The Big City

Lily had a blank look on her face as she glanced between her young red-headed apprentice and her two siblings. Her much more youthful siblings.

Lily glanced between a grinning blonde-haired loli, a smiling raven-haired shota and back to Alice. "I know I, perhaps, did not ask relevant follow-up questions, but when you told me that you and your family were orphans and could quote take care of yourselves unquote, I have to admit I assumed you all were of similar age," said Lily in a carefully neutral tone.

"Why would you assume that Dr St. Claire?" asked Alice.

Lily mentally stopped herself from hissing, 'Because these two don't look like they could take care of a hamster, let alone themselves!' She was reflexively against anything that would tend to distract her apprentice from learning, and these two brats were precisely that sort of thing.

Lily sighed and shook her head; the horse was well outside of the barn at this point. She doubted she could get her apprentice to agree to drop off the brats at Little Lamplight for a few years, after all, "You know what? Nevermind. Apprentice, front and centre. Gear check."

Lily carefully went through the gear Alice was carrying. She had only had a limited amount of time to train the girl on weapons, mainly safety and not practical usage and accuracy, so Lily had given her the double-barreled scattergun she acquired in Vault 108, loaded with buckshot, as her personal-defence weapon, and Lily's old knife, sharpened to a razor's edge, as well as a rugged and newly fabricated pneumatic microinjector preloaded with preprogrammed paralytic nanomachines.

The device featured some of Lily's first carbon-based microcircuitries to power a field to stabilize the medichines inside the injector's reservoir, preventing them from their usual decay in the absence of a controlling nanohive. It wasn't quite a computer, but it was getting close.

Lily carried a similar injector, although her version had incorporated a revolver-style rotary magazine that could select various colour-coded medichine options, from paralytics and nerve-blocking analgesic medichines to general healing varieties. She still couldn't get around the inability to inject third parties with more than a single programming schema yet, though, but figured that even with that limitation, multiple options would be useful.

Most of their belongings were crated, with some of their equipment packed into Lily's rucksack that might need to be more immediately available. However, they were only carrying on their persons a small subset of things that they would need to survive for a day or two.

"Alright, you look good. So, the main reason we received such a good price on our passage was I said I could drive a truck with a manual transmission, which I suppose is a somewhat unusual skill in this day and age," Lily began and then glanced at the two kids, "Which also means that as I will be driving, I may not be immediately able to assist in defence of the caravan if raiders attack us. So, protecting your two... siblings... is up to you, okay?"

Alice did her best impression of standing at attention before sounding off formally, "Yes, Mistress! You don't have to worry!"

Lily did not mention how little that assurance actually reassured her before walking off to find the trader in charge. As she walked a few steps away, she could hear Alice yell in an imitation of Lily's practised NCO command voice, "Nick, Isis! Front and centre! Gear check!"

Snorting with amusement, Lily reconsidered and thought that perhaps two more well-trained and loyal minions might prove helpful. Although, it would take five or six years before they would get to the point of being useful at all as minions.

She had to admit she approved of the little girl's name, Isis. It was a pretty name, and she recalled feeling sad that a certain Islamic proto-caliphate in the Levant made the name much less common in the last decade of her memories in America.

Lily found the trader next to the four trucks that had pulled up into the transhipment hub across the street from the diner. The four trucks all looked like a similar model, of something along the lines of an 18-wheeler or large commercial truck, but they each towed an extended flatbed trailer, with areas for guards to sit in front of the cargo. The caravan master was talking to Doctor Robotron's Uncle, who brightened when he saw her approach, "Ah, speak of the devil, and she appears. Rich, this is Dr St. Claire."

The trader, whose name was Rich, turned and introduced himself, and Lily permitted a brief handshake, "Dr St. Claire, I'm glad I caught you so early. I was hoping I could verify your driving skills briefly, as I will need to know you really can do what you claimed before letting you behind the wheel -- a new transmission would cost a lot more than the discount I'm offering you, after all."

Lily smirked slightly, "I understand completely, monsieur. I 'ave to admit it has been a few years since I drove a stick, but it's like riding a bike, right?" To be honest, she had never driven an 18-wheeler, but she had operated a large dump truck in the past and thought it would probably be similar.

The man tilted his head to one side, a little confused, "I'm not sure; I've never seen a bicycle. But, let's borrow this unloaded truck, and you can drive me around town, is that alright?"

Lily nodded and did a quick walk around the truck, looking for abnormalities. The tires looked a bit underinflated, but she supposed that was intentional in the absence of truly uniformly paved roads. Finally, she asked the man politely, "Do you have any systemized pre-drive inspection or checklist?"

The man chuckled, "Ah, no, not as such. Although every morning, we will check the fission drive coolant levels and hydraulic fluid levels before we leave, you very seldomly have to add any. Mostly it is just like you did, a quick walk around and checks of the tires. Although the tires are some of the sturdiest things about these trucks, I have no idea what they're made of, but they're definitely not rubber. Haven't had to put new ones on in twenty years."

That answered a question Lily had but hadn't asked, and she supposed it made some amount of sense. It made Lily curious too, and she resolved to get a scan of one of the tires. Perhaps they were rubber with an embedded graphene matrix or just layered graphene balloons filled with amorphous carbon, which was how Lily would build a tire if she had to. However, Lily hadn't seen much evidence that the scientists of the old war had yet mastered manufacturing random carbon allotropes before the bombs fell.

Lily nodded and got inside the truck's cab, along with the man. The model of the truck was unfamiliar to her, especially considering it included controls and gauges for a small fission reactor. Still, Lily was an intelligent girl and figured it out rather quickly. She demonstrated her skill in a quick drive around the town, even double-clutching to save wear on the transmission's auto-synchronizers, and the man was quite satisfied with her ability.

The trader asked her after they left the truck, "You said your stuff has to be loaded a particular way? What did you mean by that?"

Lily pointed to the two tall crates that housed her Protectrons, "Those have to be at the back. Inside each is a Protectron robot." She pulled a small device out of her pocket, consisting of a guarded switch and a small stubby plastic antenna, "I've placed radioactivated pyrotechnic devices inside the crates. If I press this button, both crates will fall away, and the Protectrons will be activated in guard mode. If we get attacked by raiders, I intend to press this button, so it would help if those crates weren't blocked on all sides by other cargo."

The traders' eyebrows rose, and he clucked his tongue, "Okay, but we're putting one of the crates on the lead truck I am driving and the other on the last truck. Do you want to drive that one, then?"

Lily shook her head firmly, "No. We can place the crate on the last truck, but it is standard ambush tactics to disable or kill the drivers of the lead and last vehicle in a convoy to trap a convoy in a kill-box. The discount you are offering me is insufficient to warrant me taking the increased risk to drive in these slots; I will drive either the second or third truck, please."

The man snorted, "The raiders we deal with wouldn't know tactics if it walked up and fucked their moms. Probably especially not in that case, as I doubt they had many father figures at home. And each truck carries one or two guards, but you aren't wrong, I suppose. You can drive the second truck. We're not headed through D.C. proper on this leg, so we don't actually expect that many problems with raiders. I'd be surprised if we see a single one before we unload you in Megaton."

Lily narrowed her eyes but nodded. Of course, she was right; the lead truck in this man's convoy looked more like an armoured personnel carrier, or armoured truck turned technical out of Mad Max, with a fully rotating crew-served heavy machine gun in the trailer bed and only one-half to two-thirds of the cargo carrying capacity. Hence, the man obviously was aware of the risk. But, perhaps the raiders here didn't bother attacking the rear of the convoy simultaneously; she supposed that was expecting a little much from their intelligence and coordination.

She went briefly around town saying her goodbyes, finding Louis and his brother last, "Thank you for your hospitality the last couple of months, Louis and Monsieur Roe. And thank you, especially, for coordinating a building I could purchase in Megaton."

Uncle Roe, as he liked to be called, slapped Lily on the back personably, "We're sorry to see you go. And it's just a six-month lease by the city council. It's an abandoned building right on the edge of their security fence. It's a large six-story apartment building, fully abandoned, and nobody wants it because it isn't connected to their municipal power grid, and the top floor is trashed. Nobody wants to take the effort of running high voltage wires for the three or four blocks it would take to reconnect that edge of the city, not to mention they have perennial power shortages anyway. Your lease is contingent on you making substantial improvements on the property, and if you do so in six months, they'll sign the deed over to you for free. It's as close as Megaton as to an eyesore, I 'spose, but it was the only thing that had enough space that you said was a priority."

Lily blinked. She hadn't known the specifics, just that Louis said his brother had found a large building in Megaton she could buy, 'This is a bit different than buying a property. Am I expected to make substantial capital improvements to a property I don't own? What if they try to screw me at six months since I've made the property so valuable? Well... at that point, I will have made the building into something more like a bunker in terms of its defensibility, and possession is nine-tenths, after all. It will be challenging to displace me once I set up shop.'

Lily decided that, on the whole, it was an acceptable risk. She expected to be on the city council of Megaton within six months or at least one of the most important businesses and citizens by then, to say nothing of her plans to personally solve these so-called power shortages. She nodded and thanked the two men one last time before ruffling Doctor Robotron's hair and departing.

She found her Apprentice making herself useful and directing the loading of all of their clinic supplies and all the crates that Lily brought, which included her second-generation power system, fabricator and other technology. She did not like those crates being out of her sight when they weren't in a place like Scott's, which was guarded by dozens of security robots. It was the entirety of her technical progress in the past months, after all, and it would be a debilitating blow if they were stolen or destroyed. 'Well, one step at a time,' Lily supposed.

Lily told her Apprentice straight out, "We'll be taking this truck; luckily, the cab is big enough for all of us. But if Nick or Isis annoy me too much, I will kick them and you out into the trailer bed with the guards, understand?"

"Yes, Dr St. Claire! I'm sure they will be fine! They each have books to read," replied Alice.

Books from Lily's library, she presumed with a slight narrowing of her eyes, 'Whatever so long as they didn't get greasy fingerprints on the pages or rest the book open and damage its spine.'

None of her memories predisposed her to be too accommodating of little children, and Alice's brother and sister looked both close to about ten years old, maybe five years younger than she was and definitely in the age where Lily would find them the most annoying.

It wasn't too much longer before they were on the road. It was a bit too much to expect that there would be radios in the trucks, but she supposed since she only had to follow the truck in front of her, it wasn't necessary.

It would have been nice, though, especially if they were attacked. Which they were, shortly before arriving at the bridge to cross the Potomac river. Alice got really nervous when she heard the sporadic shots ahead, but Lily reassured her after she could clearly identify the Ma Deuce on the armoured front truck and put paid to the half dozen or so raiders that thought, for some reason, it was a good idea to attack the well armoured, well-armed convoy as it fired in well-aimed single shots or small, economic bursts. The convoy stopped briefly while the guards policed up any gear, equipment or salvage from the dead raiders.

They weren't driving very fast at all, no more than twenty-five or thirty kilometres per hour given the terrain, but they still planned on arriving in Megaton before it got dark. They made a stop at Big Town for about an hour while some things were unloaded and other things loaded, and once more at a different settlement that she did not recognize from the games.

They arrived at the gates of Megaton with a couple of hours left in the day.

The first thing she discovered about the large settlement of Megaton was that it was nothing like what was depicted in Fallout 3, except for the fact that it did supposedly have an unexploded nuclear bomb in the centre of town, which was one of Lily's first priorities to disable after she set up shop.

Lily did not intend to count on plot armour to keep her alive while living in the blast radius of what looked like Tsar Bomba Senior. Instead, she planned on taking detailed scans of the device and then programming a lot of nanomachines to trash the detonation circuits and inject them via some gel after she was one hundred per cent sure that they wouldn't trigger a detonation.

She recalled that when you attempted to disarm the bomb in the game, it told you that while it would take a lot of demolition experience to disarm it, it was relatively easy to make it explode, but she did not believe that for a second. It was always harder to make a nuclear bomb explode than to make it safe; they were designed that way. And Lily refused to believe the USA of the Fallout universe would diverge so completely in terms of strategic weapons design. It wasn't like Megaton's bomb was an unexploded Chinese bomb dropped there; someone had drug it out of the nearby military base as an ornament for some reason. Lily didn't know if the plot in the game ever discovered the precise reason why or who was responsible. Maybe that guy in Tenpenny Tower? She couldn't remember, or it was never stated in the game.

Still, Lily wouldn't try to disarm the bomb herself until she was sure she had enough internal scans and understanding of how it was built that she could build a whole new bomb from scratch. Her medichines couldn't heal her from being totally incinerated, after all.

The nuke in the town square was, essentially, the only thing about Megaton that was entirely like it was depicted in the game. Megaton, in the universe Lily found herself in, was a lot bigger. It consisted of a surface area of more than twenty-five kilometres. It was set up in a rough circle over five kilometres in diameter, and it must have taken a decade or more to build the walls and security fences surrounding the town. There were also over ten thousand people living in Megaton, which was quite a significant increase from the twenty or so NPCs in the game.

The buildings in Megaton were also, for the most part, in much better condition. In the game, it looked like a shantytown that wouldn't look out of place in the slums of Monrovia, with buildings built of thin corrugated aluminium sheets. The reality was that the buildings were in pretty good shape. Most of them were pre-war, and they had been repaired.

Even the building that she would be occupying had been repaired since the bombs dropped; however, in over two hundred years, it had become slightly dilapidated again, but not to the point of being a barely together ruin like most of the buildings in Fallout 3.

Since Lily was paying them to deliver her things directly to her new building, she had to wait while everything else was unloaded, her Protectron crates re-loaded, and a second driver could be arranged. Lily also hired five general labourers for three hours, which barely cost any caps at all.

She drove the truck over to her building, parked it and got the labourers to unload it before watching the truck. Lily wasn't really afraid of these men she hired, but they did not seem entirely trustworthy, so the first boxes they unloaded were the Protectrons, which Lily immediately uncrated and activated.

The labourers were, from that moment, much more polite and didn't look at her belongings as covetously or at her or Alice's bodies as lewdly as before. That was good, as it might prove difficult to hire the couple dozen of labourers tomorrow if Lily ended up having to kill this batch tonight. She didn't know if they had some union, after all.

Lily briefly explored the building's first couple of floors, discovering it had a basement, to her surprise. The two elevators did not work, of course, but that could be fixed. All in all, she was shocked and amazed at the good condition of the building.

She ordered the labourers to unload all the boxes and carry most of them into the basement. This was where they would set up briefly, as it was more defensible. They groused a bit about dragging heavy boxes down flights of stairs but accomplished everything at sunset.

Lily paid them and watched them depart. She was pretty sure that if she did not have the two Protectrons that they would have sold the information of two women and two children with a lot of expensive-looking boxes for five caps or perhaps tried to assault them themselves. Another thing to thank Scott and Sophie for.

Lily squinted at them as they walked away. Then she turned to face her Apprentice and her siblings, "Alright, Alice, gremlins. We will be staying in the basement tonight. Gremlins, Alice has already sworn an oath to defend my secrets -- you are members of her household, so in this neo-feudal society we find ourselves in, that means you are subject to her oath as well. In other words, if you maliciously betray my secrets, I will kill you... or worse, I will make Alice kill you for betraying both her and me, regardless of how old or young you are. Roger?"

Alice frowned a bit at the straight threat to the lives of her brother and sister, but the boy named Nick and the girl named Isis nodded their heads rapidly, so Lily took it as the right thing to say. Alice finally found her voice and said, "Don't worry, Dr St. Claire! Nick and Isis would never betray family!"

Family? Is that what we are? Lily wasn't so sure, but she nodded.

"One verbal warning, then escalating levels of force to dissuade trespassers," she ordered the Protectrons, which acknowledged the order with a Roger Roger that Lily could have sworn was stolen straight out of the Star War prequels. One was set to guard the stairs while the other was doing a lazy patrol of the first floor of the building. Then they descended the stairs to the basement. It was a large, unfinished bare concrete single-room-style basement with support pillars around the load-bearing areas. Lily liked it and was going to take it over for her industrial base.

Lily ordered, "Alice, help me open these boxes; then you can set up your beds anywhere on that side of the basement for tonight."

Lily set up her generator and fabricator near the building's main circuit breaker panel. In the next few days, after she got everything running, she would fabricate a large industrial DC to AC inverter so that she could connect her generator directly to the building's panel here, which was expecting AC power. Then she could see what parts of the building required electrical repair if any.

It had been her experience that the electrical wiring in buildings she had discovered had generally withstood the test of time. So, unless there was an apparent short somewhere that might start a fire, she did not expect significant electrical repairs to be needed. If she were lucky, one or both of the elevators would either work immediately or require minimal maintenance to run.

She worked through the night to get everything unpacked, set up and operating, including the tripod-mounted automatic sentry gun she had built the week before. It used entirely carbon-based motors and construction but used sensors and an eyebot quantum core as its processor.

Unfortunately, this prototype model wasn't smart enough to do its own target acquisition and discrimination of friend and foe yet. Still, it was smart enough to receive that information wirelessly from the two Protectrons, so she set it up guarding the elevators and stairs and retasked the other Protectron to patrol with its comrade but focus on the primary area next to the elevators, to always stay within range to give targeting data to the sentry gun.

Lily worked most of the night, only waking Alice up close to morning to be on watch while she slept briefly for three hours, which was almost a whole night's rest for her, anyway. Lily did not plan on trusting their complete safety to the Protectrons or sentry gun, after all.

The following day, after breakfast and while Lily's fabricator was working on the several pieces necessary to piece together an effective security door for the basement, Lily left Alice in charge of her siblings and walked with a purpose towards the market area. She was told she could hire almost any number of men there last night.

This time, she did not attempt to just hire random people out of the parking lot of Home Depot or the Megaton equivalent, but she sought out a man who was close to a general contractor. She talked to two such men, the first of whom did not give Lily a good impression, so she just up and left his tiny office.

The second was a middle-aged man named Jeffrey Tombs, and he seemed much more honest. He asked her, "So you basically want every inch of the building cleaned, including all the debris up on the sixth floor?"

Lily nodded at him, "At a minimum, I need the first three floors, not including the basement, close to immaculate. The rest, well, just get rid of all the trash and debris for now."

Mr Tombs hummed and nodded, "I know what building you're in, and I've priced this job before. The guy didn't like my price, and that building's been empty ever since. I don't think anything has changed much. It'll be twenty-five hundred caps, and it'll take two to three weeks. I'll need over twenty men working this job, so it ain't cheap even if the building is more or less structurally sound."

Lily winced internally; that was a little bit less than a third of her working liquidity. Still, it didn't seem that out of bounds for twenty-plus men for fourteen days. Still, this and more would have to be done. She needed to get at least the first and second-floor setup to be able to take patients, "Agreed, Monsieur Tombs. Twenty-five per cent now, twenty-five per cent after a week, and fifty per cent when the job is done."

Mr Tombs seemed to consider that for a moment before nodding his head and extending out a hand for Lily to shake which she did, "You got yourself a deal, Doctor."