Chapter Eighty-Nine

HELIOS One. Mojave Wasteland

According to Veronica, who'd decided to join me as a sort of unofficial liaison between myself and the local Brotherhood Chapter for as long as I worked towards getting the local Brotherhood Chapter to leave, this installation had been constructed some years before the war by a company called Poseidon Energy. To the public, this place had just been a solar energy plant an effort to find alternate sources of power once the fossil fuels ran out.

Upon the surface of it, HELIOS One did indeed look to be nothing more than a solar energy plant. It contained an enormous array of reflectors and the power plant itself housed steam turbines and all of the other machines required to transform the energy into usable electricity for the nearby settlements.

As such it was worthy of a little study by the Ad-Mech as while they had means of generating vast amounts of power this place was a relic of what was for them an ancient time when mankind was still confined to a single world. It was as much archaeology as it wasn't an attempt to restore the plant to full functionality.

Since the red-robed cyborgs only had a minor interest in studying this place and only so many people they could put to work it had been agreed to fix up the plant and then use it to provide energy for certain parts of the Mojave. Custody of the plant would be turned over to those who had been recruited into the lower order of the machine cult, they would know enough to keep the plant running for Mr House.

With Hoover Dam being so close by you'd think that the locals would have all the power they ever needed. Only this wasn't the case as most of the juice was getting sent to the NCR or just to New Vegas directly. Once up and running the solar plant would provide energy for the different settlements in the area such as Nipton and Novac.

Progress to this end was slow not just due to lack of manpower but because the plant had been damaged extensively since the Great War, and more recently due to the conflict between the New California Republic and the Brotherhood of Steel forces. The local Brotherhood Chapter had taken many losses while trying to hold onto this plant and even Veronica didn't really know why.

From what I learned from one of the onsight Engineseers (tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus whose specialisation is the maintenance and repair of the many technological instruments of the Imperium of Man) only a third of its reflectors were still fully intact and able to fully rotate. To make matters worse, various issues in the plant itself made the energy transfer inefficient, meaning that the plant was operating far under its full potential. This was something the Ad-Mech needed to fix.

Before the Brotherhood abandoned the facility, they put it in a nearly inactive state and armed the pre-War security system. Despite the NCR's best efforts, they'd had no luck in getting the plant to work to its potential or in deactivating the security system. This was because the NCR did not possess the scientific knowledge to get the plant in ideal shape. The Ad-Mech did even if that understanding came with boatloads of mysticism.

Both the Followers of the Apocalypse and the Brotherhood of Steel were reticent to help us or Me House for political reasons. The Followers of the Apocalypse didn't know us well enough to trust us and Brotherhood of Steel was held up in their bunker unwilling to do anything. A real shame as this project would benefit many people by providing them with both heat and light even Mr House planned to charge people for it.

"You know, I've been meaning to ask," I said to Veronica as we entered a less crowded part of the power plant "How did your lot manage to escape when the NCR took over this place?".

I might not be a warlord but even I could see how easily the NCR troops could have surrounded the plant. The solar energy plant had no fortifications and the ground around it was flat.

"Well I wasn't actually here during the attack," Veronica admitted "When the NCR arrived, I was at the 188 trading post because even before we retreated underground, I still had to leave all the time to search for supplies. When I left, it felt like just another supply run, but when I came back the Brotherhood was already gone so I went back to the 188 stop for a while. Eventually, I returned to the bunker".

Made sense since she was a scribe, not a knight, she wasn't meant to fight as a soldier.

"I was never actually told about ARCHIMEDES, whatever it is," Veronica went to say "I don't think Elder Elijah trusted anyone other than himself with any of the research. I didn't need to know, so I was never told".

ARCHIMEDES was a project that Poseidon Energy was working on behind closed doors with the United States military (the parts that would become the Enclave I'd bet) they were commissioned to develop a new and devastating weapon powered by the sun. That part was not told to the public.

Elijah hadn't explained why HELIOS One was so important to the rest of his people and since many of them died defending this place it seemed wrong that Elijah didn't share the knowledge. It was hoped that if we could share the truth with the local Brotherhood Chapter that it would cause at least some of the scribes and knights to question his leader and start thinking about taking a new course of action.

"So, does the Brotherhood out here just keep its people in the dark then?" Sarah Lyons asked, sounding a little bit confused "Doesn't sound very trusting. I mean I know that my father doesn't tell me everything right away, but he always let me know what it was we were fighting for".

Give the Imperium's habit of mushroom management I was in no place to judge.

"Information can be a weapon," said Veronica "and the fewer people who know something, the safer the information becomes. All I knew for certain was that there was something named ARCHIMEDES inside Helios, and Elder Elijah seemed to think it was important".

Since I did trust these two I told them that ARCHIMEDES was in fact a weapons platform that focused the power of the sun and was aimed via a satellite.

"Hold on, when we decided to come here, I was under the impression that we were looking into a scientific project" Veronica almost shouted, "Not start messing with a superweapon".

She need not be worried.

"I have no intention of letting anyone get their hands on a superweapon" I assured the scribe "That's why we need to find this ARCHIMEDES weapon and disable it".

Since I had a cruiser in orbit with lots of guns it served my interest to shut down ARCHIMEDES so that no one could use it against the operations I had going on this planet.

"I'm going to need your help, Veronica," I said as I turned to face her "I had all the satellites in orbit disabled to stop the Enclave from coordinating, so the weapon is useless, but it would be for the best if we found evidence of it to show your Brotherhood and to make sure that no one blows this place up while trying to use it".

Having data on one such device wouldn't be a bad thing as it might be of interest to the Ad-Mech as a curiosity if nothing else. If I could grab a copy I would, but it wasn't that important to me.