This is a good story. Well done!!

My only criticism was mentioned earlier by D. Foxy

because of the way the dialogue is written, I get the sense of all the characters speaking monotone.

Now me personally, I find that dialogue can be extremely difficult to write. It's easy to know what you want a character to say but much harder to have them say it in a way that seems natural. Now i'm not syaing that your characters are speaking the way a person would. But, I really get no sense of emotion from their dialogue. Try to break up some of the dialogue with a pause by the charcter. Let us now what the expressions on their faces are. Do they pause to catch their breath? And so on. It isn't always about what the characters say. How they say it is important as well. You need to show emotions for your characters in your dialogue. Here is an example of what I mean:

You wrote: Jasmine nodded her armoured helmet. "Those were a kind of supersonic eyebot known as an eyedrone, a form of VaultTec robot found in VualtTec Vaults. They are not weapons originally but are designed for survey work, security sweeps or anything other such tasks. These were turned into missiles of sorts which I consider a waste of good resources. The dark psychic intelligence behind the attacks is brilliant, cunning and ruthless but perhaps not a good commander."

Maybe it's just me, but the whole line of dialogue seems devoid of any emotion. Now maybe that was your intention here as the character is relating details, but I can't help picturing an expressionless face(under a helmet) sopeaking monotone.

I'm no expert and it's just my one cent.. I'd give you my two cents, but I had to spend the other penny.

Looking forward to the next chapter.

nazguljcg, thank you for the feedback and please note that in many ways I agree with you.

But I would like to note that when people are focused and are exchanging information, especially as professionals, that in a sense they do go monotone. There is no time or space for drama. The focus in strictly on the need to communicate as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Yet I intend to go back and take another look at the dialogue with your feedback in mind.

Ironically I gave the same advise to somebody else about a day ago.

EIGHT

The wave of three F14X1 Tomcat vertijets came in low and fast to shoot over the super mutants. As they approached they let loose with laserguns and 20mm autoguns. Cluster bombs tumbled from the hard-points on their wings and the exploded amongst the clustered together enemies with roars of high explosives, shrapnel and napalm. The F14X1 were supersonic VTOL jets that could take off using special ramps so they could save fuel and carry more ordinance. They had been put together from various machines on and in Rivet City. The would not turn to return to Rivet City until they were safely away from the battlefield.

Taken by surprise many super mutants died at that moment including all of the remaining behemoths and smart mutants. They had simply not expected such an attack and bad luck played a big part.

The remaining SMs were all stupid mutants who were confused and enraged, looking around for something to fight but not finding anything they could get at. That many were burned or otherwise injured or even dying, did not make their situation better.

The remanents of the super mutant army that were able to flee did so and took with them wounded comrades, dragging them or hauling them over their shoulders. They took with them also wounded centaurs and spider mutants. The enemy was gone with impressive speed but Waverly, the Commander of the Sisterhood of Steel, was most cautious. She only allowed three small scouting teams to go out and make sure that the enemy were gone. Only after that did she have SofS soldiers go out and begin killing wounded creatures and looting what they could that was of use.

The area where the super mutants had camped was a messy network of reinforced ditches, fortifications and even small crude underground bunkers.

Jasmine stood on a mound of dirt close to a crude bit of super mutant fortifications built of bits of car, rubber tires and other salvaged stuff from the landscape. Dogmeat was sniffing around and investigating some what was probably the entrance to a molerat warren. She was tired and it showed in her voice. "That was a throw away army, an expendable force sent to either destroy us or bottle us up in Lamplight Caverns."

Cran had also removed her power helmet and was peering through a pair of powerful but compact binoculars. She spoke then with a grin in her voice. "The Reilly's Ranger platoon is here but they are not alone. I count at least a hundred Wastelanders with them with both arms and armour. A few are riding horses or are in brahmin pulled carts. There are a couple of electric trucks, a big atomic coach and a couple of battlebuggies made out of atomic car parts. This is a good start but we will need to find more weapons, more ammo, more of everything. The dead super mutants might well provide some."

But the living super mutants had taken most of the good weapons and other stuff with them. Many of the weapons left needed repair and nobody wanted to or even could wear super mutant body-armour. The good thing was that with the newcomers came many who were expert at making such repairs along with tools and materials to do the repairs with. As they poured into the camp it was revealed that they brought a few robots with them like floating robosleds full of more equipment and supplies, protectrons, MrGutsys, MrPortys who were floating globe shaped carriers, eyebots with lasers that had once floated around broadcasting President Eden's lies and even some robotanks, quite large robotic warmachines with large weapon turrets each sporting two 75mm autocannons, rocket launchers and a minigun.

Waverly, Cran and Jasmine met with Hrashman the Commander of the new army and Petra the leader of the RR Platoon. Hrashman was fairly famous, some would say infamous, as a man who had organised a large force of Wastelanders who had cleared out all the raiders, feral ghouls and other threats from the Crosswayne Territories. They were a fairly fertile and low radded area that had access to cleaner ground water. Crosswayne's farms provided much needed food and other produce to the DC Wastelands. Traders out from Canterbury Commons stopped there to trade or just to buy produce for the CC Corporation.

Very soon there was friction.

The tall hulking figure of Marshal Hrashman scowled his light brown features at Waverly who was shorter than he despite her relative tallness and wearing of power armour. His voice boomed out around the large chamber chamber with crates, boxes, barrels and other stuff stacked against walls. "The Wastelanders follow my leadership and I don't follow the leadership of any woman.

Waverly had removed her power helmet and her hard cold eyes flashed icy hard now. "I am in charge of this operation by the authority of the United States Federal Government, the United States Defence Force, the Sisterhood of Steel itself and the Brotherhood of Steel. I am a soldier first and a woman second when it comes to being a commander."

Hrashman went to say something more but then Jasmine looked intently into his eyes and he froze in surprise as if she had chucked cold water into his face. She spoke then. "While it is true that Waverly will be overly in control, Cran will command the SofS itself and you will command the newly arrived army more directly. If we do not properly combine forces and work cooperatively the enemy will easily destroy us. The super mutants will carry many of our people off and try to turn them into super mutants."

Hrashman, as strong willed as he was, had fallen before Jasmine's ability to sway people and to get people to change their minds with out her having to say much at all. She did this because, as she was then, she was always right in her point of view. Yet there was also a power behind those eyes that was superhuman, that was more than just normall willpower at work.

"So that story is true." Hrashman grimaced. "A fate worse than death for sure. My boys and girls have already decided a final bullet is better than such a fate but let's hope it don't come to that." He looked around in rapt curiosity. "So these are the famous caverns of the kids. Children living alone and running things is against nature and God's grace. Kids and dogs."

Jasmine nodded. "We are going to use the assistance of the children if they agree. They are holding back secrets on us that are very important like the answer to a contradiction that should be obvious. If the last of the advlts were gone from Lamplight Caverns about two hundred years ago, then where did the new children come from over those two centuries?"

Cran then spoke. "I came up with the same question but so, probably, have others. The children are in the caverns now, are locked in a large cave, so we can question them."

But the news soon came in the form of a much annoyed SofS sergeant that all the children and dogs had vanished. A search had exposed the hidden entrance to a fairly cramped tunnel not easily used by advlts let alone by advlts in power armour. Of them all only Jasmine did not seem at all surprised by what had happened.

Continued in NINE

NINE

The Little Lamplighters were in a large cavern chamber that was thier secre place. Mayor MacCready sat in the armchair, old but comfy, that he considered to be his throne. The others were sitting around chatting. Light came from three big electric lamps on the ceiling over the big metal alcove and the machines set into the walls of those alcoves and from a small burning camp fire. There were dogs but not just the ones that outsiders (Mungos) saw but some puppies and older dogs. Lucy was tending the scraqes on the arms of Bumble who had managed to fall over yet again.

Most of the children were nervous though MacCready was sure the Mungos could never get through the tunnels to the cave. They were too big and clumsy, everybody knew that.

Joseph was not so sure. He was fiddling with an old tourist guide robot, a eyebot like guidebot that was like an eyebot with out a laser but with powerful small spotlight where the laser would be. He had found it in the maze of tunnels and chambers that no Mungos had gone into for a very long time. He looked up with a frown and with a screwdriver gripped in one hand. He spoke with a tone of caution. "Those Mungos are soldiers who have fought feral ghouls, super mutants and raiders down in the Subways, in the basemants and the caves down there. When the Mungo traders from Armageddon Town come here secretly to buy our mosshooms, they tell stories sometimes of Mungo doings in other places. They told me about soldiers who go down into tunnels with only light armour or no armour at all to fight and kill their enemies. They call them tunnel rats. What if some of those Sisters of Steel is a tunnel rat? What about Jasmine? She has something special about her. She will get here somehow."

MacCready grinned. "Then we shoot her."

But suddenly all the others were glaring at him and the small mayor gulped. Then she laughed in a not very convincing way. "Only joking. Only joking. Cause we wouldn't shoot Jasmine. She saved Penny, Sammy and Squirrel from the Slavers. Then she came back lots of times and brought us more dogs, books, NukaCola, comics, clothes, good food, a couple of robots, two portable computers and those white mice."

Penny had the cage with the white mice and they were in that cave.

Lucy spoke then. "They will see the machines, the ramp that new boys and girls come down. They will learn that we are not normal boys and girls. They will learn that all the first boys and girls were stolen by the Darkman."

At that Bumble nodded solemly. "We are clowns."

Lucy giggled and then kissed Bumble on the cheek before she spoke. "Silly, we are clones not clowns. The first boys and girls sleep inside capsules and every so often a new little boy or girl is cloned from their cells. The Darkman told us this. The Darkman who speaks to us through the big screen there and who frightens us."

They all looked at the machines.
One was a matter-former that made goodies like basic breadbiscuits to eat, soap to wash with, paste to clean teeth with, milk to drink, butter to put on the breadbiscuits, small simple toys, small basic other things and the LL-serum that the cloned girls and boys drank to slow down their growing up. Sometimes the serum failed and the boy or girl would grow into puberty and be forced to leave. The Little Lamplighters said openly it was because they did not trust Mungos, and in truth they did not, but the real reason was that the Darkman only wanted boys and girls in the Lamplight Caverns.
Another machine treated bad injuries, burns and such like.
Yet another machine took samples of urine, faeces and blood that were sent to the Darkman.
Another machine was a kind of game that the children played because the Darkman wanted them to. It was fun in a way because one got to do different things like racing cars or shooting guns or making funny little creatures jump around. It gave small prizes when any game was played and when personal high scores were gained, special prizes. But the machine zapped the children with electricity if they did not play well enough.
There was a booth that took holographic shots of the children every month for the Darkman and which recorded their heartbeat, blood pressure and other health signs.
But it was the capsule that was weirdest and most disturbing. They had to take turns to lie in it and to experience strange disturbing dream like experiences. They would go to a place called Wonderland where they would meet characters like the White Rabbit, the Queen of Red Roses, the Mad Hatter, Alice the Schoolgirl and also the Darkman himself tall and menacing in his tophat, cloak and business suit all black and Victorian English.

The children feared and hated the Darkman. They told lies to Mungos from outside to hide the truth about the machines, the Darkman and their true nature.

When children became old enough that they had to leave and go to Big Town the Darkman fiddled with their memories so they would not remember the truth about the Lamplight Caverns and the children.

Princess spoke then. "What will the Darkman do now there are so many Mungo soldiers in the Lamplight Caverns?"

The others did not have an answer.

Continued in TEN

If anybody is interested in making a mod based on any 'named concepts' I have come up with, you are welcome as long as you contact me and acknowledge me. As simple as some of these concepts seem I had to work them and did a fair amount of researching to try to fit them into the Fallout 3 canon. If I was successful, I am not positive. Contacting me means I can pass over background notes I have on concepts such as the region of Crosswayne and its history.

A fair few concepts were put aside before they even got to these pages such a evil glowing radbunnies that throw exploding easter eggs, robotic toilets that follow people around the vaults 'just in case' and a nuclear explosive combat knive that unleashed a great nuclear explosion as you stab the enemy.

Still seeking positive feedback and don't mind if you disagree with my point of view, way I write etc. as long as you put it positive. I have a fragile ego to look after.

This is very good work DragonPen! It's an interesting story which made me read it the whole way through without stopping!
Just keep up the good work and enjoy yourself!

TEN

Vance and the Family, now with many new members, moved carefully along a deep Subway tunnel of a kind they had not seen before. It was far less damaged, it had next to no excess radiation and so far they had met no feral ghouls in it. Also the train lines were not the standard type double rails but were monorails.

How they had found it was because Vance himself had picked up the subtle scent of blood and had traced it to what looked like a simple but large storage utility room in the normal Subway System. His amazing vampire nose had then led him to the secret door which was a whole machine that swung to one side to reveal a sliding hatch in the ground. They had carefully closed up everything behind them to stop anything nasty or the BofS following them.

Just beyond the clever machine hatch, the machine functioned normal to help with the disguise, they found a chamber with two fairly new dead Enclave soldiers. The two had been stripped naked but the Family fed on them as they had no qualms about doing so to Enclavers.

With them came robots including a couple of MrPortys that were like MrHandys but with special carrying canisters. These could be opened or taken out of the robot altogether. There were three eyebots and a single MrGutsy all bobbing along with the fast, quietly moving humans.

Jasmine had given the Family the robots, a big supply of bloodpacks and other goodies. More importantly she had given them warning that the Brotherhood of Steel was moving into Arefu and was sending its people to Megaton to live. With that information had come the warning that Karl had sent a message to the BofS to betray the Family in exchange for liberty and profit. Vance had killed the would be shopkeeper quickly and mercifully in his sleep but not just because of this: Karl had been doing other dark things such as when he had killed the brahmins at Arefu and had threatened Brianna when she would not have him as a ‘customer’ to her special services.

The Family had now fully accepted Jasmine because she had come to understand that they, like the ghouls, were a special kind of mutation. They were also caused by a mixture of exposure to both FEV and high radiation. They were faster, stronger and had better damage resistance than normal humans but more so after feeding on blood.

Vance was fearful for the future of his people. He sensed that a big war was coming, one perhaps even bigger than the one between the BofS and the Enclave had been. He sensed that fear would cause people to see the vampires firstly as a threat. Yet as he paced along the concrete side-path away from the active monorail line, he was also wondering how he could get the big powers in the DC Wastelands to accept the Family. If the Family could serve as fast moving, amazingly quiet and perceptive scouts in the darkness, perhaps they could serve such as Reilly’s Rangers because they seemed more accepting of such as ghouls, especially since some had helped Reilly to survive in Underworld.

Somehow, since they had met Jasmine, the vampires had grown more physically, mentally and psychically powerful. That is when they had met Jasmine after her weird near death experience in the Project Purity control room. They had sensed the growing transformation of Jasmine into something new but not totally unique.

Holly spoke as she ran smoothly next to him in the same sort of scout power armour that they all now wore though Vance still had his cloak, hat and the special pack on his back. “Soon we must rest and feed on blood, Vance.”

Vance nodded. “So far we have come only a kilometre or so along mostly basic monorail tunnel but I fear that this network being active, that soon enough we may encounter security roboremotes, robots and turrets.”

That was when they heard the soft chiming sounds floating from the distance ahead of them. They picked it up with their enhanced sense of hearing as it seemed to send cold hot shivers running through them. The chimes seemed designed to be heard by such as vampires.

Then they heard the approach of a monorail vehicle and the lot of them crouched against the wall instinctively. They were exposed but, as each could sense, none of them could sense danger. The humming noise grew and then the monorail engine hummed past pulling carriages both enclosed and open as trays. To their surprise they saw Enclave soldiers, techs, workers, scientists and others. There were children amongst them and they seemed as methodical and disciplined as did the advlts in their Enclave light power armour. There were passenger carriages filled with people, soldiers and weapons on trays, Enclave unique robots of varied kinds along with standard robots and much cargo.

The Family had ever only encountered the Enclave at a distance, thankfully, but had heard much of them. Now Vance could confirm his suspicion that he spoke of to Jasmine; that is that Enclave humans were different from other humans somehow though in a subtle fashion. Their minds thought differently. They were somehow programmed like androids or computers or robots were and not like normal humans.

Family members had once encountered a group of rampaging Garys. Garys were faster, stronger and harder to damage than normal humans. They also had an insane unified mentality so that they were many brains but one mind. What one Gary knew, all Garys knew. Holly had been there and had sensed the truth. The Garys had taken one look at the vampires and had fled. It seemed even these monsters had their limits of courage. Holly and the others had hunted and killed them, had fed on them, to stop the clones from torturing and killing others. It had also arisen that Garys were starting to kidnap women to carry them off for some purpose or other and the Family would stop this from happening.

Holly spoke with an edge of fear to her voice. “Enclave humans are clones both like and not like the Garys. This would explain just how dangerous the Enclave became if they had some kind of linked mentality.”

Vance shook his head. “Only a kind of central cause, a kind of joint subconscious purpose but it is a dark, hard one. These Enclavers are sociopathic in their ability to kill with out mercy. They assume their own natural superiority and wish to replace other humans that they see as primitives, mutants and unable to be truly civilized.” He looked ill. “What I sensed was more terrible because of its general human nature. Still these Enclave clones are divided in wanting to commit either immediate genocide of others or to do so of many in a slower more ‘humane’ manner. I do not know which of those ideas was worse?”

He gave a sour laugh. “And I have been so worried about the Family while the DC Wastelands, no the whole world, faces such dreadful threats as the Enclave, the super mutants and true raiders.”

True raiders? The Family had sensed that at the core of the raiders were true mutant berserkers. These were altered again to be more physically dangerous than normal humans but also to be naturally murderous sociopaths. They would have naturally been serial killers in Prewar Times and some may have actually existed just before the big ones fell.

Very soon another Enclave monotrain passed with many engines to pull it. It also had many carriages, many clones but also livestock in special carriages. The vampires sensed that these cattle, goats, horses, molerats and pigs were also cloned but this time to be passively controllable. This train was longer with things in some of the carriages that the vampires sensed were strange and terrible, were perhaps some kind of scientific project. There were also deathclaws that were part machine and other such monsters of kinds they had not even heard of before. There were a fair few children including teens and babies.

Twelve long trains passed the vampires, each with many people, livestock, equipment, supplies and other things. There were flatbed trucks with hovertanks, missile-launchers, vertibirds and other machines. There were tankers. There were odd bare steel carriages that the vampires winced at when they passed because of what they sensed.

Then came the last trains and each was more damaged than the one before it. They saw body-bags piled neatly on flatbeds. They saw burn marks and holes in armoured metal along with wounded Enclavers. There were more soldiers and battle robots plus weapons and powerful battle turrets.

The last Enclavers that passed were just a single engine and a single battle-carriage that looked very damaged. One big powerful autogun looked backwards but did not fire.

It was now clear that the Enclave, as dangerous as it was, was on the retreat from some other more powerful force.

The chiming came again.

The Family turned almost as one and went the other way. They were sensing now that there were those out there who were both like and yet unlike themselves. Caution was their way and so, for now at least, they chose to retreat.

Vance reached out to telepathically-empathically communicate with Jasmine. This was tricky and tiring but at this moment very necessary. He had promised to give her important information and now he had plenty to tell her. The Enclave was still strong in the DC Wastelands, though hidden well underground, and there seemed to be a brand new threat that even they were forced to flee from.


Continued in ELEVEN

How did I miss so many Chapters!!??

Good work, loved reading it and I am SO hoping for more!

ELEVEN

GNR Tower was in near panic mode. People were racing around from meeting to meeting. Committees and sub-committees were working hard to get answers to growing problems in different parts of the great hulking building. Communications were going madly. The GNR radio was broadcasting warning bulletins for folks to keep away from Central Washington and to leave it if they did not have very good business for being there.

Crisis One: the Brotherhood of Steel, despite being now supported by new Wastelander militia units, was losing ground in the National Mall Zone. The super mutants had been joined by far more of their own kind, far more centaurs and now hundreds of spider mutants. This included hulking behemoths. Now came low flying waspiders spitting toxic webbing to damage and bind victims before the waspiders fell upon them. Now also came super centaurs, the behemoth versions of centaurs. Now also came armies of feral ghouls racing before the super mutants as an expendable first attack.

But worst of all were the smart mutants. Some were human sized like human body builders while others were the size of the standard stupid mutant. What made them dangerous was that they were sharp, they used power-armour and they exotic new kinds of weapons called disintegrators that caused BofS soldiers to literally vanish with sharp flashes of bright purple red light. The only good thing about the amazingly powerful smart mutants in their powerful armour and horrific weapons was that there were only a relatively few of them and that their disintegrators had only a relatively short range.

The big mystery was where had they come from? The only answer that they could come up with was that they had boiled up out of the Subway System, out of manholes with covers exploding open and out of buildings from the basemants.

Crisis Two: a large military force had been seen coming from the north. Reports were vague and inconsistent so far but it did not seem like a good development.

Crisis Three: The Enclave had large forces still in the DC Wastelands that were deep below in what seemed to be a more modern Subway Network of monorails. Word had come from Jasmine but she had refused to state where her information came from. He believed her, as did others, but some dared to doubt her word; these were people who had not met her.

3Dog was standing on the top of the tower with 2Kitty and at her feet were the two cats that were linked to her name. 3Dog had saved her that day when the settler convoy was attacked by strange beings and she had carried two kittens against her chest. The old but remarkably fit and healthy ginger cats were those kittens all grown up.

HUI Helibirds, helibirds being less powerful but easier to maintain ancestors of vertibirds, were on the big airpad top of the GNR building, but their rotors were still. Close to them were two faster, more powerful and sleeker looking Buzzbee vertibirds. A bigger JGG vertibird was in the process of taking off with supplies for the war-zone. The Jolly Grey Giant flying machines were the standard vertibird of the Enclave as earlier models were of the Brotherhood of Steel.

When a large government storage bunker had been found, a forgotten Post World War Two structure, it had been full of older style aircraft, trucks, armacars, tanks, more trucks, stores, more stores and some odd items. There were huge crates of SodaCola, a drink that was popular before NukaCola drove it out of business. There were huge crates full of SPAM. There were enough big band musical instruments to equip at least a dozen big bands. There were two big shipping crates full of fine silk stockings. There were record playing jukeboxes, movie reels of old time movies, a pink limousine, a shipping crate full of soldier’s magazines complete with centrefolds and even some inflatable fake tanks to fool the enemy.

Most importantly there were zazookas, a kind of improved bazooka weapon, with plenty of ammo good enough to punch through even a behemoth at close enough range. There were powerful semiautomatic rifles using the 7.62mm calibre. There were lots of Heavy Browning Machineguns using the infamous half inch (12.7mm) calibre. There was a whole lot of ammo.

There was much more and most of it had yet to be even identified let alone used.

And it had been found, bizarrely enough, just a fairly short distance from the GNR Tower itself. It had been found below the central part of Washington DC with out explanation of how or why it had been put there.
3Dog watched the trucks rumbling along a highway that not only carried goods from the bunker but which themselves came from the bunker. He did so with an odd thoughtful expression on his face.

2Kitty sighed and spoke then. “Okay, out with it. I have long accepted that you will not tell me much about your life before you met me but out with it as you promised you would when you had your fifty-first birthday.”

3Dog sighed again and he spoke. “I am not fifty-one years old as I pretended when I had my birthday last week. I am two hundred and fifty-two years old. I was not born vaguely somewhere in California in some hippy survivalist commune, though I spent many years there before it was destroyed. I was born in LunaVault-021 of the secret Lunar Colony that, as far as I know, still thrives on the moon. Yes I was born on the moon and lived there as an immortal of sorts until I was about a hundred when I was forced to flee the moon as a rebel. I was a rebel against the enforced orthodoxy of the Luna Federation. I gained my name 3Dog from struggling to survive when I landed in the frozen north of Alaska. The name comes from the saying ‘3Dog night’, that is a night so cold one needs to sleep with three huskies to stay warm.”

He sighed. “I walked on the moon many times. I went into space. I walked on the dark side of the moon. I was a scientific genius and I suppose I still might be. That is higher maths and physics.”

She frowned. “You are lousy at sums or keeping the books.”

3Dog smiled with good humour. “They are not the same. Higher mathematics is a whole different realm from basic maths or what you call accounting.”

She laughed. “I know that. I was poking fun at you.”

He stared at her in surprise. “Why do you seem so calm? You should be either freaking out because you believe me or because you think I have gone mad.”

But she only smiled. “Because I love and trust you. Anyway you have a great deal of knowledge and odd skills that now make sense. Also you speak in your sleep and I learned Esperanto just so I could understand what you were saying, oh my lovely Loony man. You had a nightmare in which you speak of a orbital shuttleboat coming into crash and you being unable to control it. You complained about tubefood and having to eat it in zero gravity while in space power armour. You speak of the damned 2001 Laws and Ways of Good Living that is one way the Luna Orthodoxy keeps tight order on your people. You addressed various higher equations and what you called the Counter Theory of Relativity or ‘why Einstein had only a half truth’.”

3Dog sighed in disappointment. “I hoped you would be blown away in wonderment.”

2Kitty hugged his arm against herself. “You blow me away in wonderment every day.”

To her surprise he blushed and then they hugged and kissed. Then he quietly slipped a ring on her finger. She smiled and then she took one of her rings and put it on his smallest finger though it had been on her middle finger.

Continued in TWELVE

TWELVE

The children in the big metal chamber as the Darkman emerged from the place in one corner next to a machine, shimmering into existence as if out of mid air. But the children had long learned it was just a trick, that a holographic projection hid a secret door in the corner of the room. They had even tried to open it, though fearfully, to see where the Darkman came from.

Black on black was the Darkman who stood in black Victorian gentleman’s gear from the top of his tophat down to his pointy shiny black shoes. His cloak had shiny blood red inner lining but that was only glimpsed sometimes. He wore modern looking wrap-around black sunglasses on his face but somehow this seemed normal on him. He held a finely made, lightly ornate and horribly decorated wooden walking-stick in one hand. On the middle finger of each hand was a black ring with a large blood red ruby that sparkled oddly at times.

The figure radiated evil, hatred and aggressive arrogance. Then he spoke and his voice was cold and somehow repulsive. “Children, children, children, we do seem to have a dilemma. I am very pleased that you did not speak the truth to these Mungos, especially to the one you call Jasmine. She is most dangerous and would take away your beloved Lamplight Caverns and fill it with clumsy nasty Mungos.”

But then he sighed, a sound like an escape of gas from his mouth, and then spoke again. “I see you have much of your stuff here in this room. Pack them and prepare to leave in one hour. Then I will return and you will come with me to a newer and better place where you can have fun with out any Mungos getting in the way.”

The children did not look happy. Bumble burst into tears. MacCready aimed his 7.62mm assault-rifle at the tophat wearing figure. Lucy sighed and shook her head. Princess pouted. There were many such reactions.

Joseph spoke. “Where are you really taking us?”

The Darkman laughed sourly and then he grinned large polished white fangs. “So your psychic side has emerged stronger now thanks, I suspect, partly due to Jasmine’s influence. I doubt Jasmine even knows what she is but that does not make her any less dangerous. Her kind is very annoying to deal with, very annoying. In truth I am going to use you in my nasty experiments until you die. I have set up a nice big maze filled with goodies and nasties. You will have to find the goods to survive and survive the nasties also to live. There will be all sorts of fun things happening as well. At least I will find them to be fun though you may not.”

Then he stared at MacCready in particular. “Your little toy gun will not hurt me, Little Mayor. Pack it away. You can use your gun in the Testing Maze for it will make the challenge better. Indeed amongst the goodies to be found will be more bullets for you assault-rifle.”

The Darkman began to approach them with softly padding feet and he lifted his walking-stick in a menacing fashion. “Aaahhh, something is not right. There are perhaps too many children. Mayor MacCready, Princess, Penny, Lucy, Squirrel, Sammy, Zip, Toffy, Farty, Knick-Knack, Knock-Knock, Noodle-Nob, Nancy, Sticky, Stocky… and who are you?”

The other little girl stood up and stepped forward in her smaller version of BofS standard power armour. She smiled up at the Darkman. “Jasmine is my name except that I am not that Jasmine but another Jasmine who wears child’s power armour and has this special gun. My name is Jas!” She held up an odd weapon with three different coloured lens-barrels. “The children knew I was here but did not really think about me too much because I influenced their minds. I have adapted the wonder machines so that they are better for the children and you can no longer deactivate them. Now they can dreamscape to a beautiful tropical island where they can play with talking animals and fairies.”

Mayor MacCready snorted. “I wanna go to a cowboy town and shoot down baddies and Indians.”

Lucy snorted right back. “Well I want to go to a nice town where I can be part of a good Mungo family where the advlts won’t abandon the children.”

Jas sighed. “But not like Tranquillity Lane.”

“Aaahhh, the place run by the madman Braun.” The Darkman laughed just a little. “We used him and we have used many insane lesser geniuses like him. You found a way to free his victims by killing them and left poor Braun all alone trapped in Tranquillity Lane. Except he found a way to escape. Yes he escaped as a mind into the SSS02 System but left his body behind. The Enclave entered Vault-112 after you departed from there with your now dead daddy and they stripped the place bare of everything they could including the brainbots which they knocked out first. They even took the dead bodies.”

“But neither they or Braun get the souls of those poor mind controlled people who lived in Braun’s sadistic nightmares.” Jas stepped closer to the Darkman. “I would have tried to save them by letting them leave but you see Braun’s technological wonder damaged not only their brains but Braun’s brain as well. Braun didn’t know it at the time but they had become reliant on the machines to stay alive; I only learned it because I hacked the Vault-112 computer network-systems before I went into a capsule and to Tranquillity Lane. Even so they were slowly dying anyway. Sooner or later they would have ceased to live one by one and there would have been dead preserved bodies in the loungers, as Braun called them.”

The Darkman grinned. “Braun wanted his victims to suffer but we were the ones directing him in his madness and we fed off the dark psychic emanations that came from the suffering of his victims. Do my words surprise you, Jas, do they cause you discomfort?”

Jas shook her head. “You call yourself the Darkman but there are many more than one Darkman and you are one of the weakest of them. Why is that, you may ask yourself? Because you are a poor fake of a Darkman, a puppet, a projection that does not even know his true nature.”

The Darkman shuddered in rage and he pointed his walking-stick at her. He screamed. “I am the Darkman, the one and only true Darkman, and I will kill you.”

But Jas fired her gun and from it spat three pencil thin beams of energy being yellow-white, blue and green. The Darkman screamed and perished, sparkling and shimmering to then simply vanish.

Zip sat up and let loose a stream of nervous words. “What is that? What is this? What is everything that is going on? Did you kill the Darkman? I was dozing. I was dreaming about pink rabbits. Do you like pink rabbits? Has anybody got some NukaCola?”

Jas sighed. “Zip, I think you are going on a free NukaCola diet from now on.”

Zip did not look happy at the idea but the other children did. Lucy sighed and gave Zip a quick hug. Jas smiled at the children.

At that moment a large hole exploded open in one wall and through it came three Sisters of Steel in now very dirty power armour. They carried portable digging machines of the kind used to help make fortifications such as ditches and small bunker chambers. But the three sappers showed no hostility to the children.

Then Cran herself stepped through and removed her helmet. She looked at the children and then at Jas. Then she spoke. “Jasmine will not come here because she says it is better for her varied selves not to directly meet unless they have to do so. All of this is way over my head but that’s the DC Wastelands for you.”

Jas turned and spoke to Cran. “I assure you there are much stranger places on this world than the DC Wastelands. You wonder at my nature but so do I. Now is not the time to getting answers to such things when we have more pressing problems to deal with and puzzles to solve.”

Cran was ogling the wonder machines. “They look promising. We need more resources.”

The younger version of Jasmine nodded and began to explain the various functions of the strange machines.


Continued in THIRTEEN

THIRTEEN

Brothers of Steel fell back fighting. As each section retreated two other sections gave them covering fire with precision training. The brigade was being pushed back towards Lincoln Memorial Complex complete with the actual memorial, the museum and the other structures. These fighters wore standard power armour unlike light infantry or scout infantry.

This was not the only action going on. In other areas fighting was raging. The ruins had fragmented the war zone into seperated subzones but so far neither friendly or enemy forces had been truly cut off from their own. The sounds of other fighting drifted to them including that of vertibirds and helibirds in action. All the vertijets from Rivet City had either been downed or so badly damaged they could no longer function; the smart mutants had learned from the massacre of their kind that had taken place outside of Vault-87.

There were helibirds and vertibirds picking them up in that area but also a small field hospital and a whole lot of fortifications. A whole lot of ex-slaves had settled there and now were part of the fighting.

A howitzer rocket exploded and caused an atomic car, a wreck with destabilized atomics, to explode terribly. The chain reaction caused two more atomic sedan wrecks to blow. Thankfully the explosion only heated the BofS armour a little as the soldiers all dropped to avoid flying shrapnel.

20mm autoguns blew apart rushing feral ghouls and super mutants. Claymore mines shredded super mutants of all kinds including spider mutants and those new low flying waspiders thanks to their clever placement. Super centaurs, monstrous armoured versions of their smaller cousins, thrust aside wrecks and their great tentacles whipped out with enough force to thrust right through an armoured soldier. Behemoths lumbered along with their own cannons which seemed designed to both fire shells and to be used as massive clubs.

The smart mutants came also, charging in a well planned and smart manner quite different from the others. Many carried disintegrators but early reports that all smart mutants had these had thankfully turned out to be false. Most of the body builder human sized and bigger smart mutants had better type stupid mutant guns.

Snipers, both BofS and Wastelander volunteers, picked off as many of the super mutants as they could. They fired down from buildings overlooking the scene of battle. They used powerful hunting rifles or military sniperguns or even such as rocket launchers. But even these were being forced to retreat as super mutants began infiltrating buildings, with spider mutants clambering quickly up the outside of these structures.

The super mutants were going to soon dominate much of Central Washington if the course of battle did not turn.

Continued in FOURTEEN

FOURTEEN

7.62mm and 12.7mm bullets ripped into the first wave of feral ghouls that came howling towards the subway station barricades. The ferals were coming in a barely organised fashion which meant amazingly well organised for feral ghouls. The Clanhunters were shooting the bullets with adapted weapons and used laser weapons also but fewer of these. They also used hunter power armour that was lighter and more flexible than BofS standard power armour but just as tough. These gave less enhancement of strength but more enhanced speed than BofS SPA.

The Knights of Atom chose to use exotic energy weapons like pulse-swords shaped as longswords, broadswords and shortswords. Their armour was also exotic energy stuff vaguely of the style of Medieval knights and they used large round shields as deflector weapons. The energy devices were powered by the KofA themselves because of their own unique nature. For these humans glowed as did the ‘glowing ghouls’ but they somehow remained human. They had also learned to channel their power into various devices, and not just weapons. The pulses, slicing and deflecting uses of this power destroyed ghouls as easily as it did other creatures.

But there were relatively few glowing humans for though they lived as long as ghouls, they could not reproduce.

Psyabalists were psychic mutants in exotic leather, metal and bone armours using psychic biocrystals harvested from the Deeping Caverns, an amazingly large and complicated cave system dotted with bunkers and other structures used as dumping grounds for radioactive wastes, toxins and stranger things. An isolated part of the Lamplight Caverns fringed part of the Deeping Caverns but were not as deep.

Yet most there were typical humans and ghouls with a sprinkling of vampires thrown in and a fair few nocturnal albino humans. Subway Guards in powerful armour of varied kinds using varied weapons. Militia and volunteers using what they could. Hunting rifles were common and powerful crossbows. There were fighting robots, mostly salvaged and reprogrammed Subway Protectrons, firing off weapons at the enemy.

Gunny Anderson muttered as he crouched behind a barricade made up of bits of rubble, metal garbage bins and sandbags. “You think now the old fools will change their minds and make an alliance with the Surfacers?” The Subway Guard Captain was infamous for his ability with a minigun and he was using one now with deadly efficiency. “We need them as much as we need them and if that means exposing our precious secrets to them, then so be it.”

The Paladin of Atom was glowing softly through a polarised visor. She turned exotic eyes upon him and spoke. “The Knights of Atom have already put this view before the High Elder Council. A vote is to be held in about one hour and it is likely that Prime Elder Canking will both be out voted and forced to surrender his position due to increasing proof of his corruption and perhaps treason of some kind.”

“The vampire ghouls?” Gunny scowled. “A very nasty combination of powers and a very nasty temperament. Word is he tried to communicate with them.”

Sir Sivane shook her helmeted head. “Not with them but through the vampire ghouls to the evil that lurks in Vault-87, that controls the super mutants with only a few exceptions.”

“Sanctuary!” The bulky power armour clad Captain nodded. “Yes, I know of Sanctuary. Smart mutants go there who wish to escape the Darkman influence. So do ghouls, vampires, ex-slaves, androids and many others. Do not like at me so. I have never revealed this secret to any but you, now, and you already know it.”

She shook her head. “Not really! The High Elders do not trust us KofA as much as most assume. I probably know as much as you do, more or less. Why are we Knights of Atom, the Psycabalists and the Hunterclan most often at the forefront of fighting these new attackers? Because the High Elders want us to be weakened in our power and influence in the Subway Union. They expected we would be left to fight alone but they have made a major mistake. As you can see both your people and the militias came to our aid and many Subwayers now are angry with the High Elders for not supporting the fight by sending in the Subway Union Defence Force units.”

She stopped and frowned hard. “The chiming noises. The vampire ghouls admit the noises and use them partly to control the feral ghouls.”

Gunny scowled. “I wish I could get at one of them now.”

But she shook her head. “Your kind are good at killing standard monsters but such as the vampire ghouls are most deadly. I have killed eighteen of them and twice came close to be killed myself.”

Gunny arched his eyebrows in surprise. “You are deadlier than a dozen of my best soldiers and myself combined. I suppose these vampire ghouls look most horrific.”

But again she shook her head. “They look amazingly beautiful until they die and then they look incredibly horrific before their bodies crumble into ash. They sing the chiming music and it sounds both hauntingly beautiful and perilous. They only fear the Darkmen and most of all the one and true Darkman that lies at the rotten core of all those false Darkmen. You must have heard this before.”

Gunny raised his minigun, let off a burst of 7.62mm bullets, and ripped apart a row of five rushing feral ghouls. The way he used the bulky weapon was almost poetic.

Then he spoke. “Yes but also differing accounts of what goes on so much of the time I don’t know what to believe.”

Then came another wave of feral ghouls but this time they came with a very new and nasty surprise. Amongst them came suicide bombers with bombs strapped to their bodies. Most died but one reached a battlement position of unarmoured militia and exploding to hurl dead bodies in all directions.

The Knight of Atom cried out in rage, lifted her glowing longsword and unleashed a glowing beam of destruction that caused over a dozen feral ghouls to disintegrate.

Continued in FIFTEEN

FIFTEEN

GNR Tower was being abandoned by all civilians. The folks of Radio Town were moving to the newly found bunker because it had proven to be far larger than first thought. It was in fact a bunker-complex of many bunkers and not all had been found as yet. A newly found bunker was designed to easily accommodate over a thousand people. The new bunker was going to house the moved Radio Town and the new GNR Station.

The move was because the enemy was getting closer and because the super mutants seemed to want something that was in the GNR Tower. Attacks against it had come both over ground and, for the first time, from beneath. Only the many booby-traps in the basemant levels had stopped the second attack. Radio Town had its own militia and there were many BofS soldiers at the GNR Tower now but the tower was now deemed too vulnerable to use.

3Dog had mixed feeling about the move because the old GNR Tower had both good and bad memories attached to it. Yet as he walked through the concrete and metal corridors of the World War Two vintage bunker, it was in remarkably good condition, he had a good feeling about this place. He also had a very odd feeling about this place.

3Dog was pushing a trolley full of holotapes, compact audio tapes, stacks of vanilla files, stationary, cans of coffee powder and much more of the stuff that kept any radio station functioning well.

2Kitty was pushing a similar cart next to him for the hallway was quite wide and high though it was one of the smaller ones of the bunker-complex. Her trolley was full of Prewar books, posters, publicity T-shirts, a garden gnome, two teddy-bears and other stuff including on top of it the two ginger cats. The felines were curled up comfortably with each other like kittens.

She smiled at him through her amazing glasses. “I feel the oddness about this place also. It is an old bunker-complex full of old stuff and yet I wonder when it was filled, when it was last used. The network-systems are working like the primitive telephone-intercoms, the old type tape-recorders, the movie theatre chambers, the old PA system and an amazing big old electromechanical computer in one of the rooms. One theory is that the United States Federal Government in World War Two war most worried about Hizzler and his super weapons. They built this and other secret bunker-complexes to deal with any major attack on the mainland of the USA.”

3Dog did not sound convinced. “Sounds like BofS Scribe thinking. When the Martians invaded Great Britain back in the 1890s the USFG built bunkers. They built bunkers in World War One, in the United States Civil War and even during the South East Asian War. But all of those bunkers were less secret than the government hoped they were. In my wanderings through these remains of the old United States, I visited many a settled and abandoned, often dangerous, bunker. That included World War Two bunkers but this one feels different.”

3Kitty nodded. “Perhaps there were other bunkers built through out the history of the USA that actually were secret, that you never got to enter in your travels.”

“Well, I suppose.” He grinned mildly at her. “Certainly the Enclave seemed to come out of nowhere. We used to think that the Prewar USFG would rely on the old Subway Networks even to move the President but BofS scouts found the monorail networks linking the White House underground to the Adams Air Force Base. Now we know there are other monorail subway tunnels down there and that the Enclave is down there along with some other threat. I suppose there could be all sorts of things hidden down under ground.”

2Kitty sighed. “Not only bad things, I hope.”

They came to a lobby chamber, a crossroads of four hallways complete with a bank of four elevators, two smaller for people and two larger for freight. There was a half circular reception security desk there with a mechanical typewriter, an intercomphone, big old metal filing cabinets, an old fashioned water-cooler and even a couple of leather padded office chairs.

It was empty and yet cleaned thanks to the work of robots sent through the bunker to do just that.

3Dog nodded and took out a sheet of paper to look at a print-out layout of the three level bunker they were in. He studied it for a moment and then he spoke. “One level down and we will be at the old time recording radio studio. Some of the others should be down there already. We can either risk using a freight elevator or go along further to use the rampways.”

But 2Kitty was looking around with an odd expression on her face. The two cats, a female and a tom, stood up and looked around with alert curiosity and yet they did not seem to be alarmed.

Then there was a shimmer and everything changed. They became phantom like and they were in a busy World War Two scene. American GIs in body-armour and carrying semiautomatic rifles were looking all tense and worried. An officer in body-armour vest but with a cap was pacing back and forth in worry. The insignia on the caps and shoulders was an altered one of the Brotherhood of Steel.

Then came a woman in a white labcoat in a brisk walk. She halted, old and beautiful with much character in her features and wisdom in her eyes. She spoke then in English with a well pronounced Irish accent. “Project Leap Forward is prepared. The Brotherhood of Steel can now begin operations that will hopefully allow us to both escape from the Enclave and the darkness that is coming. The BofS has operated in secret for over a thousand years now and finally it seems we are in reach of our real goal. What news do you have for me, Marshal Lyons?”

The officer turned and nodded gravely. He indeed had many of the features of the Lyons lineage now that one had a closer focus on him. He spoke with a commanding voice. “Those who betrayed us to the Enclave have paid for their folly and we have struck the Enclave with a series of precise counter attacks. Our units are moving to preplanned locations along with varied packages and parcels.”

He went on talking. “It is now confirmed with a raid that penetrated an Enclave bunker in Death Valley. Those new Enclavers are some kind of clone with a very dark sharp attitude to use so called normal humans. They suspect that we are enhanced and augmented but do not know the details of this any more than we know the details of their cloning processes or other secrets we have an inkling of. The images that came back from the Death Valley site were truly sickening with experiments done not only on captured animals and American citizens but even on Enclave normal humans now deemed expendable by the new clones. We rescued many of those older type of Enclavers who happily told us what they could and some have joined our cause after Sarsha and her people vetted them. Others were released because who would believe them or have the proof to be able to prove it to the public? A few we terminated.”

The scientist shook her head. “I would neither if I was one of them. I must return to the project. We are making final adjustments to the jumperships. I have a feeling that you have more to tell me. I sense you have more to tell.”

He nodded. “A Darkman corpse was found in the laboratories at the building complex above the hidden base, a legitamit research and development base for water regulation in desert climates. We have no idea what killed it and it vanished away before we could investigate it further. Our secret allies appear to still be assisting us. Oh, we again confirmed that Nazi secret technologies and knowledge, previously stolen from a crashed UFO in war time France and then warped into new forms, are being used and studied by the Enclave. We destroyed the Death Valley base as we departed, putting many a suffering lifeform out of its misery. We brought with us data on many projects and general research including something about super soldiers using something called Forced Evolutionary Virus of FEV.”

The scientist nodded. “I am grateful for that. Now I must go.”

She turned and hurried off.

With another shimmer all returned to normal.

3Dog looked around in astonishment. “How was that projected?”

2Kitty stroked her cats as if to make sure they were okay though they were calm enough. “It was projected into our minds. I do not know how I know this but I do. I am not sure what we should tell others. If the Brotherhood of Steel that we know of are aware that their organization actually goes way back before they were supposedly formed in Postwar America, then they may fear us having that secret.”

The DJ shook his head in wonder. “So both the BofS and the Enclave existed as far back as World War Two as did those Darkmen that Jasmine sent us a warning about. That Marshal Lyons spoke of the BofS having operated in secret for over a thousand years. I wonder what else is or has gone on that we don’t know about. Still, I have always wondered about that. Fighting the good fight is getting very complicated.”

They used the elevator to go down to the studio rooms where the Fre Triplets were doing a security sweep of the surrounding area, where Jogs was checking out old fashioned equipment to see how useful it might be and DJ Bot was assisting Jogs with some of its robotic devices. World War Two vintage big reel tape recorders would do fine to record much material and ease the strain on the shortage of more modern recording materials. Hundreds of old style records would play on the air waves with music, radio plays, comic moments, game shows and much else.

Knowing what they now knew, the two of them grabbed some coffee and went into the archives room full with big metal filing cabinets and sets of metal shelves full almost to overflowing with boxes and accordion boxes full of more files. There were also newspapers, magazines, journals, books and other published items. There were also many miscellaneous items. The archives chamber was very big and then, to their astonishment, the two found a second even bigger chamber also full of stuff but with a large archival work area at one end. This time there were also fairly large reels of black microfilm that could be used on rows of big bulky microfilm readers.

Thankfully there was a microfilm and a plastic card catalogue, both of them being large but very well organised. Unthankfully it turned out that many items were not catalogued, especially some of the most interesting ones, except in a very loose reference manner. Notes indicated that a crisis of some kind was forcing archives clerks to rush what they were doing.

It was 2Kitty who realised that the catalogued term Evalcen actually referred to the Enclave. She found a file referring with many neatly plastic enclosed WW2 newspaper articles and notes referring to them. The articles were from various important and also smart newspapers and none were front pagers. All referred quietly to the creation of something called the United States Research and Development Enclave. The USRDE was officially created to develop counter technologies to Nazi super weapons. Most articles went along with this line but two questioned the amazing amount of secrecy that went with this new agency and the small but important contradictions found in official reports of the agency. More amazingly than this was that one of these newspapers, it was called the Mystery Chronicle, dared to suggest that this agency was not new at all and was actually predated by something simply called the Enclave that had probably been created back in the very late 1800s during the short lived but violent Martian Invasion.

A last article had a black white photograph of a burned out double storey building with a headline stating that in a terrible incident the Mystery Chronicle newspaper and all of its staff had perished in a terrible fire. Nothing remained including any of the archives.

But then there was a precisely typed note stating that the Mystery Chronicle people, including families, had been safely brought to that base including archives and much else. This included those who had led the newspaper like Skully the woman and Muldis her male companion plus five crazy investigative reporters known as the Solo Gunmen though two were actually women.

3Dog and 2Kitty wondered how they would both run the newly moved GNR Station and solve these newly found mysteries.


Continued in SIXTEEN

SIXTEEN

The battlebuggy smashed through the light barricade with Ironsides Mercenaries inside firing off guns at the super mutants around them. The fast powerful machine was well armoured thanks to its atomic motor and bullets exploded off its side. The machine swerved, skidded a little, straightened out and then smashed into a group of stupid mutants to send them flying like skittles in a bowling lane.

Ironsides battlebuggies roared into action against the super mutant outpost about twenty Ks (kilometres) from Arefu. They had scouted the area well first and came in hard and fast along two good condition stretches of highway. Even as they did, snipers were picking off stupid mutants.

Marshal Ironsides himself was there, a man who was fitted into a robotic lower section, who once would have been in a wheel chair. He hovered over the ground and his upper half was in light power armour as were all the mercs. He fired an M60 general purpose machinegun, once common in the USDF, and pumped out 7.62mm bullets.

A stupid mutant screamed out stupidities as he charged at the Marshal swinging a heavy shredder, a device like a chain saw. The Marshal grinned, the hoverchair shot upwards and a hidden spike shot out and thrust right through the SM’s chest. The SM shuddered, cried out and dropped dead. The spike withdrew, all bloody, and slid back into its compartment.

The action was fast, hard and bloody.

More Ironsides came in fast but on foot now as the battlebuggies had smashed open the SM defences. The five fast moving machines circled the actual battlement surrounded outpost and fired in at the last standing defenders.

The last stupid mutant fell.

The Ironsides surged into the central part of the outpost and halted in shock. They had expected to find a normal outpost site with some blood and gore, some goodies to loot and the usual stuff found with stupid mutants. Even Marshal Ironsides was shocked as he floated there and looked into the hole that the SMs had dug up.

It was a horizontally placed VaultTec vault door, huge and armoured, and on it was ‘Vault-301’.

Marshal Ironsides knew of six Vaults in the DC Wastelands being 87, 92, 101, 106, 108 and 112. Vault-74 was a part vault with much of it blocked off. Other vaults seemed just to be crazy stories of the kind that were only too common in the DC Wastelands.

Each vault seemed to be the basis of some kind of sick experiment. Vault-87 was the super mutants created by FEV. Vault-92 was the white noise insanity. Vault-101 was never fully worked out but may have been the Overseer’s extreme power. Vault-106 was the drug induced insanity. Vault-108 was a hostility forming environment complete with psychopathic physically enhanced Gary clones. Vault-112 was reported to be full of Braun’s sick psychic virtual reality project with hundreds of victims in special status capsules innocently called loungers; Vault-112 had been stripped bare by the Enclave and Wastelanders had moved in to start a new settlement there. What Vault-74 had been meant for was not known.

But what was Vault-301 and what was its ‘experiment’ if there was one. He had a dark suspicion that he really did not want to know and another that, due to shortages of people, that the Ironsides Mercenaries would be ‘asked’ to solve the mystery.

He spoke to his people. “Get hold of the other Ironsides units and have them get themselves here ASAP. Set up the special long range secured radio communications equipment. I will need to speak with the new HQ at GNR Tower.”

Continued in SEVENTEEN

Dang, a lot of chapters to catch up on. Can't wait til I actually have some downtime.

Jasmine in the Lamplight Caverns and also now her other self, Jas the girl child. What is Jasmine and what is she becoming?

3Dog in the new bunker-complex fairly close to the GNR Tower tying to juggle various goals. What is 3Dog?

Who and what is the Mysterious Stranger?

Where and what now is Professor Altman?

What and where is the Darkman? How many of him are there and where and what is the true Darkman?

Just who are the Subwayers and where did they come from?

What are the ghoul vampires and where did they come from?

What of the new super mutants and where are they coming from? Super centaurs, spider mutants, smart mutants both human sized and bigger and waspiders.

What is Vault-301 when the number of VaultTec Vaults was never supposed to have reached that high?

What is mean?

What of 3Dog and 2Kitty's experience, the flash from the past, and what did it mean?

???

SEVENTEEN

The Lincoln Memorial Centre was surrounded by the enemy after they struck with amazing speed and surprise to encircle it. Brotherhood of Steel soldiers, the ex-slaves and other Wastelander militia soldiers were putting up a good fight. It helped that energy fields and weapons could be powered by the fusion globe reactor in-below the complex.

Big laser cannons fired off sizzling beams of light that sliced through charging ranks of super mutants as if they were thin paper. Some WW2 vintage weapons had been delivered to the site and crude heat-beamers melted stupid mutant after stupid mutant. The heat-beamers were crude copies of the weapons that the Martian Invaders had used in the 1890s when their comet-ships had landed mainly in the British Isles.

Cannon shells, shells and shotgun shells were used with much care as possible. 40mm AAguns blew the swarms of waspiders right out of the air and great holes even in pounding behemoths. But the enemy had cannons also and a big laser cannon turret exploded dramatically, its single gunner dying instantly.

Major Ajax scowled. He was not even sure how he had come to be in charge of the defence of the LMC. What he did know was the proudly seated statue of President Lincoln was covered in protective material, that the semi-underground museum had proven to be amazingly useful and that there more people sheltering in the place than could be supplied even with basic food and medicine or even purified water. No aircraft could get to the LMC now and no supplies. There were also no medivacs taking place which meant the small make-shift hospital was getting crowded with wounded and even dying people that could not be helped.

Ajax was wearing Prewar combat armour taken from a National Guard Depot half buried under a bigger collapsed building. He was just a scavenger, a Wasteland nobody, who had put on the outfit, loaded up his brahmin, and had on a sudden urge headed off to fight at LMC. He never been a soldier let alone an officer and had not really thought about the ranking symbols on his uniform. Then in the chaos of the sudden attack he was swept into being in command. Strangely enough he had turned out to be a fine commander.

He spoke to his second command, a wiry middle aged woman named Talleo Tallman. "Did you get through to HQ at GNR Towers? We need some idea of when they can send reinforcements to break through the enemy encirclement."

Talleo nodded. She had just come in from the radio chamber down some stairs from where he crouched looking at the bleak situation. She gave him and odd smile. Talleo wore the National Guard uniform of the new USDF. "Your rank has been confirmed, Major Ajax. Of course I knew you were not a soldier but now the people need you and, to my surprise, you are a very good officer. If anybody asks you became a major of the United States Defence Force about a month ago. If they ask for details, state they are classified. Any superior officer should know not to ask. How is it that you know how to command people so well?"

He shrugged. "Remember the settlement of Tank Springs just out from the ruins of Germantown?"

Talleo nodded. "Prospered for a while because its people found some underground water tanks full of very low radded water. Then the super mutants hit it fast and hard. There were no survivors."

He shook his head. "There was one survivor. That is me, Mayor Alan Ajax, who killed five super mutants before being left for dead. I suppose all those who were taken were turned into super mutants though I am not sure what they would have done with the children."

The lieutenant nodded. "The settlement was rebuilt and the water tanks reclaimed by the Rebirthers."

He scowled. "I heard! Tough self righteous eco-religious fanatics in strange coloured power armour that they have never been seen out of. Can't really be angry with them; they built a wonderful monument to the people of Tank Springs and kept the old name for the settlement out of respect for my people. But you know all this. I was a scavenger and trader for years; got pretty good at reading people."

The tough looked woman nodded. "I am a security-intelligence officer for the Brotherhood of Steel. We heard that you saw something of interest happen in the settlement when the super mutants assumed you to be dead."

Ajax frowned hard at her. "Yes, I surely did. The Darkman came there in his weird Victorian gentleman outfit. I can still feel the cold of him like something was trying to svck my very spirit out of my body. He waited there for a time. The stupid mutants were frightened off him, that was clear, but suddenly one attacked him. He was bigger, broader than the Darkman by far but the evil entity just ripped that stupid mutant into bloody bits with his hands. I had never seen anything so bad before and never want to see its like again. Somehow the Darkman kept the stupid mutant alive and in extreme agony until the very end and then svcked the life energies out of his victim."

The commander turned to observe a black war-machine moving towards his battlements. It was a monstrous robotic destructor designed to demolish moderate sized structures quickly and efficiently. It had crude armour welded to it and weapons emplaced into it. Stupid mutants were running behind it and close to it. Even as he watched it crushed a standard sized stupid mutant and kept going as if the death meant nothing at all.

Ajax then went on talking. "The Darkman had a visitor. The visitor came in a small fast vertibird of the kind known as a Buzzbee. Only he left the flying machine. I have a photographic memory when it comes to faces and it took time to find out who the man was. It turned out to be Head Scribe Rothchild. He was disguised in a typical Wastelander outfit so at first I couldn't quite place him. Then I remembered meeting him briefly when I took some valuable hitech to sell at the Citadel."

The woman scowled. Then she muttered something nasty in fluent German. Then she spoke again in English. "Don't take this personally but you know too much." She raised a silencer equipped 9mm semiautomatic pistol and aimed it at him. "You should know that I am a freelance assassin and wouldn't care to spit on those damned Brothers of Steel. The Darkman will reward me well for this."

Ajax sighed. "You should know I once saw your face on a wanted poster put up by the Regulators. The Darkman will kill you once you are no longer useful by svcking away your life energies."

She suddenly grunted in pain, blood flowed out of her mouth and she collapsed to the concrete floor. Of course she was dead. The young woman who stood there was the perfect image of a dumb blonde bimbo, sixy and adorable, tight in her fatigues, showing much cleavage and with big blue eyes.

Ajax sighed. "Yes, I thought there was something about you that didn't make sense. Do you believe what I said, Sarsha, about the great Rothchild?"

Sarsha nodded. "Yes we believe you. I am a security-intelligence officer for the newly reconstructed FBI. Go on and be Major Ajax. As soon as it can be arranged we are taking you to the GNR Tower with us."

He frowned. "Not before I finish what I started here. I figure it was you lot who set me up as commander here and as a target for that assassin but I have a job to do and I intend to finish it.

To his complete surprise she went over and kissed him.

Continued in EIGHTEEN

The story is appealing, but the writing hurts my eyes. Maybe a new font and writing style? I don't uphold anyone in grammar or punctuation unless I can't read it. So keep going :tops:

TH3 LON3 W4ND3R3, I have responded by trying to make my writing less bright and easier to read because I also was starting to find it to be too hard on the eyes.


EIGHTEEN

The super mutant offensive halted as soon as they had control over most of the National Mall zone. They even withdrew their forces from the Lincoln Memorial Complex so that it was no longer surrounded though it was still bombarded from the front. Instead they dug in with battlements rising with amazing speed. Not just heaps of junk or sandbags but concrete, metal and even robotic turrets of many kinds. It was clear that having taken the area that the super mutants meant to keep it.
Super mutant forces were moving towards the same point from all over, from seemingly all directions. Many didn't make it but were ambushed by various forces. Raiders, BofS, Talon Mercenaries and many others hated them.

The Ghoul Underworld based in the Museum of History including many basemant levels and even a Subway area close to it, remained untouched. The nervous ghouls received, to their surprise, a whole lot of guns, ammo and other stuff from the BofS. So it was that the Underworld Ghouls learned that the policy of the BofS had been to try to force all ghouls to stay either in the Underworld or outside of the National Mall area altogether. The reason that the BofS were supposedly such bad shots, according to the Underworld ghouls, was really they only ever fired warning shots.

The situation at Vault-87 was much quieter. Marshal Hrashman's military forces there began moving towards the Central Washington area. Jas staid with the children in the Lamplight Caverns. Jasmine and her companions, including the RR platoon, kept trying to find a way through to Vault-87. To her deep annoyance but not to her surprise, Murder Pass was now partly buried under collapsed rock.

The Subwayers were surprised when the vampire ghoul controlled attacks of feral ghouls suddenly halted. The High Elder Councils of the Subwayers all fell under investigation and three of them were placed on Death Row. They had attempted to communicate with the Darkman but the Darkman had ignored them.

At the GNR Tower there was political trouble as Ajax was taken there by the FBI Triplets and met the newly appointed President. There he spoke of the secret encounter between Head Scribe Rothchild and the Darkman, or at least one of the Darkmen.

3Dog and 2Kitty were surprised when a large group of scholars, librarians and others arrived to assist them to go through the new GNR Archives. They had been recruited by the Mysterious Stranger who gave them resources to get to the new shelter including official passes to get them in. They brought others, refugees, with them to live in the large bunker.

Strange but good new came from the Commonwealth in the north. There had been an android and robotic revolution. The dictatorship was overthrown and the dictator himself had been executed. The new Androidia had arisen where androids were free citizens and free thinking humans and ghouls were welcome.
Related bad news was that the large army moving south was the last of the former dictator's forces now controlled by a brilliant but murderous Warlord Han. With the army were many Soviet ghoul soldiers who had once been part of an invasion force of Russians, Chinese and Koreans.

New forces had been emerging for some time to assist Wastelanders and now were doing so in stronger numbers.
Brothers of Protection came in power armour that looked much like that of the BofS. They offered genuine protection to settlements and convoys.
Sisters of Compassion had the same sort of equipment but in light power armour. They focused on setting up Wastelander Assistance Outposts or WAOs.
The BofP often helped guard the SofC though the latter were also impressive fighters. With them came new robots and other surprises.
Rebirthers emerged in larger numbers in their oddly coloured BofS like power armour and began selling their fair priced eco-technologies to settlers and other Wastelanders.
Raiders soon learned, to their cost, that the new forces were formidable fighters.

Paradise Falls fell silent as the last of the slavers departed for Armageddon Park.

A large Rebirther group entered Oasis and formed an agreement with them to assist in having the influence of Oasis help turn the DC Wastelands once more to green.

Continued in NINETEEN

NINETEEN

They had found the short well hidden tunnel entrance into a cave tunnel leading to Vault-87 and then the actual secondary vault door. What had led the RRs that far were landing marks and other signs that Enclave vertibirds, four of the Jolly Grey Giants, had landed not far from the hidden vault door.

Jasmine, Fawkes and Dogmeat paced through the smashed open vault door that had been blasted open by Enclave plastic explosives. With them came the whole Reilly’s Ranger platoon that had come to the Lamplight Caverns. They were confronted with the same sort of neglected and dark vault facilities that Fawkes was only too familiar with.

There were scattered dead stupid mutants. If any Enclave soldiers had died in the attack, their bodies and other stuff had been taken away. There were stagnant bloody skeletal remains of much older horrors, of course, having been carried out in that place including gore bags.

Soon they were moving through the vault environment that was a abandoned and neglected looking version of Vault-101 that Jasmine had grown up in. After a while there were no more dead super mutants or any dead centaurs to be found. Fawkes growled in anger. He hated returning to that place and Jasmine could hardly blame him for that.

Yet Fawkes had one reason for returning because memories were returning to him that had been suppressed. He had a box full of goodies he had secretly put under his prison cell bunk. Sometimes the stupid mutants had let him out, had escorted him to a rather clean metallic room where he had met a Darkman very much identical in appearance to the fake on that Jasmine had killed off. Fawkes had been left alone with the Darkman but something had told the hulking smart mutant not to try escaping or attacking the strange figure. There was a menacing evil about the one, a terrible hidden power, that Fawkes had known was beyond him to deal with.

The Darkman had not harmed Fawkes, far from it. They had a fairly good time. They had played chess. The Darkman had told him dark but fascinating tales but also ones in which good had prevailed, even ones in which the Darkman had been defeated. They had drunk fine wines, eaten canned delicacies, watched classic 2D and 3D movies, listened to fine classical music and had debated various subjects. When Fawkes went back to his cell it was always with a gift.

Fawkes remembered these strange sessions in which he had found some pleasure but in which he had never been able to totally relax because of the certain subtle factors he could not define easily.

Now they were moving through the official Vault-87 which was very large with many subvaults, each with many levels, along with other sections. Though it looked familiar to both of them they were yet to be in an area they had actually been through.

They went through an administration area of offices, more softly humming computers, and there they met the Clerkus Brothers. The big unarmed super mutants were busy typing reports, were filing files, were going through stacks of documents. Each had a big label with big letters stuck to his oversized vault jumpsuit chest. These were not stupid mutants and not really smart mutants like Fawkes or Uncle Leo who wandered the DC Wastelands with his growing group of followers. No, these, as one of the Clerkus Brothers would state, were sensible mutants. Sensible mutants had enough smarts to get clerical work done and done well. The Darkman had left them in charge of very important paperwork.

Fawkes was evidently most amused but went quietly along with the Clerk Brothers. He sat and carefully filled out two forms that meant pretty much nothing. The five sensible mutants kept busy except Head Clerk Nugus who sat pompously behind his big old metal desk staring through thick metallic glass glasses.

Jasmine also sat down and Dogmeat sat next to her panting softly. The bemused Reilly Rangers stood in the background with weapons lowered and quietly observed what was going on.

Nugus nodded and spoke in a thunderous super mutant type voice. “Paperwork must always be done. Documents must always be properly filled out. Reports must be sent. Duplicates must be stored carefully away. Have you filled out Form A-001? You have to fill out Form A-001so that you can obtain Form A-002.”

Fawkes nodded and replied. “I take it that if I fill out Form A-002 that I can then gain access to Form A-003.”

Nugus nodded. “Aaahhh, you must be a sensible mutant. The Darkman said he saw our potential and the need for us to become the administrative heart of Vault-87. He sent us the necessary programming. We have a matter-former here that provides us with blank forms to be filled out. I myself have filled out forms up to Form A-101 Supplementary ABC-3. We have a series of Questionaries seeking your feedback on such as the colouration of gore bags, the most effective battle cry and the best use of nail boards in killing radroaches. We have special single choice questionaries for stupid mutants to fill out.”

Jasmine nodded and then spoke as she sat on a blood stained chair next to Fawkes. “How smart and clever you are, Head Clerk Nugus.” She looked into his eyes. “Do you like serving the Darkman.”

Nugus slumped visibly. His voice grew gravely sad angry. “The Darkman thinks we are a joke. We are one of his jokes. The Darkman likes his jokes. He has other jokes. Professor Altman is another of his jokes. Even his jokes do things for him. Sometimes we get important files and we file them for him in a special place. Sometimes we get things and we put them in the Gallery Chambers. I am not supposed to tell you about these things but I am going to tell you everything that I can.”

Then Nugus stood up proudly. “Please follow me.”

They went through a large office room full of fully functioning banks of computers where a Clerk was watching a 3DTV showing a brightly colourful children’s cartoon. The sensible mutant would chuckle and guffaw as he watched. Every often he paused to tick a box on a form he had on a clipboard.

Part of a wall slid back and then to one side. Then they were in a series of large fairly clean chambers with no gore and which had small roboremote units humming around looking after them. Each room had big armaglass domes to display things inside and those things rotated slowly on disk shaped display floors.

Firstly they came upon a room of fully functional Prewar objects such as a 3DTV set in a fancy wooden cabinet, a MrHandy bright and polished with domestic extensions, a pristine atomic motorised family sedan car, a robotic laundry-machine, a nice looking couch, a police marked protectron robot, a large bookcase full of books, a mascot robot for a gridiron football team looking like an upright furry tiger, a baseball launcher machine, an antique Model-T Ford sedan, life like mannequins in various sets of clothes from casual to uniforms, a display of sixtoys that puzzled the Head Clerk, a steam gauge assembly, a display of toys including teddy-bears, a display of hunting rifles of various kinds, a World War Two Sherman battletank equipped with a large heat-beamer, a Harley Davidson atomic motorbike heavy, low and powerful plus many other displays.

The Head Clerk beamed with pride. “Very good this room. Better than other rooms to come. Please follow me.”

Jasmine smiled at Nugus. “You find some other rooms to be disturbing?”

Nugus nodded melodramatically. “Me don’t like them at all but this room has fun things in it. Me like the pinball machines and the dancing robot woman who says silly things.”

Jasmine did not point out that the dancing robot woman was a machine designed to attract customers into certain kinds of nightclubs for men.

As they went to leave the chamber she noted a big plush armchair against one wall with black velvet covering and red velvet cushions.

Nugus shivered. “The Darkman came and sat there sometimes but somehow he saw everything is room, even smallest display. Me thinks he saw into all display rooms. Next room is this way.”

The next room was even larger and had surprises but there were then two other ones like it.

A Martian mechatripod of medium height stood with flexible legs in the stable triangular formation. Its hood was high above the ground but its long metallic tentacles hung down almost to the floor. Its heat-beamers were evident as were its eye-globes, its single raised fin at the top back of the metallic hood and body. A big robotic subway digging machine stood on its crawler tracks. There was a row of basic androids including a vaultboy, a vaultgirl, a police constable, mannequin-droids, waitresses and others. There was a row of proper positioned types of power armour being heavy infantry, firefighter, heavy worker, deep sea diver, astronaut, power ball player and others. There was a row of robots be they MrGutsy, MrHandy, MissNursy, MrsWife, Misssixy, various types of protectrons, various eyebot like robots including an eyebot, animal robots and others. A big prop driven aircraft stood ready to fly being a DC3 passenger airliner.

There was much more.

Continued in TWENTY

TWENTY

Jasmine and her companions were part way through another big chamber when the attack came. They were next to a domed display of a big robotic harvester when the Reilly’s Rangers moved out into defensive formation, using the thick armaglass of display domes as protection along with their raised bases.

The Head Clerk crouched and Meatdog stood protectively next to him and licked his sensible mutant face.

Jasmine and Fawkes moved forward and suddenly they seemed very dangerous. Fawkes swung his gattling-laser around and let loose a whole lot of laser beams even as he charged into action. His weapon was more powerful than it had been. It struck down two charging soldiers in standard power armour. They wore BofS like armour but they were Talon Mercenaries. As they charged, women and men, they fired off miniguns and 20mm autoguns.

But most of the Talon Mercenaries there wore light power armour or even combat armour. Energy beams and bullets crisscrossed the big chamber. All of them deflected from domes which were, it seemed, proofed against energy weapons. These were excellent fighters, were the core of the Talon Corporation known as the Talon Fists. With them came sentrybots firing off small missiles and 20mm shells.

Jasmine ran straight at a pair of big hairless power armoured figures and she could sense their surprise and their belief that she was a fool. Then she accelerated so fast she was a blur of motion and when she struck the two Talon Fists they were hurled like plastic skittles through the air.

She kept on moving, diving, rolling, kicking, whirling and as she did mercenaries were hurled in all directions. The firing stopped as the hardened killers realised they faced something new and beyond them and as the RRs did not want to hit Jasmine by accident. They turned and tried to flee but somehow, impossibly, she was always there to intercept them.

Fawkes ceased shooting and he began to laugh. He stopped when the last Talon merc was either knocked out or, a minority, dead or dying. Amazed, the Reilly’s Ranger platoon came forward as did the nervous Head Clerk and Dogmeat who seemed to like the sensible mutant.

But it was not over, not the oddness, and Jasmine knelt and touched a recently dead mercenary. There was a blue glow that surrounded the heavily armoured figure, that flowed through her and then there was transformation. A blue woman figure of energy arose out of the now empty armour and rose to float in the air. She gave Jasmine an odd smile of both jubilation and sadness. Then this ex-killer spoke with a voice that sounded oddly muffled a little and oddly a little like it was in an echo chamber.

“The truth is not something that I ever sought. I just wanted to survive what ever the cost to others after my family was slaughtered by raiders. A second chance now to swim and fly, to float above the surfaces of ground or water, to help cleanse the world of radiation and toxins, of the mutagens and the falsely named FEV. We will meet again when the time is right.”

Jasmine nodded and the blue figure simply faded away.

The second recently dead also became a blue figure, a man this time, but just nodded and then faded away.

Fawkes spoke to Jasmine. “I did not know you would do that.”

“Neither did I! I was simply a conduit for another force that you might name Gaia, the Light, God, the Goddess, the Great Spirit or what ever you like.” She sighed. “Not all will be given a second chance as those two were. Those two have set out to join others like and unlike them to heal the world.”

Then she touched the last of the recently dead mercs and this one simply stood up in his power armour, took of his helmet and showed a stunned expression on his face which looked now much younger with old scars now vanished. He nodded to Jasmine. “I would join Reilly’s Rangers if they would have me and assist you with this mission.”

Petra, the RR Platoon Lieutenant, came forward and studied the former Talon Fist for a moment and then nodded. “You will begin as a probationary trooper but welcome to the Reilly’s Rangers. This is strange but the whole DC Wastelands is strange. Why don’t we grab some of this stuff?”

Jasmine shook her head. “The Darkman does not do things straight forwardly and always has multiple purposes behind any big project. This must have taken a good deal of resources to complete. There are puzzles hidden in the way the displays are put out and in the displays. Puzzle leading to answers that we need more than we need some equipment. Also the displays are booby-trapped in various nasty ways. There are also other good reasons to leave the displays as they are but I will not go into those. Now I need all of your assistance. I must rest and meditate. Even being a conduit for such energies is tiring.”

They placed the now all healthy but semiconscious dreaming Talon Fists in a corner. Jasmine sat in a full lotus position meditating and after a moment she lifted off the floor and floated there. Her breathing slowed and she seemed almost motionless.

The RRs moved out to check the area but also checked out more displays like a Formula One atomic motorised racing car, a Chinese robotic noodle cooker, more life like mannequins with Prewar clothes and other gear, a NukaCola vending machine, a stuffed bison, a fully assembled and supported T-rex dinosaur skeleton, a Captain Courage super hero outfit complete with Shield of Justice, displays of glossy 3Dpix magazines of many kinds from cheesecake to wedding clothes to women’s domestic to many others and lots of other stuff.

It was a glimpse of an amazing world full of fashions, working government, nine-to-five jobs, gimmicks, suburbs, consumer goods and what seemed to the Wastelanders to be a strange life. It was also a glimpse of a world with out so much radiation, with out monstrous mutations, super mutants and other threats that were part of everyday life. Yet the displays were often honest and they saw that the Prewar world had many problems also from muggers to poverty, traffic jams, natural disasters and war.

Continued in TWENTY-ONE

I love the "sensible mutants". They're cute. At least, I think they are :wub: Also, I'd love to see those displays. That'd be awesome.

TWENTY-ONE

A convoy of World War Two vintage Sherman Tanks rumbled passed the site with enhanced armour, new electronics and other changes having been made. The new armour plating made the machines less vulnerable to energy weapons and the upgraded engines made the battletanks faster but they still had to be used with care. Most of the machines had vintage 90mm autocannons, 12.7mm heavy machineguns and, now, robotic weapon turrets on back and front. But two had big experimental heat-beamers and four had pairs of experimental maxiguns, bigger versions of miniguns, that fired 12.7mm bullets. There were similar vehicles, built on the same type of bodies, which were troop carriers and they were called Kangaroos.

Following them came Deuce and a Half trucks, vintage American machines, rumbling along each on six wheels. They came full of newly recruited and speedily trained, equipped and sent out National Guard soldiers. Thankfully many Wastelanders were tough, grew up using weapons and were used to fighting as groups to survive. Shortages meant that many of these soldiers used WW2 body-armour, combat fatigues, combat boots, powerful semiautomatic rifles and other weapons.

Most of the gear came from the one amazing bunker of bunkers fairly close to the GNR Tower.

The site was a Wastelander Assistance Outpost, a WAO, and there stood Brother Protectors in power armour sporting squat but powerful 55zz-pulserifles or 20mm autoguns or missile-launchers. The armour was body tight and the Sisters Compassionate were shaped obviously as women.

The WAO was a mixture of prefab modular structures, tents, squat defensive towers, a low wide barrier wall, and Wastelander refugees. The outpost was large with many tents and supporting facilities but it was fairly crowded. There were lines of people waiting to get in but they were not being neglected.

While most were given water, basic food and other necessary items, a few were caught as being criminals on the run or even raider spies trying to get into the big encampment. These ended up in a prison area where they also got their needs met but their futures were not so rosy.

The military convoy was heading not to the National Mall Zone but to the north to join with forces there that were going to intercept and do battle with Warlord Han’s army. It was moving south as if Han was trying to take advantage of the troubles in the DC Wastelands.

But just beyond the WAO the convoy was called to halt by a group of Brothers of Protection. The commander climbed out and marched to confront them in anger. Then she stopped in surprise. For before her were a line of ten atomic motorised Prewar military trucks and two big atomic battletanks.

A Brother Protector stepped forward and spoke. “They are yours as a gesture of peaceful co-existence between the new United States of America and the Communalists of Freedoma as represented in the DC Wastelands by the Rebirthers, the Brotherhood of Protection and the Sisterhood of Compassion. There are five tankertrucks there with a great deal of fuel along with a great deal of ammunition for your weapons and other supplies. You could contact your HQ at the GNR Tower before you use them.”

The woman commander looked at the Brother Protector, looked at her convoy and then at the stuff that was on offer. Then she smiled at the Brother Protector. “I would do but it seems we are having trouble communicating with HQ. So we had better just take all of this just in case.”

The Brother Protector bowed briefly and then spoke again. “Let us all fight the good fight as best we can be it on the moon, in space or here on Earth.”

She snorted and pushed her helmet back. “I suppose you are going to tell me you are from the moon.”

He shook his head. “Yes and no. I am a cyborg with an internal altered human organism, a cyborg network-system and an set of adjusted power armour. The organism and part of the cyborg network-system come from the moon, that we call Luna, but the rest was manufactured here on the Earth, that we call Terra. I am a Cybertrooper Type-2 Model-3A1 adjusted to Terran Standard Gravity. I am expendable.”

She stared at him. “My name is Joyce Elvis James. I am a newly made member of the United States National Guard. You know I call myself a Captain but truth is my papers have failed to come through and I am not sure what rank I am. I am human with some ghoul type scarring and, like too many women, I am sterile. Lately the new USFG started fertility testing women and men. Women like me are considered expendable though officially they are too polite to put it that way. I am Fertility Category D. A is fully fertile and so on.”

The Brother Protector responded. “You are not expendable! Sterile or not you are not expendable. We can cure your sterility. Go to the Sisterhood of Compassion. They have been healing women and men of sterility all over this world. We do this both for compassionate reasons and in hopes that in return you will help us solve our own problems.”

She bowed. “You are not expendable. One day we will have a dance together but please do not step on my feet. I like dancing.” She turned and hurried back to the convoy.

Continued in TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-TWO

Uncle Leo strode across the DC Wastelands with a new purpose to his steps. He wore robes now and carried a long wooden staff. With him came robed super mutants who had once fought for the Darkman. As Uncle Leo's transformation took place his powers and influence grew on his own kind. Stupid mutants came with him now and their aggression became less while their intelligence and wisdom grew. Uncle Leo was no fool. His followers had weapons and armour beneath their robes but they never used them unless in self defence. A few of the very powerful super mutants pulled two wheeled carts full of equipment and supplies.

With them walked humans and ghouls along with various animals. Many of the ghouls had been feral ghouls and many of the humans had been savage raiders. Now they were also followers in robes. The feral ghouls grew less mindless with every passing moment that they spent with Uncle Leo.

It was dark and sprinkling rain. A gentle warm breeze blew as they passed through the area known as Bethesda, a place of ruined many level buildings and vehicles. Raiders peered at them nervously at the procession and either hid or even turned and fled. Then a couple came out and joined. They were handed grey hooded robes which they put on and soon they were moving peacefully with the others.

Lightening flashed in the sky. In the distance artillery thundered. A radscorpion, only about the size of a radroach, darted along a footpath and down a hole. A smaller copper skinned gecko darted on its hind legs across the street and vanished into an open doorway.

Uncle Leo and his followers went down a rampway into a big undercover parking area where they were soon settling down for a wash, a meal and a sleep. Of course there would always be sentries on duty.

Continued in TWENTY-THREE

More about Uncle Leo, please! He always seemed to me like the kind of guy that would end up doing something like that.