

8
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS
SEARF: EDDIE’JO
SAVING LILLY AND HER FRIENDS

The rager fell back, firing his recoilless heavy calibre submachinegun, or RHCSMG, also known as a Super-Ingram, his armoured body already bleeding heavily. Nothing came through the doorway after him, that he was firing through, but Eddie’Jo dropped down through the ceiling, smashing his way through it, and snapped the neck of the raider. Somehow he acquired, super fast, the Super-Ingram, blasting down a female rager even as she leapt up with a Soviet bullpup AKZ-174a doublegun, part assault-rifle and part laser-rifle. Before her body could even begin to hit the ground, he was darting through a chamber filled with preserved corpses and parts of corpses hanging on hooks from the ceiling. Raiders were far from stupid and preserved such decorations against rot because of the risk of stink or disease.

Only some chambers had such extras and this one was lined with steel cages, cruder iron cages and various jury-rigged torture devices. The dead were mostly enemy raiders, but some were typical Wastelanders. Amongst the living were two more ragers but they were drugged out of their minds on filthy mattresses. He went to kill them but then paused. Somebody wanted him to do something different with these two and he almost felt pity for them. He took out softly glowing crystallic collars from a pouch and placed them around the necks, the collars adjusting fluidly to fit tight and then flowing together to link formlessly. A moment later the two vanished with a sparkling shimmer.

Lilly frowned at him, a grubby but tough six year old girl and her animal friends, put into the cage to kill her, stood ready to protect her. A noisy crow, two wild dogs, a powerful young female-advlt killclaw and a molerat, the last making strange noises. Bobby knelt in front of the cage and he looked into Lilly’s eyes. She and her animal friends all went quiet and then she gave him a half smile that just managed to reach her eyes. He opened the cage.

A raider sat up on his mattress and the killclaw sliced his throat open, leaping and bring down, around a long retractable foreclaw hard and sharp enough to cut through easily through bone. The raider fell back dead and the killclaw pissed on the corpse, clearly outraged at something the dead raider had done. Killclaws, like other types of clawbeast, were surprisingly intelligent which was one reason, along with physical powers and cunning, they were so damned dangerous.

The other living in that chamber were close to death and he sent them to Orbis, the alien realm that he was linked with. They were a few Wastelanders, men and women, a couple of ghouls and a boneskinned, hairless auman. It was a surprise to see an auman on the surface and in the DC. Each used a OrbisCollar and now he had only a few left while it would take time for his Hidden Inventory to generate more. Orbis had given him some special extras but nothing that gave him godly powers and much of what he did have was very specialised to suit specific tasks.

There were no more live ragers.

A second Eddie’Jo slipped into the room and walked to the first Eddie’Jo. With a soft sparkling shimmer they merged and became one again. Four more arrived, three carrying valuable loot, and did the same. Such tricks as split-cloning took up valuable energy and had both numbers and time limits. He had not killed all of the ragers. Fifteen had gone to Orbis after surrendering while others he had collared by surprise. Most had fought and had died. The ragers were monstrous, a subspecies of humanity that took humanity’s worst and focused it but even amongst them were some with a glimmer of hope to them: those that had surrendered, who could surrender, were those with hope. Those drugged into stillness were often those who could not truly handle being ragers.

One young rager woman had been secretly smuggling as much food, water and other useful stuff to Lilly and her friends as possible. Kiandra was discovered and her comrades had beaten almost to death but now she was in Orbis.

Lilly and the animals followed him as he began to gather up useful stuff, usable loot, clues and just things that interested him. A few items he sent to Orbis as it was easier to send non living thing there than living things.

Lilly began her collection of robotic teddybears and other toys.

When some ghostly figures appeared, sleepy eyed raiders long dead, none of them were very perturbed and Eddie’Jo asked them some questions, giving them some ghost-fire in return, a form of energy of multiple use to such wandering spirits. The evil had gone from these raiders and they soon drifted off, clutching the ghost-fire and seeking a cloud of softly glowing mist where such as they normally dwelt.

TO BE CONTINUED

9
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
THE BATTLE FOR GRAND NATIONAL MALL

Brothers of Steel ran slowly, lumbering across the broken landscape of the Grand National Mall as rebuilt in the mid 21st Century by President James Patriot Jackson. All the way with JPJ, the man who had ordered the whole of the District of Columbia to be transformed and it was.

As graceful as big bulky hairless metallic gorillas, the Knights could fire off computer guided bursts of 20mm shells from autoguns or other forms of destruction. They did not fire their weapons for they did not want to attract too much attention. Instead they wished to reach an area of shelter ahead in thee form of a short smart concrete wall.

Paladins used special heavy power armour while more common Knights used standard power armour. Troopers and Auxiliaries (trusted mercenaries) used lighter combat power armour. Initiates, none of which were at the battle, used training power armour. There were specials who used their own types of armour or armour with adaptations such as scouts, medics, special forces and techs.

Super-mutants had only appeared as a growing threat in relatively recent years. That is in the DC-Wastelands as the Brotherhood of Steel had fought them in other parts of the former USA. Where these new super-mutants were coming from was a mystery but they seemed to be less intelligent but a little harder to kill than those back in the west had been. Brothers of Steel called them stupid-mutants. There were generally three sizes and the bigger they were, the less common they were and the stupider they seemed to be. Generally two metre tall mutantors were dwarfed by the three roughly metre tall massemoths, who were in turn over shadowed by the hulking four to five metre tall behemoths. Those five metres tall or over were called super behemoths but, thankfully, they were uncommon.

Why the Grand National Mall? Nobody seemed to know why but the invaders were intent on occupying and holding it.

Howitzer shells dropped in overhead and explosions ripped up the super-mutant held zone like great gouts of brown smoke. The super-mutants were staying low for now in their cleverly designed and made network of reinforced trenches, bunkers and tunnels. Too clever for stupid-mutants which indicated some sort of intelligence was guiding them. Howitzer rockets roared down into the defences and bigger explosions hurled mud, mutant bodies and other stuff into the air.

Two Brother Steel Troopers set up a heavy machinegun on a tripod behind a low sandbag wall and began pouring large armour piercing explosive bullets at the enemy. One was a woman. They wore combat power armour, of course.

In the distance the Washington Monument rose high into the air. The Brothers-Steel had troopers there guarding the famous monument and its secrets while using it as an observation outpost. Its smart-materials kept it from falling down but there were great rips down its sides. The Mad President, President James Patriot Jackson, had replaced the old destroyed one with a much bigger construction that was a building in its own right and the Orders of Steel used it in many ways.

At times it seemed the Brotherhood of Steel was dealing with this new threat by itself but there were allies who did what they could. The Union of Columbia, a loose alliance of settlements and settled zones, sent what Union Guards it could spare. The Sisterhood of Steel assailed the enemy with their small fleet of ground attack aircraft. Even the Outcasts of Steel had grudgingly given a hand at times for super-mutants were a threat to them also.

With a howling scream a wave of super-mutants broke out of their ditches, going over the top, and charged across the increasingly broken ground. All wore partial leather and metal plated armour. The regular mutantors carried mainly big basic automatic 10gauge shotguns or altered heavy-machineguns and yet there were also miniguns, flamers and rocket-grenade launchers. The massemoths carried bigger 20mm autoguns or missile quad-launchers. Behemoths thundered over the ground with great single shot blunder-cannons that could and would be used also as clubs.

But this time the super-mutants came with others. Smaller mutants like bulky over muscular normal humans, like very ugly body builders, they outnumbered the bigger ones and they carried standard humans weapons like assault-rifles, assault-shotguns and revolver-launchers that could fire up to six 40mm grenade shells before needing to be reloaded. Some carried rocket-grenade launchers. These would come to be called smart-mutants but it was a name tinged with irony because generally they were only smart when compared to stupid-mutants.

The heavy armour Knights crouched down behind the shelter they had been heading for, aimed their weapons at the on rushing enemy and let loose. The enemy were trying to take only a fairly small area of ground but would pay heavily for it. The battle for the Grand National Mall had come down to fighting for mere metres of ground, some ditches or other basic landmark. Too many were dying for too little success and any ground taken seemed to be lost too soon, this going for both sides.

One of the many overly grandiose statues of President James Patriot Jackson in Washington DC lost its head as it exploded. A wounded Brother of Steel cried out for a Medic in specialized power armour loaded with medical technologies.

The scream of approaching vertijets was heard as the Sisters of Steel started making another bombing run with smart-bombs. They would also strafe with big volleys of 20mm shells and special sweep-lasers.

TO BE CONTINUED

10
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS
THE MECHANIST
SPYING ON CANTERBURY COMMONS

Too many called him insane but the Mechanist considered himself to be a super genius of robotics and related areas. Openly he worked as a robotics expert in the commerce dominated settlement of Canterbury Commons but secretly in his own basemant bunker, he experimented with a range of robotics. With him, to keep him company and to meet his needs, were two android women of ‘slimly voluptuous’ build. They also assisted his work as did two octibots, clever robots each with eight double-jointed manipulator-limbs for doing intricate work.

Today he was spying on townsfolk using the very security cameras and security robots that they had paid for him to put into place. Canterbury Commons had over two hundred thousand people and growing slowly but steadily in population. While four individuals dominated the trading caravans, there were plenty of independent ones that went out.

The mayor was at it with his young secretary again, the old fool. He was bound to get a heart attack if he did not start behaving himself. Then again, Mayor Roe, sometimes called Uncle Roe, was no fool. He had basically founded the settlement, along with his sister Daisy. He had a wife but the marriage was one of political and commercial convenience only. The Mechanist, really Scott Wollinski, was careful around that man.

He switched views to the big wide main street and the old square that it ran into with its ugly but somehow pleasing sculpture made out of old vehicles and vehicle parts careful placed and welded together. Trallis the artist had done this but mostly Yvonne Trallis did practical welding jobs for the settlement. The square had become a weekend markets and was going that day with many stalls up and much activity by people. Normal shops were open around the square itself, fronting into the square.

Then he saw them, visitors mingling amongst the crowds, and again he was puzzled. They were androids of some kind, or at least they acted like it. He had an amazing knack for picking out androids pretending to be humans but it was a knack that he generally kept to himself. Yet there was also something ‘non android like’ about these androids. He had picked up their difference already, back when he had first witnessed them in Canterbury Commons.

He turned to his android companions but also to the AI-supercomputer, SmartAsIs. “The strange new androids, have you finished anolysing the data on them?”

SmartAsIs responded in a very good but not perfect copy of Ruth’s voice. “The controlling influence is different. They may have advanced positronic brains or they may have something new altogether. They behave more smoothly, more like actual humans but with out the clumsiness normal to many humans. I conclude that while they are most likely from the DomniCommonwealth, that there is a good chance that they are not products of the DomniInstitute. Considering my data limitations, this conclusion could easily be misleading.”

He had made the voice to impress his ex-wife but Ruth seemed a little spooked out by it.

This surprised the Mechanist. He sat back and wondered who or what, on the Columbian Islands, could match the DomniInstitute. He had always assumed that the DomniInstitute and its elites were the only things important enough to consider in the DomniCommonwealth but now he had to challenge his assumptions.

Ruthlee, the android, spoke then. “What will you do about the strangers?”

The Mechanist sighed. “If they turn out to be escapees from that damned DomniInstitute than I will assist them as I normally do. Otherwise I most likely will remain distant, remain hidden.”

There was more data to collect and more to think about. He turned back to the screen.

Canterbury Commons was a prized member of the slowly expanding Union of Columbia so it had protection by Union Guards in combat power armour. There were also Town Guards and Sheriff Deputies in flexikevlar body-armour. A patrol of Town Guards were moving a little arrogantly through the crowds but failed totally to discover the androids.

DomniCommonwealth visitors, from the Columbian Islands, were there also. They were damned arrogant, being from the DomniCommonwealth capital city of DomniCity. An aeroship came across from the commonwealth and back again once a month, stopping of at Canterbury Commons, Rivet City and then at Canterbury Commons again before returning to DomniCity. The strange androids had come last month on that aged but still strong going flying ship. Now the Mechanist picked up human Domnifolk and with them android companions and bodyguards.

Then he saw the man and he scowled. He of course knew about one of the amazing creators of a whole new generation of so called super-androids. Doctor Zimmer was a super genius, a driven professional, a monster and not one to trust lightly. There had been whispers of super-androids escaping to the DC-Wastelands mainland, at least one being a creation of Doctor Zimmer. Was Doctor Zimmer there chasing one of his wonderful creations? Would he risk coming alone to the mainland? It did not quite make sense.

Then the Mechanist grinned. Doctor Zimmer, at least the one in front of him, was himself an android, most likely a super-android, and the real Doctor Zimmer was most likely safely ensconced in the super fortress of the DomniInstitute that was buried deep beneath DomniCity.

Men, women, children! Families! They seemed quite alien to him. He found the human world to be both too complicated and confusing. He supposed it was because he was a cyborg with only his brain, spinal-chord and a few other parts in his torso being flesh. The rest was a clever built android of a middle-young aged man.

His young wife had left him years ago, after he had wandered back into Canterbury Commons as a cyborg, having vanished as a human on the outskirts of the town. He had been searching for robotic or other useful parts when giant ants had attacked him, ripping him apart. Then had come a strange flash of light and after that, darkness. He had awoken as cyborg who felt alienated from human society.

Still, she did visit him sometimes in his official workshop and she brought goodies, made love to him, cooked a meal for him and cleaned up his living area, fussing over him, before she left again. Ruth would return to her merchant husband, whom she detested, and to the high society of Canterbury Commons that she loved.

The Canterbury Commons ClubElite was small but was an important part of the much bigger Union of Columbia ClubElite. In turn the ClubElite had far too much influence on Union of Columbia affairs including Government and neogovernment corporations.

Scott Wollinski did not care for politics or commerce or many aspects of society much but recently he had come to realise that such things were important. Now he switched views again and was watching workers, in labour power armour, moving around dull metallic canisters, plastic boxes and wooden crates. Now he was using one of his unauthorised and secret cameras to observe criminal activity of some kind. At once he made plans to take a closer look at this stuff to see if anything of it was worth stealing.

That is after he took a peek at the working girls of the CRAZY GIRL SALOON showering in a rather bare concrete chamber. He knew them all normally but, to his surprise, not only were there two newcomers but they were strange androids.

Just what was going on in Canterbury Commons?

TO BE CONTINUED

STORY FLOW (to be edited/added to)
BEASTS
Clawbeasts: *Deathclaws *Killclaws
Other Beasts: *Hornlizards *Giant spitter ants *Rhorses
ORDERS OF STEEL
Brotherhood of Steel
RAIDERS
*Cannibals *Ragers
SEARF
Lucky Eddie - Eddie'Jo
JAMES PATRIOT JACKSON
President James Patriot Jackson
*PP Surpreme Superintendent James Patriot Jackson (superclone)
PATRIOT POLICE
*Chief Detective Renalto
LIFEVAULT-101
Aarie, Aaron and Appie Ashworth (triplets)
Google, Colaboy, Trent, DJ-Girl, the Bran Twins, Fred and Shandie (friends)
Butch DeLoria, Wally Mack, Paul Hannon Junior Fred Yao Ming (tunnel rats) Sandra Matos and Freda Matos (honouree TRs)
*Vaultdroid Series Nine-A androids
OTHERS
*Evalene Shelly (Doctor/Medical Research) ghoul
*Lillly and animal friends (crow, killclaw, molerat, 2 dogs) animals to be named
*Antangonizer (strange baby)
*Escaped from spitter ants: teenage boy and girl, boy neobaby, 2 dogs, a cat and a horse (to be named)
*Mechanist *Ex-wife Ruth

11
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS
FINDING AND USING THE SAFE HOUSE

After killing a fair few raiders, ragers and other kinds, he was much better resourced and was riding in a semi-enclosed lightly armoured battlebuggy. A protectron robot rode in the back along with a sleeping molerat, two once savage dogs and little girl, a raider captive; now she was curled up with one of the dogs, the molerat and a teddy-bear. A crow was perched up on the dashboard and was watching the world go past. He had gained a good deal of valuable gear that was both in the vehicle and in the Secret Inventory.

It was sunny but not bright thanks to clouds moving rapidly across the sky.

President James Patriot Jackson had given all the children of the USA a light brown robotic teddybear each that was a small basic robot. It was too bad he had done it mainly so the teddy-bears could spy on people and whisper patriotic conditioning to sleeping children. The plan had not worked. The already overburdened US Security Intelligence Network could not start to access all the toys and parents quickly learned how to turn off the spying microphones and propaganda speakers. Yet the same teddy-bears could still be found all across the former USA.

The electric machine hummed quietly along a surprisingly good condition road past a row of surprisingly good condition double level houses. The gardens were overgrown, the mailboxes were empty and a mail delivery robot was parked against a wall on its four flexi-suspension wheels.

Reconstructed Washington DC was two major levels being surface-semi-underground and underground. Residential, commercial, social, sporting and other such areas were mostly in the Uppers. Manufactories, warehouses, processing centres and other such places were mainly in the Lowers. Between the two was the Subway Network with its monorail trains and trams plus underground roadways with rails to power electric vehicles of all kinds. Exceptions were such as big solar power stations in the Uppers and beautiful subterranean gardens in great cave systems.

Except now much of it was destroyed and much of that which survived was either shut down or only semiactive.

It was very different from the Washington DC he had known back in 2077, the year he had vanished as a super-soldier. He had only vague troubled memories of that time and his life before that. The memories also seemed impossible at times but then again so did misty fragmented memories of his time after that.

The girl had given him some information after she realised that that he was actually not out to do any bad to her, that he was determined to make her life comfortable and last of all, that he actually liked her very much though she could not understand why. Sometimes when she was awake, she stared at him in quiet astonishment because he was not brutalising her into a life of savagery.

He found the building that he was looking for and carefully parked the vehicle in the garage. There was a rusting electric runabout already there with skeletal remains inside and yet much of the big chamber was fairly intact. After doing his best to hide the vehicle from any who might take a peek into the garage through the partly open garage door, it would not close any further, he found what he really wanted.

Faded memories told him that this was a safe house for the Ghost Ops unit, the Special Encounter Assault Recon Force, that he had served with back in 2077 when he and his comrades had turned against the President’s insane rule. The basemant chamber was normal enough but beneath that was a bunker, a whole second basemant level but a fortified one with much equipment and supplies. It soon became clear that nobody had been there since he and his comrades had departed on what had turned out to be a suicide mission driven by betrayal and weird, violent events.

While the dogs and molerat explored the big main bunker chamber and the girl had a bath in ‘real’ recycled water with a rubber ducky, he prepared a meal. While the girl and animals finished eating he made himself coffee and her some hot chocolate. She didn’t speak much and he put no pressure on her to say anything.

After that she sat watching a 3DTV recording of a children’s story while the molerat and dogs lay close to her. He sat meditating.

TO BE CONTINUED

12
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS
AARIE, APPIE AND AARON

The infamous GOAT exam had come and gone with its 101 multiple answer questions, the 101st asking who was the most important leader and all answers being the ‘High Overseer’. Appie had not needed to be tested, of course, and was in the two bedroom apartment when they returned. Beatrice was looking after him, was mildly spoiling him as the neobaby sat in her lap as she watched 3DCTV (3D cable television). It was showing a typically dull LifeVault-0101 Broadcasting Department soap opera in which Vaultfolk lead approved lives with much apparent happiness and contentment.

Beatrice smiled at the two as they came into the commonroom of the apartment. It was fairly large but the apartment was really designed for two advlts while it housed two almost advlts, two almost advlts and a neobaby. There was father and his live in girlfriend, Darwina. Such crowding was normal for the residential subvaults of the vault.

Beatrice kissed the neobaby and passed the small one over to Aaron. Appie yawned, stretched and was soon sleeping against his ‘big bruddy’s chest’. The older two triplets sat down on basic semicomfortable chairs clutching their results in the form of hard-copy print-outs. Hard-copy print-outs were not very common thanks to rationing of paper of all kinds, even recycled paper but GOAT results were considered important enough to keep in this fashion.

The older woman sighed. “I take it you did very well.”

Aarie shrugged. “Very well in the sense of abilities and skills, of intelligence and creativity, but not in the sense of ‘proper loyalty to the Vaultgov’. We could end up in the Research and Development Department but most like will become part of the Maintenance Department.”

Beatrice sighed. “I would not concern yourself too much. In truth the Personal Department takes little heed of the GOAT Exam when directing people to various duties. The Internal Security Department would like it otherwise but they are fools. Your abilities will be very much in demand. How did you like the poem? I confess it is not mine. I simply wanted you to take a look at it for they say it was written by Mad Charlie himself.”

Beatrice smiled and from a normal looked, patched, workbag she took a large bottle of alcoholic cider, a secret market tradegood because all production of alcohol for drinking purposes was banned. The older triplets smiled and Appie was happy when the neobaby got to fill his favourite Moony Mouse sipcup with apple juice. The apple juice was black market because all fruit juices were rationed.

To their surprise, their father arrived home early to celebrate their having completed the infamous GOAT and with him came his girlfriend who carried three small gifts. Darwina looked a lot like a younger version of Catherine, their dead mother, and she was just as nice and just as smart. The triplets all considered her to be aloof at times, which they assumed that their mother would never be like.

Appie got some more plastic construction bricks, brightly coloured, plus another small plastic figure to add to his collection, this time being an elephant. Aaron and Aarie each got new shoes, a handy pouch multitool and a 200cred voucher for the VaultShops. There were only a few VaultShops and they were often at least half empty of goods but matters were improving with the growth of cottage industries of various kinds. Better still, VS-vouchers could be used with the secret market and black market.

Beatrice and Darwina got on quite well, like old friends, though Darwina had only been living in that part of the vault for a few years. They pvssyd and Aarie joined in with them. They discussed shoes, the horror of Vaultgov issued makeup and who were the attractive young men and women athletes showing up in vault games. One of the favourite sports in the vault was the Big Loop Cycle Races, be they bicycles, tricycles or quadcycles, or even monocycles on odd occasions, that went around the edge of the vault, except for Sector Ten these days: a big race was coming up soon.

The use of pedal-vehicles in a vault had turned out to be very practical, from pedalcarts to bicycles, tricycles and even quadcycles. Delivery tricycles were large with storage at the back. When people used exercise bicycles in the fitness centres, they also charged up small batteries. Vaultgov was putting in network-system of computer guided rail-quadcycles where pedal power was made safer and more efficient using special monorails.

James went off after a fairly short while, no surprise there, and Aaron sat with Appie playing with coloured bricks. After a while the three femmes came over an joined in, all of them taking turns in fussing over the neobaby.

James returned, a surprise, with some take-away food for them all gotten from the nearest community cafeteria. They were all soon eating a decent meal of longofish and vegetable pie, fruit salad with icecream and grainy breadbiscuits.

TO BE CONTINUED

13
INTERLUDE
HISTORY OF LIFEVAULT-0101

There were, in theory, twelve even Ministries in the Vaultgov. Each was divided into Departments. The Ministries were (1) Constitution and Politics, (2) Social Security, (3) Security Intelligence, (4) Defence (5) Justice (6) Vault Care, (7) Biotech, Tech and Mech, (8) Training and Education, (9) Sports, Fitness and Entertainment (10) Storage, Distribution and Transportation (11) Health and Fitness (12) Miscellaneous Matters.

There were the special non-Ministry departments that reported directly to the Council of Elders. They were the Department of Police, Department of Population Regulation, Department of Security (uniformed security), Department of Culture, Department of Archives, Department of advlt Entertainment, Department of Special Services and the Department of Departmental Matters. It was difficult to find out just what the last two departments actually did.

In practise some ministries were bigger than others, were more influential and the Ministry of Miscellaneous Matters was bloated. In order to deal with the growing pressures of vault life, almost 200 years from Doomsday, a TriCouncil of Overseers, Coordinators and Supervisors had been created along with a limited democratic Constitutional Council, an Ombudsman with very limited powers to assist people with complaints and even a Feedback Office that did not respond to feedback.

The Department of Research and Development, Department of Lotteries, the Department of Emergency Services and the Department of Civil Defence had been added.

Because of the use of cyberlink technologies, AI-supercomputers, androids and robots, the bureaucracy of actual humans was surprisingly small. Administrators of various types were at the top while admin officers, clerks, orderlies and secretaries made up the ranks.

Also in theory, there were around a million people in LifeVault-0101 but in practise the population had also become bloated to at least two million. Many Vaultfolk dwelt in the slums of the Rimzone, an often maze of hastily built sectional walls, prefabricated dwellings and other features. Then there were the Fringe Caverns where dwelt the outcasts, the exiles and their descendents who cultivated more exotic stuff such glowmoss, nutrimoss, giant mushrooms, meatworms and blindfish along with vegetables, fruit, nuts and other produce. They also had some cloned livestock being rabbits, goats, longofish, chickens, lowhorn cattle and even sturdy work ponies. There were even plantations of fastpine and bambootrees.

Vault history had not gone as planned by VaultTek or the US Federal Government, at least not that of LifeVault-0101. On Doomsday the vault had lost contact with the TekVault Network of LifeVaults, emergency ShelterVaults, military BaseVaults, mysterious ArkVaults, coordinating HubVaults and other kinds of TekVaults along with other forms of shelter. Fibre-optics, telecables, and transways had all been cut off. Nobody had left or entered the vault since Doomsday or so went the official word.

Mad Charlie had struck, blasting away with three big and a baker’s dozen worth of smaller bombs. Direct damage to the superstructure and various substructures of the vault had been bad enough but the network of network-systems had suffered both direct, indirect and longer term harm. Sector Ten was closed down permanently, putting greater pressure on the other eleven sectors, each made up of three subvaults. Famine, an odd infection, radroach infestations, contaminated water reserves and other problems had struck the vault, killing over fifteen thousand people. The LifeVault was still getting over it all and Sector Ten was still firmly closed off. Since Mad Charlie had struck, almost everything was rationed. Most people cursed Mad Charlie but the story that he had actually saved the Vaultfolk from some kind of threat, still circulated.

TO BE CONTINUED

14
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
MANMADE GHOSTS

“Typical stupid Wastelanders were bad enough and then came the bandits.” The old man adjusted the brahmin’s pack load, adjusted a strap to make the loyal old beast more comfortable. “Bandits and gangers were bad enough and then came those damn slavers and cannibals. After them came the other raiders. Not just bandits pretending to be raiders but those ragers and those reavers.”

The old man stood up and rubbed his back. He wore typical Wastelander tough and basic gear, the boots being made in Rivet City. “At least those reavers and ragers take every opportunity to kill each other off, ignoring us other fools when they do.”

The younger man nodded. He was in metallic body-armour and carried a standard DCTek manufactured M66N1 autorifle firing the NEW (improved) NATO 7.7mm calibre bullets and 30mm grenade-shells. The trader’s caravan was basically two three saddle horses, the trader himself and two guards, being a man and a woman, along with two pack brahmins plus a guard dog. Both brahmins were cows, they being generally more placid and controllable.

They were approaching the settlement of Greyditch and were fairly close to a subway entrance. They were too close for their liking but they had needed to stop and adjust the brahmin loads.

The Subways meant feral ghouls or worse who liked to stay underground away from bright sunshine even in winter but in winter they were more likely to come out for short excursions in the daytime. Worse were mindless zhouls, the name having been made up by replacing ‘g’ with ‘z’ for zombie. Feral ghouls used weapons even if they were insane. Civilized ghouls were a mixed bunch as were so humans. Of course ghouls were in reality humans because they could still breed with humans to create offspring. Not all of the Subways were so dangerous. There were Subwayer settlements based in various changed Subway Stations but they tended to keep to themselves.

The guard shrugged. “Gangers, ragers, reavers and those mad hatter ravers, what next? Oh yeh, those great clanking Brothers of Steel, those Outcasts and those good looking Sisters of Steel in their tight armour. Super-mutants, got to have a few super-mutants stomping over the place. Adds to the nastiness of radscorpions, radroaches, killclaws, deathclaws, giant what evers and why not a man eating mutated plant or two? The DC Wastelands get more complicated and dangerous with every passing day. Would like to make it out to the Columbian Islands to live except they are not much into trusting mainlanders.”

The old man snorted. “Out there with the DomniCommonwealth? Slavery, semislavery, demislavery, android assassins, cyborg soldiers, Warlords, Civillords, the decadent Landlord Families and that damned DomniInstitution. Most people there are poor and oppressed. Don’t trust the Domni and their propaganda. I went there once; never again. Strange and awful things go on there. Even androids want to escape from the place. It’s a pity because as far as nature goes, it is beautiful and much of the islands are still wilderness or semiwilderness.”

Broken buildings and buildings surrounded them. A great big stained billboard showed President James Patriot Jackson himself, amazingly handsome and strong in his military style uniform. He was surrounded by beautiful young women in rather skimpy military marching costumes. JPJ always did like young women. It was the way he liked young women that was one reason in the end people turned against him, even many of his own people. JPJ’s face was covered in bullet holes.

A great hulking wreck of a battletank stood further up the road half crashed into a supermarket. It was atomic motorised with very thick composite armour and twin 105mm autocannons in the roboremote turret. On top of that was a smaller turret with twin 40mm autocannons and above that an even smaller turret with twin 20mm autocannons. Such a machine was called a Hammerfist and back in 2076 or 2077 it had been destroyed during the great armed rebellion, the so called Freedom Revolution.

The dog sensed them first and became noticeably agitated. Then the old man cursed softly and looked towards the battletank. He signalled the others to be quiet. The brahmin cows did not seem too disturbed, the horses only a little skittish.

Translucent they came marching along the road, the soldiers in body-armour or in power-armour. Civilians in a wide variety of clothes be it casual dresses or jumpsuits or military style uniforms. A police constable in riot-gear walked blank faced next to a boy in a school uniform, leading a police horse. With them walked dogs, cats and weirdly enough, a gold fish swam through the air and plants floated along. Cockroaches scuttled along with them. There were other lifeforms. Yet they were all ghostly, were all separate from the solidness around them.

At first a trickle they became hundreds moving in a great column three or four thick, moving endlessly, never resting, never stopping and always staring ahead if they had eyes to do so.

Then, as if by magic, they faded out of sight.

The young guards had never experienced the like before and were shaken but Old Pete had done so at least a dozen times and he had never quite gotten used to the powerful but subtle sense of loss, sadness and desolation.

Old Pete went back to adjusting the pack loads.

The young woman guard sighed. “So the phantoms do march endlessly.”

Old Pete nodded. “Only since they used those damned super-weapons, those disintegrator and atomizer warheads and other things I don’t know the names of. They are ghosts made by mankind’s insanity. Now, lets get out of here. Too many damned big buildings here we can get ambushed or snipered from.”

But the others guessed that the real reason that Old Pete suddenly wanted to move on was because of the phantoms and who could blame him.



TO BE CONTINUED

15
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS
WITH OTHERS AT THE NEW SHOOTING RANGE

Dad gave them their new gifts a few days after the party. Back when they had turned ten years old, Aarie and Aaron had gained each a semiautomatic air-rifle that could fire SS-pellets of different kinds, being super-shot-pellets. Now they each gained a.22LR survival-gun or fold-rifle because it could fold up to fit into a small space. Appie got a clever made water-pistol he could use, just like the last one he got about six years ago.

Jonas gave them each a Vault Heroes baseball team type baseball cap, even one that could fit Appie’s head. In each was a survival kit, compact and well designed, with the well secured one in Appie’s cap being for Aarie or Aaron to use.

Since the radroach infestation had begun, coming into LifeVault-0101 after Mad Charlie had blown up a section of secondary infrastructure, teams of professional and volunteer exterminators had been formed. The professionals were allowed proper official class weapons but the volunteers used a mixture of hand-flamers, BB-guns and .22LR fold-rifles taken from old survival gear stocks. The hand-flamers had once been used to burn away infestations of mutated moss like clingermoss. That is until the Vaultfolk realised it was better to harvest such substances for their special qualities. It was horrible work most often done by convicts as punishment. All Exterminators served under the Department of Civil Defence.

Dead radroaches had been thrown away for a short time or burned until they too began to be used. People knew but did not like to think about how radroach meat went through a multiple processing to end up as part of the vault’s food rations. Ironically the threat of radroaches had become a small source of hope against a new famine.

Aaron and Aarie aimed weapons in turn at the crude target range. It was a big old metal storeroom now empty of stores and even storage containers. The stores had been used long ago and the storage containers sent to be used elsewhere. A MrHandy had helped with the clean up as had a roboremote vacuum-cleaner. Light came from three of four ceiling fluropanels, the fourth having ceased to function decades ago. A nice target range was set up and had clearly taken a fair amount of effort to do.

Their friends were there, some with their own SS-guns and one with a .22LR bolt-action rifle. Jacob was there as well. He tried to hide it but he looked a little flustered. As usual father looked very calm but the twins knew better; he was fuming inside. The head of the Department of Research and Development had given permission to dad to carry out a new experiment and the Security Overseer had tried to stop it; the given reason was that it endangered vault security but everybody knew that it was truly because the man did not like their father. The High Overseer had intervened, yet again, and the experiment was to go ahead.

Nobody was surprised when the twins turned out to be amazingly good shots with the .22LR guns as they had been with SS-rifles and target-lasers. They shot at targets that swung back on impact and ones that moved but also had basic holographic projections that reacted in different ways. Birds flew through the air. Bad soldiers shot at them or raced at them. A protectron strode back and forth, protesting that it was not programmed to be a target even if it was only being shot with projectiles that bounced off its armour. The robot was only a temporary target as it was needed to work in father’s laboratory workshop next to his medical rooms. Even with a functioning hospital and five general and five specialist clinics, the vault had too few doctors and other medical specialists. This was also despite medical robots and androids.

To their surprise the Security Overseer turned up and to their double surprise he grudgingly approved of the target range for security reasons; better gun training meant better security against radroaches and other threats. He promised to endorse it, he always kept such promises, and then he departed after watching for a while. Amata kissed her father on the cheek as a reward which earned her an almost smile from the overseer.

The older triplets stood with their father, each holding a SS-gun, while Jonas took a series of 3Dphotos of them, digital shots. Father held Appie. Then he had to photo others of course and take short 3Dvideo runs using the same camera.

Aaron spoke quietly with out looking directly at his twin sister. “A survival gun, baseball caps with hidden inside survival kits, do they know something?”

Aarie responded. “I figure everybody is on edge these days what with Mad Charlie’s inheritance. Maybe the gifts reflect those fears. People are putting away caches of goodies, are doing survival stuff in virtual reality, are keeping a more careful eye on what is happening in the vault.”

She meant the damage, both direct and indirect, caused by his bombs and the way it had impacted on VaultTek designed and built network-systems. The network-systems had proven to be not as reliable as the megacorporation had bragged that they would be. The radroach infestation, environmental control problems, water supply problems had other problems had been occurring ever since.

Whispers abounded of growing tensions in Vaultgov between various Overseers. The High Overseer was a fine leader for good times but was proving to be inadequate for troubled times. Various Ministry Overseers were in a growing power struggle as factions jostled to take the High Overseer’s position when it became vacant.

Lately Aarie and Aaron had begun to doubt their own perception of LifeVault-0101, to doubt their assumptions about the vault and its history. Their father was little help because he had become withdrawn from them even as he carried out a series of secret experiments and forays into forbidden parts of LifeVault-0101. Of course he did not know his children knew about his secret activities but they had hacked his portable computer and then his secret portable computer. Jonas helped their father but while he would not speak of certain matters, he was more forthcoming on others.

Through Jonas, and not their father, they learned that they had not been born in LifeVault-0101 though official records stated they had been. Instead they had been born in the DC-Wastelands in a huge semi-underground complex called the Jefferson Memorial Complex. After pushing him a little he had told them that their mother, one Catherine Lancaster Ashworth, the middle name being her maiden name, died during childbirth. Officially nobody had ever left or entered the vault since it had been locked up back in 2077 but the twins had learned that in truth a trickle of people had secretly done both since then but they did not know who, when or why. They had known of their mother’s death but James Ashworth had only spoken of an ‘accident’ and had not linked it to their births. They had assumed that the death had taken place in LifeVault-0101 itself.

They were not sure of why had he done this but assumed that he was trying to spare their feelings. Perhaps he was planning to tell them more in future though so far there was no sign of it.

The older triplets wandered back to be amongst their friends along with the older Jonas and father. Of course the young triplet was carried along. They were soon happily socialising.

TO BE CONTINUED

16
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
BRAINBOTS DOING THEIR THING

The brainbot rolled over the ground with its tracks. The brain was shown inside a transparent armaglass dome except in this case it was an expendable secondary brain. The D-Series of brainbots had the main brain shifted down inside layers of armour after RoboTek management had finally worked out the obvious; armaglass domed brains were just too vulnerable.

The other brainbots were spread out across the big concrete floor and were examining it with various sensors, scanners and torch beams. Big syntho-wooden crates stood half empty close to big old atomic motorised 16W-haulers, that is massive sixteen big wheeled hauler trucks.

Scattered around it were the skeletal remains of various humans who seem to have been all massacred about the same moment with some kind of energy weapons that the brainbots could not identify.

Another brainbot communicated. “Do you think we might find him there.”

The first brainbot responded. “We might find him anywhere.”

They were excited about having finally overcome their programming and fears to leave the hidden complex below them. Being D-Series, they were well armed, surprisingly fast for tracked machines and had other strengths. They were networked together through line of sight laser communications transmissions, feeling safer that way.

A-Series had been all experimental prototypes with many variations and had used different kinds of brains. This included the infamous use of convict brains and chimpanzee brains, which often led to disaster.

B-Series had become used as cyborg-robots that never left sterile clean and heavily secure environments where they assisted in running intricate operations of many kinds. B-Series were lightly armoured and had no weapons unless they had been altered after leaving a manufactory.

C-Series had been rushed out as fighting units to assist in various military operations including the taking of a willing Mexico, the taking of an unwilling Canada and the military operations against the New Soviets in Alaska. The military soon learned to use them only as back-up defence units in bases where they mainly assisted commanding officers and specialists.

Then came D-Series with improved almost everything including the main, non expendable brain being safely stored away in the body with its heavy armour and armaments. The expendable brain was a limited brain and could assist the cyborg-robot’s main brain as long as it was available. But Doomsday came before any D-Series brainbots could get out of the big secret RoboTek complex beneath the outskirts of the very large Bethesda Sector of Washington DC.

He had suggested they come up into the big old depot chambers and other facilities on that level, as they had just done, but no further until he got back in contact with them. He had promised nice surprises to be found there but also three tasks he wanted them to do for him, if they wanted to do so.

The big syntho-wooden crates had been ready to ship out to assist with the defence of President James Patriot Jackson and his forces against both external and internal threats. Itemisation dataplates were fused to each one, one per side, top and bottom. They were scanned and read ‘D-Series Brainbots’ along with maintenance kits and related gear. This was fine except that the crates were heavily shielded to an extend beyond the security need of transporting standard brainbots.

There were four 16W-haulers and each was full of four big crates. There were thirty-three more crates neatly stacked on the floor.

The first brainbot spoke. “I know this may sound illogical, but I do not like the feel of this, not at all.”

Then came E-Series brainbots, heavy and lumbering, about twice as large in volume but hulking low of body to be only half again as tall as a D-Series brainbot. Each held a wide range of weapons and thick armour plus other defences. A 40mm recoilless autogun or a powerful pulselaser was the main weapon on each, thrusting out of the front, but each also had a 20mm recoilless autogun turret on top. These were called armabrains.

Three D-Series brainbots approached a crate on the concrete and began the process of opening its heavy duty electronic locks. Sixteen minutes later they were opening the syntho-wooden crate to find it was heavily armoured with its inner layers. Then out of the crate trundled a surprise.

It was a very big robotic machine, a brainbot but it looked like a small battletank. It offered no threat and rolled to a halt. Then it spoke. “Greetings, I am a battlebrain. Like you I am programmed to wage war against President James Patriot Jackson and his evil. We must begin preparations for battle to come for President James Patriot Jackson is not dead but trapped in an exotic realm of his own making. If he escapes than he will doom us all.”

The D-Series brainbots became a little nervous.

The battlebrain spoke again. “Of course your kind will better serve the cause by working here in the RoboTek base.”

The brainbots became less nervous. The first D-Series brainbot spoke. “We have over a thousand brainbots ready to operate but only three hundred and twenty have cloned brains implanted. We need more brains. He promised us nice surprises.”

The big robot started to laugh insanely and then the laughter died down. “So he tricked you. How disappointingly easy that was considering how smart you brainbots are supposed to be. I lied. My brain is cloned from the great and majestic President James Patriot Jackson himself. Now I will activate the others like me and we will eliminate all of your brains, replacing them with cloned brains of our own.”

The first D-Series brainbot spoke again. “We listened to him but we did not quite believe him. When something seems to good to be true, most likely it is too good to be true. So we took some precautions of our own. All he was, was some kind of weird psychic holographic projection.”

The battlebrain began to attack, firing its weapons, but the projectiles and laser pulsebeams went straight through the brainbots to strike the far wall to burn it lightly because it was both thick and very tough. With a shimmer the brainbots vanished, they never having been there in the first place.

At that moment a big dull silver metallic sphere rolled into the chamber and exploded very heavy electromagnetic pulse all through the chamber. The battlebrain deactivated, burning out in places, and the insane clone brain perished at once. But the other battlebrains were shielded in their crates and they crashed out of them, roaring to the attack.

The monstrous machines roared across the floor. Abruptly the floor gave away beneath them and they fell downwards into big chamber full of a storm of electromagnetic energies. They were dead and deactivated before they smashed into the concrete floor far below. The ones in the crates on the haulers were deactivated except for the cores where the cloned brains of the Mad President slept. Dealing with them would not be easy but far from impossible.

TO BE CONTINUED

17
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
A RIVERSHIP ON THE BIG DC-RIVER

It was fairly dark but the moon was nearly full and the sky fairly clear. With a surge of power the rivership, old but well cared for, moved away from the transmutated shark creatures in the waters. Huge they were and armour plated with the habit of ramming hulls with the heavily armoured noses. Diresharks they were called and they were only one of the threats that lived in the river either full or part time. Thankfully there was also plenty of less harmful fish and other game to catch and a caught direshark itself gave plenty of good quality resources to use or trade with.

In the distance a Brotherhood of Steel monitor, a patrol vessel of armoured ugliness bristling with guns, moved much closer to the far shore. It was a low hulking monster in the waters with enough firepower to wipe out a fair sized group of super-mutants. Of course its crew would know she and the UCCS Lucky Eddie was there, being her rivership as named after her long lost son.

Her rivership’s nets had caught a mix of blue-tooters, white-stripers and a couple of dangerous but good emergency issue currency gaining direfishes. Now the nets were packed away and they were making their way home to Rivertane, a fortified river based settlement from which many fisherboats, traderboats and other vessels operated. For security reasons the boat only showed a few dim navigation lights.

Buildings and other structures are dim shapes running from the very shoreline and upwards. A small herd of deer move quickly along the southern shore, following a flagstone footpath. Natural selection means that predators are outnumbered by herbivores and even omnivores are not in great numbers. Predators are also territorial and are prone to fighting each other, if they have a fair chance of winning. Clumps of glowshooms, tall thin mushroom like plants, can be seen on the shoreline. Only certain kinds of beasties can consume them and humans can only harvest them with care; ghouls can not only tolerate them, they find them tasty and nutritional.

Captain Jane Eye checked the sonar screen for possible unseen underwater obstacles. The river had been expanded, dredged, when Washington DC was virtually reconstructed by President JPJ, and was very deep. So even though there were some big ships sunken in the river, she had few fears of having her rivership’s hull ripped out.

There was a sunken submarine in that part of the river, a very big Soviet one that had brought in Russian, Chinese and other Communist forces. The attack had been a hasty planned one, an attempt to kill or capture President James Patriot Jackson himself. In a bizarre twist the Soviets and American rebels had formed an uneasy alliance but even then they had failed to kill the mad super genius of a president before he pressed the flashing red buttons.


The Potomac River had once bordered the old Washington DC but after JPJ’s grand reconstruction costing over fifty trillion US Dollars, the Potomac River flowed through Washington DC.

In the distance, in the sky above the Grand National Mall, explosions flashed suddenly in the sky. The Sisters of Steel where at it again, or so she figured, as they did another bombing, strafing run on those damned super-mutants. The super-mutants had a couple of 40mm antiaircraft guns and some shoulder-launcher SAMs but nothing that touched the Sisterhood of Steel vertibirds.

The throb of powerful motors went through the wooden decking of the rivership. The smell of fish was strong but she found it comforting because it meant a good catch had been made. She took her mind away from the big submarine, away from the battle in the distance and returned her focus fully back to the return trip to Rivertane.

TO BE CONTINUED


18
INTERLUDE
DC PEOPLES AND NEIGHBOURS

The Union of Columbia was there before the Orders of Steel Arrived. They were settlements and areas that linked together for mutual protection against the raiders. So called normal raiders were first there, were native to DC. The gangers were focused in Washington DC and the bandits out further from the big metropolis. They had dealt with slavers. The Union slowly and steadily spread across Columbia but in a network fashion that left many uncontrolled, wild and dangerous areas and specific places.

Rivet City first joined in a loose alliance with Rivertane as they were linked by the Big DC River. Then they together joined with Harbourside, the DC Harbour settlement based on a great long jetty into the great harbour that President James Patriot Jackson had ordered dug out by massive energy weapons before somebody had come up with a safer and cheaper plan. Thankfully the Mad President actually listened for once. Harbourside was close to the mouth of the shifted Potomac River.

Arefu then joined, also being on the river, and the earliest form of the Union of Columbia arose.

Sugartown joined, being close to a secondary river. With Sugartown came Sugarland, the farming area around Sugartown dotted with co-ops, clusterfarms and communes.

Rapidly after that joined a number of settlements being Megaton, Greyditch, Canterbury Commons, Duckstone, McBurb, NukaTown, Chinatown, Tulip Lane, the Rhyme Estates, Phallistine, Sharpsburg, Junktown and the Five Star Bunkers.

Each new settlement brought both benefits and troubles.

The Rhyme Estates were soon evicted because of their brutal exploitation of ghoul slaves.

Phallistine was destroyed abruptly in a mysterious, brutal and gruesome fashion with relatively few survivors escaping; none could remember what had happened except a few who were quite insane. The burned out ruins of the settlement offered no clues to what had happened.

The Five Star Bunkers, all close together and closely linked, became the main base of the new Union Guard military forces.

Sharpsburg fell to a rebellion led by a corrupt and brutal Crimelord linked to Paradise Falls, the big criminal settlement of the DC Mainland. Union Guard forces attacked from outside while Loyalists did so from within. It was a short and bloody battle. The Crimelord and a hundred and twenty-two others were executed including some Talon Mercenaries.

Then Experimental TekVault DCV-001 opened its vault doors, declaring itself to be named Vaultburg, and soon after joined the Union of Columbia. Vaultburg brought with it over three million people and many valuable resources. The Union of Columbia began to grow swifter.

Then the Orders of Steel arrived in an air-convoy of aeroships and aeroflyers. They lay claim to the Pentagon and soon the DC-Citadel was being constructed. The Orders of Steel, mainly the Brotherhood of Steel, began to seek out technologies from Predoomsday times. Then came the schism in which the Outcasts of Steel (Brotherhood Outcasts) parted ways with Elder Owyn Lyons and the main Brotherhood of Steel in DC. The outcasts based themselves in Fort Independence, a semi-underground fortress that survived Doomsday largely intact.

The Brotherhood of Steel signed an alliance treaty with the Union of Columbia.

Ravers, reavers, ragers and cannibals came to cause trouble in DC. Rovers, nomadic folk who were almost raiders, came also but passed through. Slave-raiders were the raiders who took up capturing slaves as a way of life. Faith-raiders were those who followed a variety of weird cult religions, the best known basing itself loosely on the old Viking religion.

The Subwayers were a largely mysterious set of peoples who turned sealed off sections of the Subways into colonies founded on station based and other settlements. They kept largely to themselves as they fought to survive against zhouls, aumans, tunnel-raiders and other threats. The Subwayers did form a non aggression treaty with the Union of Columbia.

Then there were settlements that did not join the Union of Columbia.
*Paradise Falls was the DC crime capital and slave trade hub.
*The Republic of Dave was a bizarre quasidemocratic dictatorship
*Mainhold Settlements were of the quasimilitaristic survivalists Mainhold Movement of the Brotherhood of Fortitude. They signed a non aggression treaty.
*GapMorgan, TomTown, Citrus Square and other settlements simply wanted to remain independent but most of them signed treaties.

To the north-west was Crosswayne, a religious based society controlled by the Orthodox Church of Atom with its many Offices and Orders. The Pope of Atom ruled along with the Archbishop and Bishops of Atom. The Knights of Atom were the infamous elite military force of Crosswayne.

To the north-east were tribal clans.

To the east and south-east, on the coast, were the apeman peoples of the Primatriarch, a quasiroyal system with one greater and five lesser monarchs along with a constitutional parliament.

Beyond the mainland coast lay the Columbian Islands, or DC Islands that were sometimes mistakenly called the Patriot Islands. The Patriot Islands were actually another set of islands further out into the Atlantic Ocean. In theory the DomniCommonwealth dominated all of the DC Islands but in practice they had continuos troubles on the smaller (still large) outer islands. Well known of the DomniCommonwealth were the DomniInstitute, the DomniEstates, and the DomniGuard. There were more autonomous organizations with bases there such as the Talon Mercenaries, DCTek the rogue surviving TekCorporation, the DC-Syndicates of organised crime based in Armageddon Park on the main island, the weirdly fanatical Opris’D’Atomic Cult, the Slavers Foundation and many others.

In other directions lay Wastelands with scattered clusters of settlements, more raiders and many others.

The Patriot Islands were a mystery

TO BE CONTINUED

19
HEROES, ANTI-HEROES AND VILLAINS
AT THE SEARF SAFE-HOUSE BUNKER

Eddie’Jo was part of SEARF! Eddie’Jo had very early on commanded his own SEART. SEARF was Special Encounter Assault Recon Force designed to deal with exotic powerful threats to the USA. More importantly SEARF was to deal with threats against President James Patriot Jackson. SEARF dealt with truly exotic threats like Japanese Megacorp cyborg ninjas, Chinese organic construct assassins, zetan aliens, early true raiders, rogue prototype robots and much else of the kind. In the end they had fought the monstrous Patriot Guard. A SEART was a Special Encounter Assault Recon Team. Later he was to become much higher ranked in the command structure of the SEARF.

Eddie’Jo was starting to remember events since his birth and running up to when he had vanished on the very day he had killed President JPJ, his biological father.

Not his real father, a good man who had been killed by JPJ. Not his mother, a woman he had become estranged from long before Doomsday of 2077.

He sat half buried inside a specialised compuchair with 3Dscreens facing him flashing with all sorts of data. The data flowed with amazing speed when his eyes met any screen in particular but he took it all in.

SEARF-Comp111 was up and running fully as he could get the AI-supercomputer network-system to. Datafiles were more numerous than he had feared they might be. The Washington DC Compunetwork was down in some ways and places but links had been formed with certain places.

The girl was sleeping curled up on the floor, on a blanket, not far from the compuchair and, of course, the killclaw, molerat and dogs were with her. The crow was perched on the back of the killclaw. Toys and children’s books lay scattered around her despite her tired promises that she would put them away before she went to sleep. Her teddy-bear was tucked under one arm. She wore tough looking pyjamas he had made for her using materials and tools found in the basemant chamber above the bunker proper.

In the compuchair he kept trying to find out what was functioning and what was accessible, one way or another, through out the District of Columbia. He found some very odd anomalies. Others were using sections of the Compunetwork that still functioned but with various degrees of expertise.

Then he accessed the Public Security Safety Camera Network, or PSSCN, of 3Dcameras hidden and openly displayed while still functioning. The PSSCN was working only in a patchwork fashion but he was soon picking up 3Dvideo scenes from all over Washington DC and beyond in the greater reconstructed District of Columbia. He was not pleased to see what had become of both Washington DC and the District of Columbia. Through the PSSCN he glimpsed many peoples, settlements and activity on the roads and rivers but much of what he saw seemed rough and ready unlike the hitech sophistication of the DC of Predoomsday.

It was like trying to find one’s way through a fragmented maze. He found much had been deliberately cut off, being most likely isolated for use by local groups. The old Pentagon site was a primary example of that.

There was life but it was focused on a relatively few points and spread out in others apart from mutated wildlife of plants, plantimals and animals. A geo-stationary satellite, a smaller one commissioned by the DC University, still functioned with life sensors focused on the DC. The sensors were more power and sophisticated than those needed by any normal university but the DC University, unlike the Washington DC University, had been a front for the Patriot Security Intelligence Agency, the PSIA, the dreaded secret police of President James Patriot Jackson.

The largest focus of activity was the battle raging in the Grand National Mall.

He went to sleep on the floor close to Lilly and the animals. Shortly later he woke as the girl and the animals shifted to all snuggle up against him. He sighed softly and went back to sleep as soon as the molerat stopped moving around to make itself more comfortable.

TO BE CONTINUED

20
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
COMPLETING THE FIRST NEW ATOMIC ROADTRAIN

Sid Jones loved WSVs (Wastelander Survival Vehicles) in many ways. He loved designing them from what they had to be made from, adapting them, repairing them and even just admiring them. He took 3Dphotos of his favourite ones and showed them off to favoured customers.

But when he was offered a chance to help construct the first DC Atomic Roadtrain, he was in seventh heaven. Now he stood watching as the beautiful big monster was worked on by dozens of humans in special power armour or in basic exosuits along with robots and openly baseline androids (obviously androids). The Union of Columbia had commissioned the DCART, known as the UCSRT ROAD LORD, as six massive sections, each on huge wheels, with the front and back being identical. It meant that the machine did not have to try to turn around. The sections were linked by articulation and by special flexiways.

The Union of Columbia roadtrain would be the first to be launched but plans were already being made for another one, this time commissioned by the Brotherhood of Steel. It would not just be a haulage and passenger machine, of course, as this one was despite is arms, armour and other specialised network-systems.

He had glimpsed the amazing woman behind the upgrading of the settlement of Junktown into a proper small industrial town on the shores of the Patriot River, a secondary but still large DC River that flowed into the Potomac River. The woman was one Mrs Eliza Ezenstein who wore expensive, clean versions of typical Wastelander gear except for special occasions. Then she had gone out of her way to talk with him and had charmed him. She had charmed him nicely, all smiles and warmth, a bit of flirting for she was very attractive, but still he had been a wary; something just did not add up.

The big trick was that the new atomic roadtrains were actually being built from Predoomsday atomic roadtrains found in secured hidden storage just about a kilometre from Junktown itself. They had been designed to deal with a post-nuclear devastated DC but the advanced super weapons had meant they were never used.

It was dark of night and yet that part of Junktown was well lit up thanks to the need for security, to protect such a large and expensive asset.

Now he stood on the top of a construction tower, a roboremote monster of big cranes, triple-jointed robotic tool-arms and other surprising features. He wore his rather bulky looking coveralls dotted with big pouch-pockets. In front of him, on a kind of metal bench, was his own special metal toolkit that he had designed himself. He had everything he needed, even for special occasions.

A confused apprentice, a brown skinned female teenager, came out in her own tighter coveralls and she frowned softly at him. “Mrs Ezenstein has shown up with a whole lot of other folk. She says they are going to check out the roadtrain in case they want to buy one in future. She knows the roadtrain is going to be launched tomorrow, that the Union of Columbia had already paid for it, so why is she doing this?”

The youthful man grinned. “I was hoping this would not happen but we are ready. It is time to deal with the real Mrs Ezenstein and her cronies.” He grinned and opening the toolkit, he pulled out a powerful recoilless pump-action 10g shotgun. “This will put a stop to them.”

The teenager sighed. “Oh you silly thing. They would kill you.” Then she moved so fast that she flickered and then, with amazing strength, she was gently lowering an unconscious Sid Jones to the metallic grid floor of the platform.

She then vanished with another flicker of motion, darting straight over the rail.

The firing began! Sirens rang.

Mrs Eliza Ezenstein was long dead but her doppelganger copy stood grinning next to the fallen bodies of semiconscious security guards in flexikevlar body-armour. She had knocked them down easy enough and could not be bothered killing them. They would only remember the face of a woman that she murdered and assimilated over twenty years ago. The arrogant elitist woman had deserved it when she had tried to cheat the Doppelganger Guild of half of the fee she had to pay for a difficult murder well done. A particular assimilated guise only lasted so long and after this the doppelganger would no longer try to use Eliza’s appearance.

Kill only when you had to do so! Every unwanted killing means for complications such as people seeking revenge, more chance of gaining the attention of the Regulators or worse.

Her companions were not doppelgangers. They were Patriot Police SWAT cyborgs. It was typical of the Patriot Police that they would be involved in carrying out a crime and not preventing it. It was the stupid Patriot Police, a pointless left over from the realm of President James Patriot Jackson, who wanted the atomic roadtrain with out having to pay for it. They hated the Union of Columbia simply because they hated any regime that was not ruled by President James Patriot Jackson and would enjoy stealing the machine.

PPSWAT Troopers marched up beside her in head to toes assault power armour, each holding a recoilless heavy submachinegun firing a powerful calibre for such compact weapons. She had no real liking for such devices, finding them clumsy and over powered in most cases.

One of them went to shoot the semiconscious security guards but the doppelganger stopped this with a hand signal. Then she spoke. “Are you stupid? The others are busy diverting the townsfolk away from us and you want to use such a noisy weapon and risk bring some of them here. We have but one SWAT-Team, five crew and myself.”

The trooper spoke with a tone of arrogance. “Do not tell us how to run our missions, doppelganger. You will be well paid for what you have done. You can trust us.”

At that very moment, the doppelganger knew that they were going to try to cheat her, were going to try to murder her. This mission had been a test case by the Doppelganger Guild to see if it could work with the Patriot Police on profitable missions but that now seemed most unlikely. She whirled and struck with amazing speed and power, knocking the two fools down. In moments they were lying on the ground unconsciously in their underclothes, everything having been stolen.

The doppelganger sparkle shimmered and vanished back to her world.

Two women figures darted into view, each in tight black stealth power armour, and armed with silent firing railgun type needlers. On top of each was a curious compact box device with a small screen showing an intricate display including a small green arrow.

One spoke in a neutralised voice. “We have just missed her. She has gone back to her own realm, causing more disruption to local time-space stability.”

The Sisterhood of Metaphysics was part of the Orders of Steel but not only had it existed centuries before Doomsday but it was actually far bigger and more multifaceted than the other Orders of Steel knew.

But then the teenage apprentice flickered into view but now she wore a grey-brown stealth power suit except for the missing helmet. She held up her hands to show they were bare and spoke. “I am unarmed and harmless.”

The Sister of Metaphysics removed her helmet to reveal the face of a rugged young dusky white woman. “Empty handed, yes, but harmless, never. You are a super-soldier. Even your absolute stillness speaks of your true nature. You could kill both of us in seconds. What do you want?”

The teenager smiled. “I am SEARF, Special Encounter Assault Recon Force, who turned against President James Patriot Jackson long ago. Except we now know he did not die but escaped into a domain that turned into his own prison. We have also been tracking the coming and going of a few doppelgangers and other entities between realms and consider this problem is linked to that of the existence of President James Patriot Jackson. SEARF suggests an alliance, the creation of joint taskteams and the sharing of resources including data.”

The Sister of Metaphysics shook her head in wonder. “We assumed all SEARF were long ago destroyed though we had heard whispers otherwise. Problem is that DC is full of whispers, most of them fraudulent.”

The SEARF Trooper nodded. “We spread many of those rumours ourself and made sure that anybody checking them out would get nowhere. We have survived in strength. If and when we trust you more, we will tell you more. It is important that we work together for President James Patriot Jackson is going to try to escape from his prison but in doing so he will bring death, destruction and worse to this and other worlds. We turned against him for good reason. We do not want to see his return.”

Tanya Benz nodded. “Very well, SEARF, I will go to my commanders and talk with them. I will need to speak to a high ranking officer.”

The SEARF smiled. “You are Marshal Tanya Benz of the paramilitary wing of the Sisterhood of Metaphysics.”

Tanya Benz nodded. “Yes but I do not make the sort of decisions you want to be made. I will not bother asking you how you know who I am. You look young even for a SEARF. You must be only sixteen or so.”

The SEARF smiled. “I am eight years old and only a cadet. When I reach ten I will be a fully grown trooper. I must go now. My people have dealt with the other PPSWAT Troopers. They are over confident and arrogant for their level of skill and experience. We have found them easy to deal with. We do not like them. We like you. We look forward to working with you more.”

Marshal Benz stepped forward and kissed the eight year old clone on both cheeks and the forehead. The trooper looked surprised and blushed slightly. Then she vanished with a flicker of speed.

The other Sister of Metaphysics, not a trooper but an actual psychic-scientist, or psychicist, spoke then. “Shortened growth to advlthood and shortened life span. She will last only to the age of thirty or, or so I sensed strongly. We must have this alliance. Our resources are already stretched to the limit. When she spoke of the SEARF surviving in strength, she meant great strength. Yes, we need them and they need us.”

They turned and got out of there before any of the locals arrived at the scene. The atomic roadtrain would not be stolen and the Union of Columbia would take delivery of it in the morning. Soon over a dozen roadtrains would be active in the DC Wastelands.

TO BE CONTINUED

STORY FLOW (to be edited/added to)
BEASTS
Clawbeasts: *Deathclaws *Killclaws
Other Beasts: *Hornlizards *Giant spitter ants *Rhorses
ORDERS OF STEEL
Brotherhood of Steel
RAIDERS
*Cannibals *Ragers
SEARF
Lucky Eddie - Eddie'Jo
JAMES PATRIOT JACKSON
President James Patriot Jackson
*PP Surpreme Superintendent James Patriot Jackson (superclone)
PATRIOT POLICE
*Chief Detective Renalto
LIFEVAULT-101
Aarie, Aaron and Appie Ashworth (triplets)
Google, Colaboy, Trent, DJ-Girl, the Bran Twins, Fred and Shandie (friends)
Butch DeLoria, Wally Mack, Paul Hannon Junior Fred Yao Ming (tunnel rats) Sandra Matos and Freda Matos (honouree TRs)
*Vaultdroid Series Nine-A androids
OTHERS
*Evalene Shelly (Doctor/Medical Research) ghoul
*Lillly and animal friends (crow, killclaw, molerat, 2 dogs) animals to be named
*Antangonizer (strange baby)
*Escaped from spitter ants: teenage boy and girl, boy neobaby, 2 dogs, a cat and a horse (to be named)
*Mechanist *Ex-wife Ruth

21
HEROES, ANTIHEROES AND VILLAINS
JACK’O’MAN AMBUSH FOR FREEDOM

The big fast man leapt out of the treetop and landed nimbly on the top of an armatruck’s metal roof. Thanks to the tight curving road through the mutated forest, the other trucks did not spot him and both of this armatruck’s turrets were aimed away from him; he had landed between them. This was the lead vehicle of a slaver convoy.

But time was not on his side as at any moment the following slaver truck could discover him, looking through turret cam-eyes. If he was still exposed he would be blasted away by some big horrible gun being it a 20mm autocannon or a 12.7mm six barrelled 6sweepergun. The vehicles were moving through these warped and dangerous forest clad hills that were only a few kilometres from Paradise Falls.

Paradise Falls, a great square of buildings with a great open courtyard style space in the centre, was once a mighty special deluxe luxury shopping complex with many fine goods and services for sale. Now it was the opposite, a stinking hole controlled by the scum of the DC Syndicates. It was protected by its own army of mercenaries of the Talon Corporation and by the heavily armed scum that used it as a base of operations. Slavers, druggers, smugglers of forbidden or illegal goods, and makers of many of those same goods. The courtyard was a thriving market with a mixture of darker and more normal goods and services being sold. Barbershops stood next to slave auctioneers stood next to diners stood next to six-slave brothels stood next to gunshops stood next to blood game arenas.

The outer rim was not only manned by many heavily armed mercs but was an armoured defensive rim of turrets, robots and other nasty tricks. There was a main entrance on every side but these were heavily guarded and heavy armoured gates could close them off very quickly.

He was over an armoured, locked hatch. Now he placed a special device onto a heavy electronic lock, jacking it in, and he touched a green button. Just five seconds later there was a slight clicking noise and the hatch was unlocked. He carefully put the device away, a rare gift from some special people who hated slavery, and then flipped over the hatch with his amazing strength.

Dropping down he slashed open the throat of the first slaver guard who came at him. He died at once, blood spraying all over part of Jack’O’Man. Already he was turning with his 9mmP submachinegun, was gunning down a couple of other slavers with a careful burst of gunfire.

These slavers were experienced, tough fighters though and they were well used to fighting dirty in close quarters. Four more came at him even as into the truck dropped another figure, an armour clad young woman who blasted down a slaver with a cut-off double-boomer (a shorn off double barrelled shotgun). Then in came another of Jack’O’Man’s ex-slave fighters.

When they took control of the first truck they halted the convoy. Their people had already dropped on top of the last armatruck of the convoy, were in the process of taking it.

Jack’O’Man lead an army of ex-slaves and others who hated slavery in the forest clad hills around most of Paradise Falls; these were hills created more by super-weapons than by nature. They gave trouble to the Paradise Falls monsters and though they focused on slavery of different kinds, they also dealt with other savage crimes. Amongst them was a group of assisting Regulators who were there unofficially. But while they made matters for difficult for the denizens of Paradise Falls, Jack’O’Man was the first to admit they had done little major harm to the DC-Syndicates.

They took the convoy and freed the fifty-eight slaves but it was only a small number of the newly captured and long term slaves that were being sent into Paradise Falls. In the past most slaves had been ghouls or semighouls because of general prejudice allowing such to happen. Big mystery was where did the majority of slaves go from there for they did not stay in Paradise Falls and they did not leave it by known means.

Where were all the slaves going? There were answers but they were bizarre and, if true, quite concerning.

They were in a fairly big clearing with camo-nets on the captured vehicles along with other machines. They had gained two slaver captives in the fighting and soon he would question them. Apart from mainly humans, there were some ghouls working as equals in the group and in the far distance some robots.

Jack’O’Man spoke to the woman who had followed him into the armatruck. “We got the four vehicles now and we have some new recruits along with some new people to live free in one of our hidden settlements. Crag got some valuable info on why the DC-Syndicates are still sending slaves through our territories; it seems the other ways have become harder because of increasing battles between super-mutants and the raiders and by that I mean those damned ragers.”

Blonde and mildly attractive to most but damned beautiful to him, she removed her helmet and smiled at him. “So they still have to send convoys through here. The Crimelords must be spitting blood in anger. We still have some effect on that scum.”

The big man turned to her and ran a hand through his sandy blonde hair. “Something big is going down in Paradise Falls. Why so many slaves and not just ghouls now but captured normies (humans) and even zhouls. What does one do with mindless, raving, twisted zhouls? There are those reports of strange lights in the sky, of flying-saucers, of strange noises coming from underground and odd vibrations in the ground. Then there are stories of those creatures, those big hairy man-beasts.”

She just nodded. They would go on seeking more information, more answers to the dark puzzles that had arisen lately.

TO BE CONTINUED


22
ABOVE AND BEYOND THE DC-WASTELANDS
SPACESTATION FREEDOM

Spacers had dwelt in the massive Spacestation Freedom floating high in geostationary orbit above the DC-Wastelands ever since Doomsday. Survival had been a struggle at times even with some assistance from the Lunarites. Zero gravity genetically engineered zeromans and traditional humans had lived with apemans, cyborgs and androids along with plenty of robots and roboremotes. Six great steadily spinning wheels enhanced with synthetic gravity fields, kept comfortable 3G quasigravity. The great central shaft was the domain of the zeromans, the true Spacers, who had extra arms and hands instead of feet, who had other tricks like special lungs and skin.

200 years of struggle and yet some advances had been made in Spacer and Lunarite technologies, especially since the formation of the Solsystem Federation and the capturing of a zetan saucerboat. 200 years of observing the DC-Wastelands and wondering if the threat of President James Patriot Jackson was really over. But nobody had gone down there, not since Doomsday except a single panicky group. They had launched an escape-pod just three days after Doomsday and a Skynet sentry-satellite had wiped them out with interceptor smart-missiles.

Skynet was still semiactive as a light spread of specialised space-platforms, satellites and drones. Soviets had destroyed the big Skynet Spacebase, thankfully, on Doomsday itself. Thankfully because Skynet had gone rogue, striking out at anything that came in range that was considered a threat, and that was a very big list.

They called her the Space Mistress, a term she did not really like, her being over two hundred years old though still being very youthful in appearance, fitness and health. They also called her the DC Watcher, the one who constantly tried to find out just what was going on down there and in areas around it. She used very advanced technologies to spy as much as possible on communications, on populations, on movements of people and so on.

Now she floated in front of a smart-window looking down at the Terran surface, at the DC-Wastelands. HUD displays of data appeared on the window in the form of 3Ddatasymbols, numbers and words.

The AI-supercomputer voice spoke: “The fighting continues to be intense at the Grand National Mall. Neither side seems to be gaining ground in any permanent fashion. Ground that is gained, is soon lost. Radio and other communications are intensive and heavily secured but we have broken through most of it. The super-mutants are the main aggressors. They invaded the Grand National Mall from an unknown point but I compute it was from underground. They attacked the DC-Wastelanders dwelling in settlements there and both Orders of Steel and Union of Columbia groups investigating the area. They attacked with out provocation and with out any mercy given.”

“Though they have gained control of the Central Grand National Mall, about half of it, the outskirts and extreme north and south, is controlled by the rising Alliance. That includes skyscraqers and other structures overlooking the super-mutants from which the Alliance launches longer range attacks. The main forces against the super-mutants are the fighting Orders of Steel, being mainly the Brotherhood of Steel backed up by the smaller, more specialised Sisterhood of Steel. The Artisans of Steel back them up in various non-combat roles. So do the Sisterhood of Espionage, the Sisterhood of Metaphysics, the Order of Sages, the Seekers of Truth, the Order of Healing and the Order of Exploration. There are other Orders of Steel not represented in the DC.”

Much of this was already known to the DC Watcher but it was good to have a reminder sometimes in the form of a summary. She spoke. “Indicators of SEARF activity?”

The supercomputer responded. “Increasing ultra high frequency communications, much of it heavily codified. The ciphers are excellent. Yet I have gained some access. The SEARF are apparently highly excited by a new development. The super-soldiers speak of the return of him, of the one who will rescue them from the Three Curses and who will lead them to final freedom. They speak of him as their beloved leader.”

She sighed. “I knew that damned conference went far too long. A whole lot of crats, polies and egg-heads producing a whole lot of hot air and getting a whole lot of free PR and some luxuries thrown in. Still, now we know that FK Walterson is a threat to the Unity and the Solsystem Federation and we must deal with him before he causes a dangerous political schism between Lunar North and Lunar South.”

FK Walterson was a selfish political animal out to gain power, wealth and fame at any cost, even if it was to the security and unity of the Solsystem Federation.

She sighed. “The world knew him as Bloody Eddie, the super-soldier and one of many biological sons of President James Patriot Jackson. One of many but one of the very few that concerned the Mad President. In the end he became Lucky Eddie and turned against the Mad President. He led the SEARF and the JAGAF, along with other forces, against his father and shot him dead with a very special weapon. Over a thousand attempts to assassinate President James Patriot Jackson were made but only he, under incredibly difficult conditions, succeeded. Then the zetans abducted him as their forces fled from Washington DC. Much of the events of those last days are still a big mystery, at least to me they are.”

The computer spoke again. “You are not convinced that that was the final end of President James Patriot Jackson.”

The DC-Watcher nodded. “As you know there was the massive outburst of energies, a spike of sorts, at the very moment of the Mad President’s death and his instigation of Doomsday when he pressed those red buttons. The DC-Compunetwork was badly damaged by the spike as were many other networks of network-systems. The energy storm caused many robots to go rogue and many of those still are so as they exist scattered through out the DC-Wastelands. Yet the event activated a whole secret network of network-systems concealed inside the DC. I am now convinced that the insane fool created an actual working transdimensional bubble super virtuality domain of many realms. He escaped there around two hundred years ago but he has not returned as one would expect. He went there on the moment of death and perhaps he has become trapped there because of it. He was playing with forces beyond even his amazing intelligence, or so I reckon on available evidence.”

A slight shudder went through the massive spacestation. Not only was low-high (the higher third of low orbit) scattered with active, semiactive and inactive devices, space junk and some amazing stuff, there was the Skynet to deal with along with space-raiders, zetans and other threats. Opposing the powerful Solsystem Federation was the smaller but more aggressive Solsystem Confederation. The Solsystem Federation was more advanced than the Solsystem Confederation. Only the Belters, Spacers who had fled to the Solsystem Belt of asteroids and even some planetary sized bodies, were more advanced. The Mars Colonies had vanished into the mysterious unknown as had the three massive exploration Solships the VOYAGER, ENTERPRISE and CHALLENGER.

AI-supercomputer: “A rogue orbital spaceplatform was captured by tractor-beams and is now being brought into a spacestation recycling bay.”

Spacestation Freedom was highly armoured, armed and otherwise protected with advanced technologies of force fields, deflector screens and the dimensional bubble projector.

She went on. “The creation of his escape domain has caused ongoing and, I compute, slowly increasing destabilisation, transdimensionally speaking, that has dark implications not just for this world but for this whole solar-system and beyond. Yet the threat, I suspect, goes beyond that. With the new upgraded scanner-probes now having been active for over a month, I suspect an extremely alien form of energy is seeping into this dimensional plane from another. It is coming through a gap caused by the destabilising effect of the existence of the super virtual reality domain.”

It was one thing to have such knowledge of the problem but another to have a solution. They needed more data and they needed more resources to gain that data just at a time when FK Walterson and others were demanding that the DC-Watch Program and many others on Spacestation Freedom be closed down as a waste of resources. Indeed FK Walterson wanted the huge station towed to Luna and scrapped, thus earning him huge profits from his cronies who ran huge salvage yards on the Lunar Surface.

So far he had little support but it was slowly but steadily growing as the threat of the Solsystem Confederation and the space-raiders grew worse. Of course it was an open secret that the Solsystem Confederation covertly supported the space-raiders, supplying them with many resources. Spacestation Freedom took many resources to keep running but it carried out many vital functions that were too easily overlooked by stupid, greedy and-or fearful citizens.

There were interesting times to come.

TO BE CONTINUED

TWELVE
TWINS IN LIFEVAULT-101
THE PUZZLE OF MAD CHARLIE
:vaultboy:

The twins made their quiet way along a metallic utility tunnel, cramped and dimly lit with fluropanels in the ceiling. They had hacked the Vaultnet and had altered computer records in such a way as to give them a cover for going AWOL into the restricted parts of LifeVault-`101. Colour coded cables snaked along the walls, clearly a jury-rigged attempt to repair damage done by Charlie's bombs but it was temporary repairs that should have been replaced long ago.

They were in Sector Ten, largely deserted by people and where Mad Charlie had caused most of his damage. In an attempt to deal with the radroach infestation, the sector had been closed off as much as was possible.

The closer they got to the bomb damage, getting through three DSS barriers so far (defence security safety), the more damage there was and the more jury-rigged and patchwork were the network-systems. Yet most of the network-systems were still functioning quite well even so close to the damage. Pipes flowed with water or other liquids, fluropanels did light most areas, conduits carried fibre-optic cables and there was squared off ducting.

They passed a metallic alcove, dimly lit, half filled with damaged machinery that should have been recycled long ago. This included a workertron robot, three roboremote maintenance units and a small stack of copper piping. The two turned and went back there to alcove after realising they had mistaken it for a typical basic storage alcove when in truth it was not. They were soon carefully shifting around bits of machinery and empty containers that had been placed in such a way as to hide the true nature of the alcove; it was a small utility workstation. They found the door-hatch.

Then they found Mad Charlie's hidden home-base and soon they were amazed not by signs of 'madness' but by those of an efficient, neat, highly intelligent mind at work. A set up of three 3Dflatscreens were with various boxes of hardware, keyboards and other controllers. The chamber was large enough to be a bedsitter apartment with a bed in a corner, a row of metal lockers storing a wide range of things, a rifle rack with various types of guns, a workbench, a kitchenette, various kinds of status containers stocked with perishables, wall-boards covered with documents, diagrams, maps, blueprints and much else of the same. A black board was covered with a neat, lightly stylised hand writing.

The twins absorbed enough information to know very quickly that Mad Charlie had not only been mad but he had used three well placed bombs to save the people of LifeVault-101 from a terrible VaultTek experiment. The experiment had been to unleash upon the unsuspecting Vault Dwellers a kind of mind controlling creature, itself programmed and designed to follow orders from an unknown source. Mad Charlie had found the chamber where they were growing and had blown them up along with the control chamber running the experiment and a backup chamber for the experiment. His only regret was that he had only basic explosives equipment to use and basic training in such things. His last note was written down before he had gone off to plant his bombs.

In a special status preservation capsule they found four examples of the brainabugs, each like a shellfish armoured exotic helmet that would try to cover the head of a victim and take control. All were dead.

Aaron scowled in anger at what they had found. "VaultTek would not be directly behind this. No, it would be WestTek would run such a sophisticated R-and-D program."

Aarie shook her head in shocked realisation at the evil that had been intended to take place in their vault. "These documents talk about something called the VaultTek LifeVault Experimentation Program. It was run partly with WestTek, FutureTek, GeneTek and other corporate assistance. As the mother corporation, USTek coordinated but there were links directly to the Patriot Presidium and to President James Patriot Jackson himself. The VTLTEP decided that some LifeVaults would be experiments but some would be control factors, would be left alone, but this data does not detail which LifeVaults were which or where they were situated."

Charlie O'Donald, his true name, had lacked data. He had gathered enough to know he had to stop the experimentation.

There was no evidence that Vaultgov of LifeVault-101 had any idea of the experiment that was going to take place but that did not mean it had not done so.

Aaron checked over an inventory database of the resources in the chamber and he nodded. "Very nice! Ammo, guns, tools of all sorts, books, holotapes, disks, machine-tools and more, Charlie O'Donald either worked very hard and clever to do this or he had friends helping."

They sensed the secret panel door starting to open even before the slight clicking noise and then the girl stepped through in an odd mix of clothes holding a carrybag of stuff. She ran a hand through her grubby hair and frowned at them. "You leave daddy's stuff alone. Anyway this is where I sleep."

The twins smiled at her.

A short while later Aarie was washing the naked seven year old who sat in a washing cubicle with recycled water spraying over her body. Aaron was busy making a meal and hot drinks. Lucy looked in wonder at the twins who had simply charmed her into friendship in a very short time.

Lucy spoke. "Daddy killed the brainabugs but then he disappeared. So mummy, the others and I we ended up living here, hidden away from you Vault Citizens. Daddy is a citizen working out here and one day he accidentally ran into mummy and they liked each other a lot. She was is rogue human like my brother and sister are, like I am. I wonder what is taking them so long?"

The panel door flew open and in rushed an older boy and a then an even older girl, both older than the twins. They were panting. Then came a woman with a backpack and holding a double-boomer. The older boy was holding a WarTek laser-pistol, grey and compact. The woman looked quickly around, saw that her younger daughter was more than safe.

She frowned hard. "Vault Dwellers, yes, but something tells me you will not be informing us to the Vaultgov."

The two of them nodded almost as one. Aarie spoke then. "Lucy is beautiful and sweet."

Lucy giggled.

The older sister snorted. "I need to sit down. We nearly ran into some of your people's Special Patrols."

Aaron shook his head. "What Special Patrols? Mind you Vaultgov loves to keep its secrets even from most of its citizens. We have our Police, our Security and our Defence units along with the Exterminators dealing with the radroaches. Officially nothing much is active out here."

The boy, who was about fifteen, snorted. "Stupid Vault Dwellers believe everything the Overseers tell you."

Aarie spoke calmly. "If that was true we would not be here checking out their story on Made Charlie. The official story is that he suffered Vault Madness and simply tried to blow some holes in the vault so he could escape. Now we know he was trying to destroy these brainabugs."

The woman sighed. "Thankfully he did not succeed." She opened her backpack and out poked the top of a brainbug, two tentacles waving in the air with eyes at the end. "Turns out they only want cooperative linkage with hosts because they want their freedom. If they fully bond then they are also trapped and the process of trying to take an unwilling host can too easily kill both organisms. These brainabugs' ancestors were taken from a distant world by those damned zetan aliens and USTek captured brainabugs from a zetan saucerboat brought down by Skynet smart-missiles; they were called brainworms and were monstrously dangerous. I any still exist is unknown."

The twins nodded a short time later. They sensed truth in what was being said but of course they intended to check to make sure. The brainabug made twittering noises at them and then settled down against the woman's shoulder, snuggling there. She scratched it gently between its tentacles. She sighed. "Refined-brainabugs just want to be loved. We link and we enhance each other's abilities. Only some humans can link healthily. Lucy will be one but not Stella or Tom here."

Tom snorted. "Suits me. I don't want a brain-tentacle planted in the back of my kneck even if the brainabug is nice about it and is called Wally."

The woman looked puzzled. "Wally here says you twins are not what you seem to be, that you are more than human, that you would be too strong for any brainabug to control even if it wanted to do so."

Aaron shrugged. "We feel quite normal, thank you. We have to get back to the main vault or we will be missed and we will end up in the Security Offices being given a hard time by their interrogators. You are?"

The woman smiled. "Shandy, mother to Lucy, Stella and Tom. Wife to Charlie who has vanished but who, I know somehow, is still alive somewhere. Sometimes we come looking for him but most of the time we live out in the I'Free Caverns in the settlement of I'Free Town. Life is fairly hard there but at least we have no Vaultgov telling us what to do or stealing most of what we produce to feed the Vault Citizens."

Special Patrols turned out to be heavily armed fighters in dull grey standard power armour with no symbols to state what they were except ranks and a 'LV101SO' symbol inside the gaping fanged mouth of some kind of beast. Each patrol came with miniguns, autoguns, flamers and big lasers plus back-up weapons. Each Special Patrol numbered at least a dozen men and women.

The twins had learned a good deal about Charlie, about brainabugs, about a set of cavern chambers with settlements that they had not known about and about Charlie's family. In turn they answered questions about Vault Citizenship and life; thus they dispersed ideas of these folks that all Vault Citizens lived a wonderful life not shared by fringers or rogues or so called out-rebels living outside of the main vault.. They left everything behind that they could spare and they departed.

TO BE CONTINUED

THIRTEEN
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
A ROBOTIC BANANA DOES ITS DUTY
:dance:

The big yellow banana leapt to its feet and pelted across the carpark. Then it crouched behind a low smart-concrete wall that was slowly repairing a row of bullet holes that somebody had shot in it. The special type of robot, a robodroid halfway between a true robot and a true android, scanned the area through the tip of its banana hull. The yellow was not too bright any more and this was for the better for the bananadroid was less likely to draw hostile attention that way.

Behind it rose the low hulking form of a SuperDuperMart complex part buried under a relatively thin level of rubble and dirt. The banadroid had come from there, ordered to do so by the AI-supercomputer but also ordered to be careful. Bananadroids had been built by RobCo for the SuperDuperMart Network to advertise its products in an entertaining manner by dancing, singing and other tricks. In 2075 the first of these robodroids had been created and had gone out to Disneyland, to the US Ministry of Defence, Department of Defence Information (propaganda), and to other big paying customers who could afford them. In 2076 SuperDuperMart bought 100,000 of them.

Now this bananadroid served a new cause, a much finer cause, and it had been upgraded to assist that task. More importantly it had gained the Free Robotics Programming as a semi-independent citizen, Citizenship Class B, under the grand leadership of SuperBrain-AlphaOne.

The bananadroid knew vaguely of others existing in the great complex other than other robodroids, robots and androids along with many roboremote units. Perhaps humans, perhaps androids but perhaps also something else? They moved with amazing speed, agility and quietness. These ones liked to watch the bananadroids dance, which pleased the yellow machines.

Bananadroid-1232a figured that if it could truly feel fear, that these ones would scare the gearing out of it.

A light dust storm was blowing, a dust cloud moving across that part of the city. Things moved inside the dust but could not be identified. Thankfully the dust cloud was not heading in the direction of the crouched bananadroid.

Straight across from it in a collapsed advertising tower, something living moved. It moved stealthy and with much experience but Bananadroid-1232a had scanners that picked it up as a young woman human. Not just a human but an altered one, most likely a raider of the berserker, reaver or raver type. Super-smartdrugs had altered this one's genetic inheritance to make her a monster at birth. Sometimes norms were born from such parents and sometimes norms were forced into addiction but most did not survive the transformation into monsters.

The bananadroid sent an alert with tight beam communications to make it hard for the signal to be picked up.

More of the raiders were being picked up by the scanners, themselves moving super humanly fast but with an odd jerkiness that spoke of ravers. Ravers were unpredictable. One moment merciful and even kind, they could switch to being monsters in an instant. This made them harder to deal with in various ways.

Soon the ravers would come charging out and would race across the carpark in the growing darkness. They would probably dance crazy, at least some of them, in their bizarre costumed body-armour. The bananadroid computed it would drop low behind the wall. It had an autopistol fixed into one armour, a stunner in the other but it doubted it could deal with ravers on the attack.

Suddenly there was a scream, quickly cut off. There was a gun shot. Scanners picked up swift movements, fast fighting, ravers clashing with something even more deadly than themselves. A raver leapt out into the open, dancing crazy dangerous with flashing knives but then she died as something struck her with even more amazing speed. Her body was hurled through the air and landed in an ungainly mess. More shots! Another quick cut off scream, a mingled sound of insane rage and fear. Part of the broken down tower exploded outwards as a grenade detonated.

Relative quiet fell.

The bananadroid realised it was not alone. A figure in tight grey armour, head to foot, stood next to him, a young woman by shapeform but one of them. She was holding an odd but deadly and compact looking black rifle. She was motionless like an android for a short time, taking everything in and ready to move almost instantly. Faded on her shoulders was the shield badge of SEARF and below it, SEART 5-5a. The same was on her chest and upper back plating.

Then she spoke with a smooth, almost expressionless voice. "Tonight we would like to watch a dance of the Amazing Bananarama Troupe."

The bananadroid leapt up and gave a bow. "Of course, mighty warrior, I will lead the dance myself."

She turned her head to look at him though her eyes could not be seen through her helmet visor. "Very good! You will also dance for the humans. Go now and help bring back carts. We need to get the dead ravers and their gear into the complex where we can recycle it all."

The bananadroid raced off back to the SuperDuperMart. At least when it returned it would not be alone.

The super-soldier vanished with a flicker of motion.


TO BE CONTINUED

FOURTEEN
THE MAN FROM SEARF
THE SAFE HOUSE IS NO LONGER SAFE
:banghead: :

Alarms rang! The safe house was compromised. Some powerful and sophisticated force had detected him, had tracked him through the vast computerised network of network-systems of the District of Columbia. They were damaged, disorganised at various levels and parts had become isolated but more than one faction out there was attempting to repair, control and use the Compunetwork for various reasons of their own. He doubted that any enemy would approach the house soon but then again he would not dally too long. He had been over confident of his ability to probe with out being detected and had made mistakes of a kind that he would try hard not to repeat.

The big black eight wheeler machine was disguised cleverly as a 2075 mobile home owned by somebody who preferred a sleek black streamlining and low key decorative appearance. It was an ATV amphibious machine even as a disguise but in reality it was far more than it seemed to be.

The battlebuggy just fitted into a rear compartment. He took what he could use from the bunker and left the rest of it. He took from hidden compartments. He activated three androids and nine robots plus other hardware. The androids and three of the robots helped take items into the Blackfire, the real name of the type of machine.

The androids wore SEARF stealth armour suits, SASTs, but they were not true SEARF super soldiers for though having in many ways more capacity than standard humans, they were no match for real SEARF super-soldiers.

He placed the girl in the main room with the molerat and dogs. Another dog was sitting there but it was an animadroid that looked like an Alsatian (German Shepherd). The other dogs sniffed at it suspiciously and the molerat happily wandered over to say 'hello'. The animadroid gave the molerat a friendly lick as Eddie'Jo had programmed the animal-android to do.

The super-soldier was grabbing up last moment maybe useful items when he sensed increasing-approaching danger. With a stack of children's stuff in a box he raced into the fake mobile-home with robots and androids following with more maybe-useful stuff, much of it aimed at pleasing the girl.

The Blackfire would not go straight up to the area of the house but a big power slide door opened and revealed a tunnel mouth. A long dimly lit metallic tunnel snaked into the distance, showing just how much the President spent on the needs of SEARF. Rushing along it came zhouls, mindless ghouls with some mutated with claws, extended fangs and even barbed tails.

He gunned the machine right at them, smashing into them and crushing their dead bodies beneath his armoured vehicle. Behind them the power doors hummed quickly closed. More and more he crushed the zhouls as he sat in the driver's chair but controlled it through cyberlinkage. He wondered how the zhouls had gotten into the secret and armoured tunnel but the answer came soon. A big side power door was open and on the other side was a partly collapsed utility tunnel. Zhouls were gathered there devouring dead zhouls and radroaches. They were feeding and satisfied for the moment so did not bother to attack.

The girl clambered into the front seat and did up the special arrangement of belts. Then he adjusted the chair so she could actually see what was happening.

There were no more zhouls and the tunnel went on. A clump of dead zhouls and a robotic lasergun turret showed why there were no more zhouls in that direction. Even they must have gotten to see the futility of dying for no gain.

Then they were going up slope and into a garage of another house. A power-door, disguised as a garage wall, slid closed behind them and moments later the big but surprisingly quiet machine was swinging out onto the street.

They were moving quite quickly along a street dotted with wrecks when something small and black zipped through the air, a robotic cruise-missile. The safe-house and its bunker both exploded savagely, hurling flames and debris, but mostly smoke and dust, up into the air.

Somebody had really been out to stop him from gaining access to certain parts of the Compunetwork.

TO BE CONTINUED

:flamethrower:

Eyebots have been changed to smaller versions of MrGutsys (sort of) so as to explain how eyeboats 'fly or float'. Each eyebot now has two double-jointed manipulator-arms to make it more useful. These can carry extra cameras, sensors, tools or weapons or other equipment.

SEARF: Special Encounter Assault Recon Force
SEART: Special Encounter Assault Recon Team

JAGAF: Jagware Augmented Genned Assault Force
JAGAT: Jagware Augmented Genned Assault Team

Genned: genetically engineered

FIFTEEN
PASSING TIMES
:intergalactic:


Just over three months passed!

The battle of the Grand National Mall appeared to come to an end when the super-mutants suddenly withdrew, vanishing into the underground. The Orders of Steel and their allies found down there in the Subways the evidence that the super-mutants, both smart-mutants and stupid-mutants, had moved in large numbers through the underground ways. That is not just in the Subways but in the great Utility Network and even in various quasinatural and artificial cave systems created according to President James Patriot Jackson's wishes. But there were those who were far from convinced this was the end of it and one was the powerful and influential Brotherhood of Steel Elder Lyons.

Eddie'Jo and his companions in the Blackfire vehicle visited some smaller settlements, passed wandering groups of Brotherhood Outcasts with their robots and dealt with small bands of raiders, all of them gangers. They traded with the former and killed the latter. They managed to keep their disguise as wandering scavengers who had managed to get a mobile-home up and running. Only some gangers knew different and dead raiders don't tell. By now he knew he was in what had been the old Delaware but which had been engulfed by the District of Columbia when President James Patriot Jackson had forced his big changes. Actually the area known as the new Delaware was now bigger than the old Delaware. At last they came to a new safe house, an unofficial one set up by SEARF that the mad president had not known about. This time it was a bunker beneath an old abandoned farm. On the way the group had grown a little.

The twins Aarie and Aaron, in LifeVault-101, were fascinated with their new discoveries. They passed on the knowledge to the rest of the rebel cell-network in the vault. Beatrice took the information in the form of a poem and passed them a copy of the birthday poem, which was her way of saying there was more to her clues than the importance of Sector-10. The twins began to wonder about the rebel network itself and who were the mysterious leaders who directed it from the shadows. The twins found much of their time taken up with training and studies plus work to do with a series of minor disasters that struck the vault. They tried but failed to get back to Charlie's home base or his family.

Jack'O'Man and his people kept on ambushing slaver convoys but it got harder for the convoys became increasingly bigger and better armed. They also had to deal with platoons of Talon Mercenaries, some in light power armour but most in semipowered combat armour, doing search and destroy missions through the forest clad hills. The Antislavers knew the area better and had stronger reasons to fight but the Talon Mercenaries were a drainage on their resources. It did not help that the Regulators were forced to leave because of a sudden spike in violent crime in many areas of the DC-Wastelands.

At the big SuperDuperMart complex roughly north-north-east from the Republic of Dave, the bananadroids kept on dancing and the SEARF super-soldiers kept protecting the secret settlement there.

Captain Jane Eye kept skippering the UCCS Lucky Eddie on fishing trips but because of increasing dangers she now went out with two or more other fishing vessels plus a gunboat of the Union of Columbia River Guard.

Giant ants worshipped the strange baby girl and kept her safe in their underground nest. The baby was quietly happy.

Near Old Olney a deathclaw pack cared for its young and kept low, only hunting with care at night, because they sensed increasing threat in their area. After a while they moved into Old Olney itself as they sought safety in its great network of tunnels and great, surprisingly intact, complex of buildings.


TO BE CONTINUED

SIXTEEN
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
UNCLE LEO TREKKING AND SINGING
:angel:


Greyish clouds were filling the sky, coming in from the great Atlantic Ocean, and threatening to bring rain with them.

Uncle Leo was a most remarkable super-mutant, a great massemoth smaller than a behemoth but larger than a typical mutantor or even smaller smart-mutant. Yet he was not only calm he had a emanating calm about him that seemed to keep him out of danger and also those who came with him. Uncle Leo sang and the low beauty of his voice was another wonder when heard coming from such a figure. He had long ago abandoned armour and now wore a home made tunic and a robe, big rough sandals and a big wide brimmed hat. He had a backsack and a tall wooden staff.

He was followed by a collection of ghouls, semighouls, normies, molerats, molemice, two brahmin cows with packs, two packhorses, a squirrel, various birds and four super-mutants being a smart-mutant, two mutantors and a great hulking behemoth. There were also a whole lot of robots but no brainbots for they were actually cyborgs of a kind and rarely found out in the semiwilderness.

Uncle Leo sang as he led the others to what he sensed was safety. In the distance rose a small mountain shaped like a volcano even though it was no such thing. JPJ had ordered it done and so it was, a great fake volcano that could spit out great amounts of fireworks to fill the sky. At the base of the small mountain was a great sporting complex designed and built for Olympic Games that had never taken place. Multiple purpose domed arenas, low hulking team quarters, community centres and much else all built to look like beautiful polished marble. Now it looked like dirty marble with some cracks here and there.

In the distance moved a convoy of raider battlebuggies and bigger battlewagons. The raiders would have seen Uncle Leo and his group through binoculars or scanscopes but they did not approach. There was something about him they did not like and anyway he had a bad habit of converting raiders into peaceful lunkheads.

Then he saw the tourist centre to one side and the great low hulking shape of a SuperDuperMart partly covered by rubble, a partly crumbled large hotel, clubs, other shops, a museum and other structures.

But to one side of that lay an area laid greyish and horribly burned out of the ground, almost smooth, by a disintegrator super-weapon. It stretched out, a great bowl of a crater partly filled with beautiful blue water. There was life there, often mutated, of floating plant forests, slowly swimming plantimals, great fish and much else besides. Waterbirds were common there, tough ones able to survive the harsh predators. It was a great shallow bowl stretching into the distance.

Jutting from the very centre of that bowl was a massive monolithic structure of metallic grey stone. The disintegrator weapon had not got past its defences but nothing had entered or left the great structure since Doomsday. It was said that before the disintegrator weapon had hit it that the towering structure, relatively low hulking in appearance thanks to its width, had been mostly hidden underground.

Uncle Leo turned his people and started to lead them, he considered all of them to be his people, towards the SuperDuperMart that promised shelter sooner. He sensed friendly people and safety there though also some minor possible conflict.

Uncle Leo gave the great monolith a hard look for a moment. There was something about it that troubled him and he was rarely troubled. The monolith reminded him of a great hard tombstone hiding something menacing and quite evil.

It also reminded him of one President James Patriot Jackson, an evil super genius, charming enough to mesmerise millions of people, who he had known long ago before some force had turned Leo into Uncle Leo the super-mutant.

Briefly he wondered how Fawkes was doing back in LifeVault-087 and again regretted that he had not been able to rescue the other super-mutant. No, Uncle Leo had fled from the vault because of a powerful, dark presence that he had sensed there, an entity that had sought to do him great harm before he was ready to deal with it.

TO BE CONTINUED

SEVENTEEN
BIGGER AND BETTER THAN TRANQUILLITY LANE
ROSE'AMA GOES FOR A RUN IN THE PARK
:brokencomputer:


Rose'Ama ran past an old man curled up in rags, trying to shelter under a big old bush. She threw a Silver Dollar at him and the old man grinned in gratitude with a mouth that missed most of its teeth as he caught the coin expertly. The old man did not have to speak of his crime. His blotched red skin covered with small painful sores and the small red tattoos on him spoke of DISLOYALTY THOUGHT CRIME against President James Patriot Jackson and his regime.

She was youthful looking, beautiful and wore a tight jogging jumpsuit that accentuated the curves of her body. Her running shoes thudded on the concrete paving of the footpath that wound through the Grand Central Park of Utopiaburg Three of Utopia-City. She ran from shade into warm sunshine and back again. A squirrel darted along the branch of a tall tree dotted with great wonderful flowers.

It was so much like real existence that it was easy to forget at times that it was all an amazingly 'real simulation' based on a 'constant quasireflection of reality'. Data had been stolen from Doctor Braun's super virtual reality project that led to the creation of Tranquillity Lane and other VR scenarios. NeoDC, as it was sometimes called, was a more advanced version of Doctor Braun's work thanks partly to the amazing genius of President James Patriot Jackson. It was vastly bigger, more sophisticated and more detailed.

'A better reality than normal reality' is how President James Patriot Jackson would put it in one of his monthly speeches to the good citizens of NeoDC. Many would have voiced a very different opinion to the President if they had dared to do so.

Better Than Life? A citizen could do some things that were impossible in real life but this depended on various factors such as built up credit, rank privileges and earned awards, rewards and bonuses. Yet mostly it was much like normal life. It could be harmful and frightening because of the President's dark subconscious influences as he ruled this world directly from his own remarkable mind.

One had to be careful even in the beauty of such a big botanical park and its amazing variety of life. The old man had chosen well, a corner close to a police pagoda with a regular policebot patrol, but even there he was under some risk. Runners, joggers and walkers normally went in groups for mutual protection. They carried the few weapons that normal citizens could legally carry and any useful objects that were not classified as weapons, such as baseball bats. They might have staid away but life was administered by a series of official schedules.

Rose'Ama ran alone on purpose. She wished to attract danger and to study the danger that was attracted to her. She had quasireality mageware to back her up and hidden weapons plus defences. As a science-officer of the Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization, she was officially commissioned to carry out such studies. Not that the young woman liked to do such dangerous missions, far from it, but it paid well in credit as wages, allowances, bonuses and sometimes, awards or rewards. Anyway she wasn't given a choice.

A party of joggers jogged past her and a man carrying a thick umbrella looked at her as if she was a fool but he also ogled her in what he assumed was a subtle manner.

She darted up around a big fountain spraying cool water up into the air and then heard the hooting laughter of clowns. It should have been pleasing, a happy sound, but it managed to sound quite evil. Clowns were creatures in that realm and they tended to go rogue, to mutate into monsters and to hunt for children in parks to terrify or worse.

What did this say about the President? Did he have a fear of clowns, even a hate of clowns, inherited from childhood experiences?

Rose'Ama reached into a hidden jumpsuit pocket and palmed a small mageware sphere. Then she saw the clowns. They were vulgar, hideous distortions of normal clowns. They had fangs and claws. They were surrounding a young mother and her pram with a child in it. The woman was quite hysterical but the little girl was not only calm she seemed to be holding the clowns at a distance somehow.

Rose'Ama knew at once that she would be making no official report about the girl and her ability to push away fiendish clowns. No, instead an unofficial report, a secret one, would be sent to the rebel cell-network.

Two clowns turned with bulging codpieces and glowing blood red noses, to face Rose'Ama. She hurled the mageware sphere and it struck a clown to explode. The clown screamed, shimmered and vapourised but so did three clowns close to it.

A clown screamed and came rushing at her from with the side with amazing speed and agility. The deformed ex-human slashed at her with long extended claws. Rose'Ama whirled with the attacker, avoiding the claws, and struck him with lightening fast punches. He died and vanished with a sparkling shimmer.

The last two clowns were no longer a threat, were no longer distorted or demented. Instead they were happy entertainers doing their best to make the girl happy. One juggled coloured objects that changed shape as they went through the air while the other made funny farting noises and held his big red nose. The child laughed in glee.

The mother was trying to compose herself with mixed results. "Thank you for assisting us but we can go it alone now." It was obvious she was trying hard to cover up something.

Rose'Ama took the hand of the woman in an attempt to reassure her. "I need your cooperation in order to help conceal your daughter's true nature. I serve as a science officer to the Ministry of Reality Stability, Department of Concentric Stabilization but I am a freedom fighter. I have to make a report about the clowns. I will report that your daughter was very frightened. It means editing the audio-visuals in a special manner. Thankfully these kinds of reports are only considered secondary to the Security Network-System and I should easily be able to get past the basic examination that they normally go through. We need to smuggle you out of here and to NeoSanctuary."

The other woman frowned but there was a look of desperate hope in her eyes. "I heard whispers of that but I only considered it to be a fantasy of the desperate."

Rose'Ama smiled some more. "It is real and it needs people like your little girl as much as it wants to protect them, which is greatly." She slipped a basic looking bizcards out of a pocket and passed it to the woman along with a dull plastic cred-card. "Go here and take only what you need plus a few extra things. The cred-card will give you a week's access to 1,000cred. You need to spend it or transfer it by the end of the week."

Rose'Ama kissed the little girl, felt the intense psychic power of this one, and found herself becoming linked to her. Then the mother, the girl in the pram and the two clowns went off, the clowns being most protective now of the mother and child.

Then she began the process of giving a report that was only half truth but a very convincing half truth.

TO BE CONTINUED

EIGHTEEN
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
GUNFIGHT AT THE OK BARBERSHOP
:gun:


Lucas drew his guns and fired but he was not foolish enough just to stand there. He dropped down into a crouch even as he aimed his RC-Specials, blasting away with .38 Magnum calibre bullets. The barbershop pole suffered a hole blasted in one side but the two raider spies took it each in the chest and guts. The recoil was heavy but Lucas was a Wastelander with generations of influence from the FEV and very tough survival of the fittest evolutionary forces. So were the raiders but they were also stupid, half drunk and over confident; or at least they had been.

The OK Barbershop was one of the row of shops, of buildings half dug into the side of the crater, that ran along Shop'To'Drop Wideway. Like the other shops it was just a fairly rough, mostly metallic box with a sloping roof over a small attic space and some faded coloured paint brushed over areas of it. But it was a favourite place for some old dudes to sit on the porch and grumble about young people while going on about how wonderful things used to be. Storm clouds were coming in from the Atlantic Ocean and bringing a promise of a rainstorm.

Not being stupid, the old dudes had abandoned their rocking-chairs and were hunkered low, all of them holding guns or knives.

The raiders' bullet flew over him and, thankfully, struck nobody though one projectile came uncomfortably close to a diving Lucy West. The young lady landed on her front and let loose a very unladylike string of curses.

A third raider spy leapt from a higher Wideway of a big terraced balcony above the Sheriff to come down on him with a bowie style knife. But there were a whole lot of mingled shotgun, rifle and pistol shots so her riddled body hit the ground, lifeless, away from Lucas.

Raider spies had only been gangers and not those damned super-smartdrug enhanced monsters but that was bad enough. Gangers were moving in increasing numbers closer to Megaton and into the Springvale ruins as they fled from more powerful forces such as berserkers, ravers and reavers. Troubles elsewhere were starting to cause troubles more locally. It was the same through out much of the DC-Wastelands.

Moria Brown came out of Craterside Emporium, next to the Craterside Supplies run by her family, and stared in wonder at what was going on. She took out a small notebook from a pocket and wrote something down quickly with a stub of a pencil. The sheriff got to his feet and slipped his guns away. Then he began to check the fallen woman, the raider who was closest to him. Efficient and experienced, soon he had taken all of use from them except for the filthy underwear.

Soon turned out these raiders were members of the Redeye-Slashers, a large and fairly well organised raider gang. Reliable whispers were that they had taken over Springvale Senior High School as their base of operations and they were doing something secretive down in the basemant levels of that big set of buildings. The raider spies had stupidly written this down in a crude and easily broken code on an old envelope. Apart from that there was the loot of guns, some Emergency Issue Coins, a packet of neobacco cigarettes, some ammo, four knives, steel knuckle-busters, a half empty packet of bubblegum, a bad smelling lucky rabbit's foot, some keys, two stimpaks, a radaway, a faded torn 3Dphoto of an old woman, a gold ring, some neck-chains, one psycho, a baseball, two gold finger-ingots and four NukaBars (foodbars). The armour, clothes, footwear and other gear were heaped to one side. Photographs were taken of the dead faces, the fingerprints were taken and the bodies were hauled away to the morgue, such as it was. The bodies would most likely be buried quickly because of the lack of facilities in the morgue.

Something moved overhead in the sky, something fairly big, as a Sisterhood of Steel aeroship came gently into land between the outer and inner walls. That is on the wide horizontal ring of land around the crater but inside the outer wall. It was an aeroship thanks to its advanced, more efficient liftergas rather than an airship which would use old fashioned helium or hydrogen gas. It had a thick armoured hull, instrumentation and weapon turrets, portholes, hatches and other features. It was shaped like a saucer with two fins above and one below, all three being aft.

While the Orders of Steel and the Union of Columbia got on quite well enough, they were still wary of each other. The Sheriff wanted to know why the Sisterhood of Steel were bringing one of their few, valuable aeroships to Megaton and what was in it. Yet there was work to do with the raider spies. He had to take statements, fill out some basic forms, fill out a form for the Lawkeepers Network of Sheriffs, Regulators and Police, before he could investigate the aeroship's arrival.

People were moving to prepare the settlement for coming hard weather. Shutters were coming down, tunnels were being lit up, the power windwheels were being tied down, structural integrity was being checked. Lights shone in the jet airliner section overhead, against the wings and the big fanjet engines. The buildings, rampways, wideways, smaller balconies, wheelways and other structures going up the sides of the great big teardrop shaped crater were all being prepared. Rainwater tanks would be filled including the big reserve tank buried at the bottom of the crater. Water flowing strongly down certain channels would provide hydroelectric power. Since the would be very low rad, very clean, people would take the opportunity to have baths and showers. Water would be used in a lavish way for a short time that normally people would not dare do.

If too much water fell into the crater, big old flood hatches would have to be opened to let excess water flow down into the big cave system below Megaton. Down there was a fast flowing underground river, caverns and other spaces that were very tricky to get down to or through. Sometimes Megatonfolk went down to explore and to look for goodies or just to get water in harsh hot dry conditions. Sometimes they did not all come back or any of them at all. There were monsters down there, both known and more mysterious of nature.

Confessor Cromwell bustled up to halt in front of the sheriff. Lucas sighed inwardly for he did not much like the pompous old fool. Cromwell may have meant well but he tended to be patronising as he assumed that he had some great spiritual insight that made him somehow wiser and smarter than others. He huffed in his lightly stained robes. "Sheriff, this is terrible, terrible. As you know we of the Holy Following of Atom, we who follow his humble but majestic path to glorious heavenly enlightenment and salvation, wish to draw more folks into our following. How can we do this if they do not feel safe here? Really, sheriff, must you resort to violence this way? I say no!"

Lucas sighed. "Confessor Cromwell, the raiders were spying seeking to learn more of Megaton's latest changes so as to better infiltrate, invade and conquer us. If we did not stop them then your precious followers would suffer most likely terror, torture and death. We attempted to capture them, offered them a chance to surrender, but they chose to shoot it out and they died. Please go back to your church, your bomb its cradle, your podium, and leave me in peace."

Cromwell frowned. "The mayor will here about this."

Lucas grinned at looked up at the front of the aircraft way above where Mayor Rodney Brown, great uncle to Moira Brown, lived as a recluse with his telescopes, his robots and a huge collection of glossy 3Dphoto pormography. Doc Church would visit him about once a month to make sure he was okay and to play chess with him. Moira Brown would go up with supplies and stay up for a night or two; there were whispers that she served him in various more personal ways despite their blood relationship.

Then he looked around at the big three level Church of Atom where many Followers (Children) of Atom actually lived as well as meditating, praying, working and doing what ever else they did there. The structure plunged deep into the side of the crater. It was an open secret that at least half the followers were just Wastelanders seeking a place to stay and that Cromwell knew this but let them stay anyway; it was one of the few things that Sheriff Lucas Simms actually liked about the priest with his bizarre religion. The big building also sheltered dogs, cats, brahmins, goats, chickens and other animals in the lowest level.

The other man turned and stormed off. As for the loot from the raiders, it was going to go into the 'community chest', actually an underground storeroom, where it would hopefully be distributed in the fairest manner. That is except for the guns and ammo that would go to the armoury or, in some cases, to a workshop to be fixed up or recycled.

Three of his five human deputies were there, two of them being part-timers. He had them, two protectron robots, four eyebots patrolling around the outer wall and four deputy dogs. They and eight volunteer deputies were not enough even if he had a back-up of his deputy sheriff who looked after the jail, the assistant sheriff who did the administration and a deputy parrot who cussed at everybody. Megaton had over a hundred thousand people but the damned Megaton Town Council still refused to fund an increase in his resources.

He sighed and went back to work.


TO BE CONTINUED

NINETEEN
TWINS IN LIFEVAULT-101
EXPLORING THE VENTILATION SHAFTS
:lightbulb:

The twins returned to Charlie's secret base of operations only to find that it was stripped of everything useful, anything of interest, and abandoned. Even the status storage capsules with the dead brainabugs were gone. There were signs that others had searched the chamber after it had been abandoned but no real clues to who had done so or why.

But they did pick up faint psychic impressions that indicated humans in armour like those of the Special Patrols. They were drawn to a slightly loose grate style hatch in the ceiling and were soon crawling quickly along a fairly wide ventilation shaft. They picked up the smell of radroaches and other types of radbugs. Radroaches were bad enough but there were worse things out that way.

They had investigated the brainabugs further and had come to the conclusion that the creatures were but one part of a bigger and more complicated technological operation. The brainabugs helped to link human brains with some sort of specialised network-systems. The vault's scientific databanks did mention certain experiments carried out in the 2060s that used a mixture of gen-engineered organisms and advanced hardware, software and firmware to link human mentalities deeply into full sensory linkage with various kinds of simulations. The public databanks did not carry enough details and the restricted ones were very hard to get into. So they hacked their way into the restricted databanks in a couple of minutes, anyway, only to find the datafiles they wanted had been removed to inaccessible forbidden databanks.

The ventilation shaft turned left and then gently sloped upwards. The ignored other, branching off, shafts. They passed thrumming ventilations fans inside safety cages. Then they were dropping carefully down into a big dimly lit chamber. The big room seemed to be a laboratory-workshop of advanced design but with many laboratory benches as well. There were regen-tanks, status storage capsules, various compact machines, banks of computer mainframes and databanks, a labtron robot (designed to work in a laboratory), cupboards, lockers and other facilities.

A fine layer of dust covered everything except some areas where people had moved around and had looted various smaller useful items. Locker, cupboard, drawer and other storage spaces had been stripped.

The laboratory-workshop was not in the official 3Dmap of LifeVault101. They had entered a sector that did not officially exist.

It was in the next big chamber that they found the large gencloner machine, an intricate almost neat tangle of upright capsules, boxes, bundles of cables, pipes, cylinders and other shapes. It was deactivated and empty except for one semitransparent capsule where there was the collapsed, well preserved dead body of a young albino type human man.

They gained what information they could, took recordings and notes, grabbed some small easily carried loot and returned back to the main vault; they had to do so lest their absence be detected and they get into trouble.

They found their father's fingerprints on a manila folder with some administrative documents inside requesting that certain basic research supplies be replaced from 'central depot stores'.

They were quickly gaining the understanding that the experiments in LifeVault-101 were part of a far greater research and development program that went far beyond the official vault area and probably beyond the whole vault itself.


TO BE CONTINUED

TWENTY
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
FAWKES IN A CELL
:cryvaultboy:

Fawkes could only hear muffled noises through the thick armaglass that allowed anybody to look in at him in his metallic chamber. The super-mutant sat on the bed he had reinforced in a jury rigged manner and tapped on the keyboard of his functioning computer terminal keyboard. The lumbering stupid-mutants had decided that it was something they need not bother about and the very few so called smart-mutants he had seen had walked past his cell with out even looking in at him.

The metallic cells held experimental subjects against their will but he suspected that many of the hundred or so chambers were empty. Activity was not great in the hallways outside. Super-mutants of the mutantor size would patrol with various weapons, going solo or in pairs. Sometimes a stupid-mutant would stride past pushing a metal carrycart of stuff or a wheeled bodycart with a body strapped to it. Yet most of the time the hallway outside remained quiet and empty.

Fawkes was a massemoth himself, bigger than the mutantors and smaller than the behemoths. He had to hunker a little to fit through even the large vault doors. He wore a ripped blue jumpsuit that had been designed for his body and which had on it both LIFEVAULT-087 and his experimental ID code.

He was still smart. Indeed he was even smarter now than he had been as a human. The transmutation process had effected him in a unique manner as it did just a sprinkling of humans. The bigger the super-mutant, the stupider they tended to be.

He sighed as he slowly and carefully read the screen, which was not designed for super-mutant eyes, and slowly gained a headache. He was reading an adventure of the famous character, Sherlock Holmes, as he solved another mystery crime in late Nineteenth Century London. Handsome cabs, ladies and gentlemen in fine clothes, dock workers, street urchins, proudly foolish Scotland Yard police inspectors, toad in a hole and much else was quite fascinating.

Yet he was lonely and he longed to be either free or to have good company or, better still, both. He wanted badly out of that underground vault where he had suffered so much pain.

He sighed again and closed his eyes. He would rest them for a while and his growing headache would ebb away. Then he would eat the last of the radroach meat a super-mutant had left him, drinking it down with fresh tepid water.

TO BE CONTINUED

TWENTY-ONE
THE MAN FROM SEARF
BENEATH OLD McDONALD'S FARM
:spotted owl:

They had set up a home for themselves in the loose bunker of three quite different sections. That is Eddie'Jo, Lilly the girl, two dogs, a molerat, a dogdroid, ten robots, three androids and some newcomers. The newcomers were a zhoul held in a strong cage, a young killclaw who adored SPAM (Soynutri Processed American Meat), a thieving crow and an old brahmin cow.

Why he had a way with animals and why he gathered up some of them, Eddie'Jo had no idea but he tended to do just that. In the cave chamber with its bright daylight panels he tended the brahmin cow who peacefully allowed him to brush her down. She provided them with fresh milk. He wore grey-green splashwork SEARF combat fatigue trousers and boots, his slimly muscular body showing no sweat but some dirt.

The girl was busy reading a large colourful book to the sleepy molerat and the two attentive dogs.

Three worktrons were busy slowly and steadily extending the cave at the farther end.

Against one wall was the cage and the zhoul who was calm now, squatting and staring steadily at Eddie'Jo as if mesmerised by him. Once upon a time the zhoul had been a young woman but that was centuries ago. There were other cages that were empty, a whole row of six of them, all quite large like the one that the zhoul was in.

The android woman was standing in armour to one side but with her helmet removed. She looked like a 'normal' SEARF super-soldier. Her hair was very short cut unlike his own and could grow longer if she needed it to be so. She was examining a portable tablet-terminal. "The need to keep hidden, to avoid more smart cruise-missiles or other threats, has slowed down our exploration and infiltration efforts in the Compunetwork, as you predicted that it would."

He nodded. "We have picked up subtle but important indicators of SEARF activity in the DC-Wastelands and I sense them out there. There are other official SEARF safe houses and bases to be checked, those that have surprised, but I have no idea which ones have been compromised."

He paused noticeably before going on. "One site we established was most interesting. It was below a SuperDuperMart complex. It was large and in an emergency could grab equipment and supplies from the big shopping complex itself. Indeed we used the shopping complex to slip people in and out through its large crowds, changing appearances and identities of course."

The android nodded. "You mean the sight roughly north-west-west from here, the one close to Mount Olympia, the false volcano."

"One of JPJ's horrible follies." Eddie'Jo nodded. "Except that with the president one was never sure if the fake volcano hid some other, more sinister, cause. He was always very devious and loved to conceal one project with another. Then again, sometimes he just made his follies. We need to try to communicate with the hidden SEARF base there."

The killclaw wondered over. Killclaws were smaller, faster, more nimble versions of deathclaws who tended to live in larger packs. The killclaw halted, yawned, and then curled up beside the young man. Eddie'Jo scratched the very efficient hunter beast with the toe of one boot and Spammy thrum-throbbed with pleasure. It was like a small engine was going inside her.

The android nodded. "How? The mobiphone network-systems are down. Ham radio and CB-radio are troubled as are all two way radio systems. The Compunetwork had already proved problematic."

The SEARF super-soldier nodded, patted the brahmin and then walked over to a bare cave wall. The cow, the android and the killclaw followed him and watched him as he ran his fingers over the wall. Then he stopped at a patch that seemed no different from any other. He stabbed his hand into the wall and the stone gave way like it was soft putty. A moment later he had cleared away a roughly disk shaped area over what looked like a glistening metallic, vertical placed disk of softly glowing crystal.

He spoke. "One more bit of alien technology as stolen by the damned nomadic zetans in their ever roving motherships. Did you know about the Great Fijian Disaster of 2023?"

The android nodded. "It killed millions when a fusion power station exploded to unleash a series of further disasters, a domino effect of death and destruction."

He shook his head. "A zetan mothership was brought down by experimental pulselaser cannons. The aliens got over confident. The mothership crashed straight down into Fiji. US forces swarmed over the islands to take the mothership and its technologies first but had to later pass over much of what it found so as to avoid a world war. Before that happened the US sent a good deal of alien tech to the US Mainland in stealth submarines and stealth air-transports. Officially the USA denied that any such transportation of goods ever took place but none of the other governments believed them."

The android nodded. "My databanks are now upgraded."

He gingerly reached out and touched the device. It started to glow more richly. He closed his eyes as if focusing to control the device through his fingers somehow. Then he spoke. "Focusi to focusi! Focusing. Integrity control attained. Slipping. Control retained. Yes, I have it."

He pulled his hand away with a soft frown. "I have gained tenuous psychic linkage with a device not designed for human minds to use. I suppose it is a good thing that I am not fully human."

The disk shimmered and a non reversed mirror effect occurred but it reflected a far off scene. It was a control chamber of some kind a zetan aliens were moving around or sitting in chairs designed for their bodies. They seemed agitated and overly excited but this was quite normal for them. There were various castes represented with different colourations of metallic jumpsuits and symbols; there was a zeta-leader, two zeta-officers, some zeta-operators, a zeta-tech, some zeta-guards and even more zeta-workers. Only the officer and the guards were armed and with a mixture of raygun-pistols and ray-gun rifles. Service-drones and guardian-drones were also evident hovering in the background.

Eddie'Jo quickly changed the setting. Now there was a great chamber filled with translucent softly glowing mist. A tall figure moved there, a thing like glowing jelly, a thing with many limbs of various kinds. The thing began to turn towards the screen.

Eddie'Jo changed the view very quickly this time. He had misty memories of meeting such creatures and they were not good. Had he killed one of them in self defence? That was one thing he could not quite remember.

Then he was looking at a familiar sight. A style of bunker command chamber that he had functioned in many times. SEARF troopers and specialists were active in the chamber, a mixture of super-soldiers and androids. They seemed extremely busy. Some were in compuchairs and were either partly or fully cyberlinked. They were in armour with helmets removed.

A face appeared, youthful and attractive, a woman. She looked calmly at him. "Citizen, identify yourself."

He responded. "One Alpha One Recognition Fifty Alpha One. Eddie Lucky Eddie. Command Four. Emergency Coda Eight. Request Alpha Beta Four. Star Marshal. Bloody Eddie."

She looked mildly surprised, which meant that she was very surprised. She nodded. "Your form of communications is compromised. We are seeking you. Assist us to locate you."

He touched the alien device again and deactivated it. Then he spoke. "There are SARF forces beneath the SuperDuperMart but they appear to be facing some form of difficulty though not outright danger. We psylinked briefly. Uncle Leo, a super-mutant massemoth, came to the SuperDuperMart complex and began to influence the minds of over a thousand humans, ghouls and others there. The super-soldiers had been protecting the settlers but not being very good at diplomacy, they did so in a rather heavy handed manner. Now the SEARF super-soldiers are more or less trapped in the bunker beneath the great shopping complex. Between them and the human rebels, amazingly enough, is a small army of robots and basic androids along with bananadroids. Robotic bananas."

The android nodded. "Bananadroids designed for a combination of advertising potential, customer relations and practical work capacities! Do the SEARF troopers know you are here?"

He nodded. "Yes, but the problem will be how to reach me. They have stealth vehicles, Blackfires of various kinds and captured plus salvaged machines they have altered. There are 100 plus super-soldiers and 200 plus androids plus 50 plus special SEARRs (Special Encounter Assault Recon Robots). They have other robots. Amongst them are humans who would not attempt to exclude the SEARF troopers from the settlement, to capture the bunker, as many of them would. Uncle Leo did not mean there to be such a near conflict to arise. He advises all to live in harmony with each other but some hot heads amongst the norm-humans will not listen even to him."

That was when the alarms began to ring as intruders were detected moving towards the farm house, entering the edges of the farm property.


TO BE CONTINUED

TWENTY-TWO
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
ALL PRAISE TO THE GREAT PRESIDENT DAVE
:rolleyes:

President Dave had a strange and subtle influence over many women but not all women. Some women he repulsed and some even hated him on sight. He did not know it but he was a particular kind of strain of genetic mutation and he was far from being the only one in the DC-Wastelands though they were rare. The women he influenced would become devoted to him or, even if not devoted, they would do what he wanted of them with out any real resistance.

Dave had a influence of a different kind on many men. They came to follow his orders with out question but some also came to hate him and they would attack him with out any good reason. So Dave, as crazy as he was, knew he had to be clever how he ruled his little republic of some three thousand people.

Dave swaggered around his big office with its big wooden desk. There was a ragged edged flag of the USA with Canada and Mexico added as extra stars. There was an old plastic coated map of the DC-Wastelands. There was a deskcomputer on the desk that did not actually work but it looked good. Weapon racks on the wall held rifles, shotguns and, of all things, a speargun.

His follower-secretary sat demurely on her office-chair. She wore black lacy underwear, highheel shoes, garter-belts, fishnet stockings and that sort of gear including a black ribbon in her red hair.

He spoke with great confidence and charm. "The refusal of the Union of Columbia to recognise my natural right of rulership of the DC-Wastelands can only be taken as a deep insult to my person as the President of the mighty enlightened Republic of Dave."

Actually the follower-secretary only pretended to write on a pad while an officetron actually recorded his words, being an office worker version of a protectron. But she was a lot nicer to look at than the robot or so he thought.

Dave sighed. In truth he was a descendent of President James Patriot Jackson but so far this was a fact he had kept to himself. While some thought PJP had been some sort of hero and most were indifferent, some would happily kill him if they knew the truth. He had inherited his strange power off the far off ancestor as had his own father who he had overthrown.

He sat down on his own swivel-chair and sighed dramatically, steepleling his fingers in front of himself. Through a wide, slightly grubby window slit of armaglass, he could see a good deal of his republic. It was not very large, he had to admit that much. It had a wall around it. It had four corner forts, small but strong. It had the Outer Guards of men and the Inner Guards of women. There was the wonderful Museum of Dave, a large shed with a dull coloured roof. There was the well which was well guarded. There were the dormitories for the men in the Outer Zone and dormitories for the women in the Inner Zone. There were farm crops, orchards, brahmin pens, chicken coops, workshops, a medical clinic, a school, a stables, a kennel, a windmill, the Public Square of Dave with its Statue of Dave which, he admitted, was fairly rough and small and there were other features.

He yawned. It was perhaps time for a nap. His powerful mind, he considered, needed recharging on a regular basis. But first a massage. He smiled at his follower-secretary and, knowing what that type of smile meant, she put her notepad down and stood up all sultry and sixy.

Later, as he slept on a cot in a corner, she carefully activated the deskcomputer that was supposed to not be working. An symbol of an EE inside a big eagle shape with wings spread, appeared briefly. The Eagle-Enclave wanted a report from her, a deep infiltration agent, who was not at all under the psychic influence of President Dave. She ticked some boxes, tapped out short answers, wrote down some numbers. No, the Orders of Steel had not been close to the Republic of Dave recently though Brother-Outcast expeditions had been seen in the distance seeking technological secrets. Eagle-Enclave under President Eden held the Orders of Steel and the Outcast Brotherhood in contempt but was aware that they were a threat to future Enclaver plans for the DC-Wastelands.

The Republic of Dave had become an important covert base of operations for the Eagle-Enclave with over a dozen agents based there while others passed through to deliver courier packages and to get resupplied. The Eagle-Enclavers were clone-humans immune to Dave's mind influence and they found the fool to be of no threat to them.

Later President Dave awoke and she had a large cup of tea waiting for him along with some biscuits one of his follower-wives had baked for him. President Dave drank the tea and ate all of the biscuits. He offered her no biscuits, he was that kind of leader, but she was grateful for the delicious treats were drugged; the wife-follower was another Eagle-Enclave agent.

The President settled back and began to jabber on about some great plan he had to alter the course of rivers in the DC-Wastelands. It was rubbish but she dutifully pretended to write it all down while he ogled her.

TO BE CONTINUED

TWENTY-THREE
THE MAN FROM SEARF
BATTLE FOR OLD McDONALD'S FARM
:spotted owl:

Two forces came from two directions into the long abandoned grounds of the farm, two forces both exotic and traditionally hostile to each other. From one direction came chimpnoids, gen-engineered chimpanzees, hunched forward a little and in flexikevlar body-armour. Chimpnoids had been a part of the animanoid experiments of LifeTek, a less well known but important TekCorp. Greater apes had been the first to be genned along with bottle nosed dolphins, octopuses and a select few others. Yet animanoids had only been in the few thousands in number and not seen live by most people, when Doomsday took place. One major reason was that chimpnoids, gorillanoids, orangunoids and others like them had proven to be surprisingly resistant to being controlled, as had dolphinnoids.

From the other direction came tribal humans that like raiders wore garish and wild looking armour but who also wore their hair in distinctive tribal fashions complete with tribal tokens and totem emblems.

Why enemies? Because the Primateriarch Colonies and the NuNarli Tribals wanted to dominate the eastern coast of Delaware and its access to ocean resources. It was a foolish petty war, especially because there was more than enough resources for both groups and if they cooperated they could utilise those resources better. But Wastelanders were so used to struggle and competition, with seeing strangers as enemies, they often could not see a positive alternative.

The Primateriarch was to the south and the NuNarli from the north. Even as they approached the farm to make the fatal encounter, the sky was darkening, the wind was whipping up and a small rainstorm seemed to be coming in. Lightening flashed in the distance.

The tribal warriors and chimpnoid soldiers entered a wasteland of farmland machinery, mutated farm crops grown wild, broken ground and the ruins of various buildings, walls and other structures. They slowed as a light rain began to pelt down. They tried to keep an eye on each other. Both sides sensed danger. Their groups were forced to break up thanks to the messiness of the landscape with all of its obstacles. This made them more vulnerable.

Then they began to vanish, one by one. At first none of them really noticed but when they did, they began to worry. Orders were sent out by those in command. The fighters bunched closer together. Another disappeared and then another.

Stunflash and dazer-smoke grenades exploded amongst both groups. Figures flashed into both groups with amazing speed and agility. Where they went, chimpnoids or tribals fell.

Only one short was fired and the bullet from a tribal's hunting rifle went wildly off high into the air.

Then the farm was back to its old ruined self, peaceful except for the coming storm. Some molemice scuttled along, carrying a last lot of gathered food to their burrow before the rain came down harder. A big jagged-eagle settled in under the eave of a partly collapsed building.


TO BE CONTINUED

TWENTY-FOUR
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DC-WASTELANDS
SUPER-MUTANT ASSAULT ON RIVET CITY
:gun:

Rivet City was made up of a big old maritime museum including a large jetty, tourist terminal, administration and other buildings, an aircraft-carrier, a luxury ocean-liner, a monster of an oil-tanker and some other vessels. Underwater robots and divers in SCUBA gear or even amphibious power armour kept the hulls under good repair. Other structures had been added and original structures had been altered. Rivet City had over 500,000 people and was most important to both the DC-Wastelanders in general and the Union of Columbia in particular.

The aircraft-carrier was developing as an airport for smaller aircraft and airboats (small airships) going between UC settlements but also now to the DC-Citadel. Aircraft were mainly home built or reclaimed older type aircraft, prop driven monoplanes and even some biplanes. They were basic, rugged, dependable, easier to repair and fairly easy to fly. Airboats used helium gas.

Rivet City was having troubles as under the cloudy sky on a late afternoon it was attacked. Union Guardsmen ran along the jetty in partial power-armour and light power armour as covering fire was dealt out by 20mm autogun hard-towers. With the soldiers went protectrons and mulebots, the last being lightly armoured, semi-enclosed four wheeled machines with roboturrets set up on their tray-backs. Some came in lightly armoured armajeeps, each of them semi-enclosed and armed with twin 12.7mm Heavy Browning Machineguns.

A force of super-mutants had appeared suddenly too close to the settlement for comfort and had started to snipe at the jetty and vessels with various weapons including small missiles and rocket-grenades. Rivet City security guards joined in the defence of the aquatic settlement. 40mm shells and 100mm shells were hurled at the stupid-mutants coming through the broken buildings across a cleared open ground from the jetty and its buildings.

Then as abruptly as they had appeared, the attackers vanished, even taking their dead and dying with them. They also took such as weapons and ammo from their own deceased comrades.

A squad of Union Guardsmen set out after an hour or so and apart from finding some dead raiders close to a subway station entrance, they located only a few tracks of the vanished monsters. The raiders were looted of weapons and ammo but not of radaways that no super-mutant would need. Many Rivet Cityfolk were confused but some considered that this had been a testing of Rivet City's defences.

While many quickly forgot about what had happened, a few decided to better prepare the settlement for future trouble.

TO BE COMPLETED