I'll Take it in Trade

It took them another few hours to get everything they were taking loaded. With Scott's near seven tons of machine tools, her seventy-five fission reactors, an entire tracked construction vehicle as well and not to mention all of the miscellaneous items they found inside; they were running up against the forty-ton limit on her two-hundred-year-old trailer.

And there were still thousands of tons of stuff to take out of the factory, including over two hundred additional fission motors that they just couldn't fit in one trip, but it was all things Lily wasn't entirely interested in. Not enough to go back and forth, looting it thoroughly, anyway. Not personally, anyway.

They had found two additional MUVS attachments, one being a large front-end loader which was precisely what she wanted, and another being a large drill, almost big enough to turn the thing into a small boring machine.

She intended to create multiple sub-basements in her building but didn't see the drill as that useful, as it wasn't really designed to drill straight down. Perhaps if she started a tunnel from the outside? She'd have to do some simulations, but for now, she still intended to build a drilling machine using lasers. She could build a machine that could power multiple continual beams of lasers, rotating to chop up the ground, cooling it with liquid nitrogen so that the lasing heads didn't overheat.

They sat in the cab listening to one of Lily's songs that she had recorded onto holotapes; this one was Michael Bublé singing his cover of "Save the Last Dance For Me." It was suitably big-band inspired, so it sounded more or less at home even to Gary. In fact, Gary loved it and asked why he had never heard it before, to which Lily replied that the singer was Canadian, which caused him to laugh.

"You need to get these songs to that Three Dog man. It's barely been a week, and if I have to listen to the same twenty-five songs anymore, I think I will show his ass just what the Good Fight really is," replied Gary when the second Michael Bublé song, "Feeling Good," started to play.

Scott nodded, looking moved as well, "It really is hard to listen to the same songs repeatedly. But make him pay for them; that man is just a Brotherhood front. He'd be dead a hundred times over if he wasn't under their protection, and that means he is under their control. Despite his flowery words, a man cannot be free if he depends on others that aren't his family and close friends to defend himself."

Lily raised her eyebrows at the savvy and accurate political analysis from the Mechanist. That might have been the longest string of words she had ever heard him say and certainly the most philosophical she had ever heard him.

Lily tilted her head to the side, "You 'ave issues with zhe Brotherhood of Steel, too?"

Scott scowled behind the wheel as they approached the broken-down electronics store that he would soon be vacating, "I don't, but only because they don't know I exist anymore. They repeatedly hassled the merchant I used to Apprentice with for selling robots and old tech. Honestly, they're the main threat, not raiders, that I plan on having to defend myself against. Well, the main threat that is actually a threat. That's why I liked that giant magnetron and dish; it would cook them inside their Power Armour."

Lily chuckled. He really was quite verbose on the subject, and it was another area where she agreed with him completely. However, she mentioned, "Zhey will know you exist once Gary and you start selling purified water to Canterbury Commons, you know. Zhey will definitely track it back to Vault 108, even if nobody else does."

Scott frowned but nodded, "Yes. I have already anticipated that. Are you still willing to make that trade we discussed before?"

When she had mentioned to him she was going to construct dozens of auto-turrets in her hospital he offered to trade her five Protectrons for fifteen auto-turrets, so long as the turrets featured both a laser and her electro-beam weapon. He suspected the high-intensity electrolaser might prove very effective against Power Armour. She wasn't sure, herself, as Power Armour was supposed to be insulated if it was maintained properly but intended to build the ones in the auto-turret with at least ten times the number of capacitors as the ones in her Termitrons, just in case.

As far as she was concerned, it was a good trade. Each Protectron-arm had two ruby-gain media to facilitate their rapid firing, so she would only have to supply five more to create the fifteen auto-turrets since she already intended to transform all of her Protectrons into Termitrons, with one laser arm and one electrolaser arm.

"Yes, of course. It is zhe good deal for me," she replied to him, which caused him to smile and nod, and say, "The best deals are good for both parties. I have a lot of robots, including heavy Sentrybots. But assaulting my Vault would involve walking down a trapped, prepared corridor filled with auto-guns with robots firing down the other end? It would be suicide, no matter how zealous one is to "protect" the people against my technology. The Brotherhood talks a good game, but they only try to steal your tech if you can't kill a lot of them. Suppose you can? Then they make peace with you. Just look at Rivet City. That place has a lot more defences than it lets on or shows to the tourists that visit the place."

Wow, she was really getting Scott to lecture today! She liked it!

Gary was listening to their conversation, "Rivet City is the settlement on a beached aircraft carrier? That hurts my heart to hear it is just acting as a glorified town, but Scott is definitely right. You could expect a hidden sentry gun in the ceiling at every passageway intersection on every single deck. And the standard anti-boarding complement includes twenty sentrybots in sensitive locations and over a hundred marine Assaultrons, which were at least half as sassy as your Matilda. Plus, if it still has its offensive armament, at least twenty nuclear or conventional-tipped sea-skimming missiles in vertical launch tubes, which are easily programmable for ground-attack mode. Oh, and plus all the nukes and missiles the Air Wing had, which is probably in the hundreds since they weren't in range of the enemy to use them when the bombs fell, some of which are precision-guided ground-attack cruise missiles. It's very likely that Rivet City could nuke the Brotherhood's HQ at the Pentagon, and visa-versa so they may have settled into some manner of détente."

Both Scott and Sophie glanced at him; Scott's eyebrows were raised to the ceiling. Sophie was the first to speak, "Wow, Gary! I 'ad almost forgotten zat just a few years ago; from your perspective, you might 'ave been sailing on Rivet City. You did say you were on carriers, didn't you?"

Gary nodded, "I'm not 100%, but I think the only carrier near the home port in the Atlantic when things went to shit was the USS Charlton Heston. If so, yeah, I served on her for some time. Good ship. It's a shame she ain't in the water, but at least she is still protecting her shipmates, even now."

Lily had already read a lot of the history books, so she wasn't as surprised by that ship's name as she would have been when she first arrived. Of course, in this world, there was a movie star turned President in the 1980s as well, except it wasn't Reagan; it was Charlton Heston. His filmography was a bit different, also. He still starred in Ben Hur in the 1950s, but not one of the Planet of the Apes films was made in the Fallout universe, probably because they were a cautionary tale about nuclear weapons.

"Perhaps you could go visit it, maybe find all zhe non-regulation stills you 'id away in 'er compartments while you were serving aboard 'er," Lily commented dryly.

"Illegal stills! How dare you impinge my character so accurately, madam!" Gary said, feigning shock, which caused both of them to laugh, although Scott, who never served as an NCO, didn't get the joke.

"I think I will go visit her, though, when we get everything settled in Megaton, and I have some wheels," Gary mused.

Scott backed the truck into position at the electronics store's loading dock and turned to Lily, "It is already past 1700. I suggest we all sleep here tonight. We can load what you're taking back to Megaton on your flatbed trailer tonight before it gets too dark, and then we can set out in the morning."

Lily hummed and nodded. They still needed to load the rest of Scott's stuff, including his important computer mainframe, and take everything to Vault 108. It might be two or three days before she could get back to Megaton.

Scott then paused, "I have a proposal." Lily blinked and asked, "Sure?"

"We go directly to Megaton tomorrow. I would like to get all of those upgrades as soon as possible. You're not planning on using this truck right away after you get back, are you? If not, and you don't mind lending it to me, Sophie and I can go back and move all of our stuff by ourselves afterwards. I'll bring back your truck in a couple of weeks, along with a load of scrap metal you said you could recycle," he said calmly.

Lily clucked her tongue and considered. She had been planning on starting to convert the truck into what amounted to an armoured RV. That was a pre-requisite to her assault of the VSS building, but with Gary's project she was investing in, she would instead be building two trucks, more or less from the ground up.

There wasn't a lot of engineering involved, as she was planning on mostly copying this current truck, at least as far as the transmission, clutch and propellor shaft were concerned. But, she still likely wouldn't get any work on her armoured RV done for over a month or more, especially considering she would have to return to working regular shifts in the hospital.

She nodded, "Zhat is fine. Zhe steel would help a lot, actually. I need a lot of nickel, also, almost even more zhan steel, if you know of any sources."

Scott looked a bit confused, "Nickel, more than that is in stainless steel?"

Lily nodded, "Stainless steel would be very useful for its nickel content. But one of zhe alloys I am making is close to fifty per cent nickel. It's a high-heat resistant alloy, and I'm going to use it in layers as armour against lasers and, to a much lesser extent, zhe plasma."

Scott rocked back a little bit, surprised. "I see." He was quiet for a moment, "I think you will just have to accept that you'll end up with a lot more elemental iron than you need, as stainless steel and other steel alloys are still probably your best source of nickel in large quantities. I think your best bet is just to take all the nickel out of all the steel alloys, then make soft steel ingots and trade them. Plenty of people, even the Brotherhood, would buy or trade for them."

Lily made a face, but that was what she was thinking too. Well, she hadn't considered trading the "waste iron" in the form of steel ingots; that was a good idea. Nickel wasn't an uncommon metal; it was pretty common, actually. But it was just used in small amounts in everything. Very few things had high concentrations.

He paused again and then added, "But... There is an old so-called battery recycling plant not too far from the Corvega factory. Like a lot of Pre-War corporations, they were crooks. They didn't recycle anything and just dumped all the batteries in a pit in the back. That's the only other source of high concentrations of nickel I can think of. It might last you a little while. I'll visit it and bring back a few tons."

Lily smiled at this and nodded. They dismounted the truck, and Gary had fun driving around that forklift. They removed all of the things she was taking back to Megaton out of the trailer. When they were about to leave Scott's share of twenty fission motors in the back of the trailer, he piped up again, "How many fission motors would you take in trade to make me a utility truck like you are going to make for Gary?"

Lily blinked. Now she had three to make? She considered it. "Five, plus two tons of zhe steel zhat you can deliver to me at any time. I'll keep your tab. And I'll even give you the design files for the vehicle, too."

That was arguably more than she was charging Gary, but the single-tracked vehicle that she was going to use as a front-end loader was immediately useful to her. Plus, Scott was getting the design files, so he would be able to build his own versions eventually. The technology transfer was priced at a premium, but she knew Scott well enough to know that he would want that.

Scott nodded, a satisfied smile on his face. "That's a good deal. You wouldn't mind me selling competing vehicles in the future, then?"

Lily shook her head slowly. She wanted to get into the car business seriously like she wanted a bullet in the head, "You might 'ave to come to me for tires, zhough, eventually." They had taken over a dozen sets of good tires with them, which she would be taking back to Megaton. However, it was clear that despite how well they were manufactured, there weren't enough good tires to outfit dozens and dozens of vehicles. The tires were made of graphene, much as she suspected. Lily had no idea how the Fallout universe produced the graphene in arbitrary shapes like that but would very much like to take a loot---err look at a Firestone or Good Year factory to find out.

Lily would change the design, away from pneumatic tires and instead use amorphous carbon inside the tire instead of air as the main failure point she noticed was the metal installed in the valve stem. However, she had no desire to share her carbon manufacturing technology with anyone, not even the Mechanist. Perhaps, years in the future, she might sell him a purpose-built tire manufacturing machine, but only if it was suitably trapped and secured from reverse engineering.

He shrugged, "That would be fine." Gary popped up from the seat of his forklift with his opinion while grabbing two crates of fission motors, "Steel tracks might not be out of the question given the state of the National Highway system, you know what I mean? The main disadvantage of tracked vehicles is speed and fuel efficiency. Oh, and damage to roads. Nobody drives fast these days, and fission motors make fuel efficiency pointless. And nobody gives a fuck about the roads, such as they are."

Lily chuckled, and Scott glanced at him and nodded, "That's true." Despite her denigrating the inflatable pneumatic tires earlier, she had intended to use inflatable graphene-based tracks on her armoured RV, after all. At low pressures, it would work a lot like a tire, but a highly inflated graphene track would work much like steel tracks. Gary was incorrect; some places wouldn't let a steel-tracked vehicle inside of them. Megaton was one of them.

She glanced inside the box trailer, seeing only Scott's stuff and all of the things he looted in the factory. Good thing, too, since her flatbed trailer was loaded almost to capacity. With all the robots the Mechanist would bring, some of which to trade to her and others for his self-protection, the trailer would be completely full. She tested the tires and didn't see any bowing, so she figured the reinforcement she made to it was very effective.

They ate a home-cooked meal by Sophie which was excellent, as usual, and afterwards, Lily brought Gary to the guest room. After she closed the door, she told him slyly, "I zhink you owe me a debt, but you can pay for it in trade if you like, yes?" With your body, she left unsaid, as it was understood.

---xxxxxx---

The next morning, after a shower, she set out to have a short conversation with Gary to set his expectations. He laughed and waved her off and sat down with her to give her his own version of the talk she was planning.

He said, "Doc, don't worry about me. You're a very nice woman, but I have very highly tuned emotional radar, and you know what this highly trained instrument detects when I point it at you?"

Lily tilted her head to the side precisely forty-five degrees, "Not really?" However, if he really did have some way to detect emotions, she knew exactly what he was implying. Perhaps Gary Prime's baseline brain had some study potential, too!

Gary continued, "Well, I was about to say not much... you're not one of those psychopaths that don't feel anything, but you don't feel much, except you just seriously spiked with something along the lines of... academic interest, perhaps? I'm not sure. But it is the strongest thing you've ever felt around me."

She was incredibly academically interested, but that wasn't the emotion she was feeling, so she corrected him, leaning forward, her tone thick with as much emotion as she could emote in a husky tone, "Curiosity." He really could detect emotions? Fuck, she left her scanner in the truck!

Wait, this possibly totally ruined most of her FEV research! What if the only reason she produced a Psyker-Gary was that Gary Prime was some kind of latent telepath? Like Dianna Troi? She wanted to groan and dissect him at the same time but outwardly presented back her serene expression of neutrality. Where the fuck would she find a gaggle of insane clones, she wouldn't feel bad about experimenting on?!

Wait, she had already given up on FEV research, so it didn't matter, right?

This caused him to grin, "And now frustration? You feel curiosity strongly. No wonder you're a scientist, then, eh?" He sat his hands on his lap, "But the reason I told you this secret of mine, which I trust you will keep--" his tone turned slightly menacing when mentioning that, which excited her a little bit, "--is that after my wife left me, I made myself a promise never to get seriously involved with a certain kind of woman."

Lily blinked at him and then asked, offended, "You think I'm crazy?!"

Gary chuckled and then shook his head and said gently, "No, I think you are exceptionally rational. The type of woman I won't get involved with is the type that can't love me back."

Ah, that stung her to the quick. Well, no, it didn't. It was exactly the same reason she had started this conversation with both him and Grace. It was actually quite refreshing for someone to understand her without her having to spell it out. She nodded, "I understand, and you're precisely right. Zhat was why I was going to 'ave zhis conversation. I didn't want to 'urt your feelings after you got the wrong expectation. You don't 'ave to worry; I will definitely keep your secret." She paused, "Say, does zhis... emotional radar thing of yours run in your family? On your matrilineal or your patrilineal sides, perhaps? Or both?" Her tone was very casual as if she was just asking as a lark.

He laughed and said, "You can't trick me with that practised casual tone of yours, Doc! You're practically drooling to know more, eh?" He glanced at his Pip-Boy, "You know, it is still quite early... Just how much time did you budget for this conversation? I have a better idea."

---xxxxxx---

She did get an answer, but she was distracted from thinking about it until she took a second shower of the morning; this time, she wasted water like a spendthrift with her hand on the button, just letting the mist play across her body as she considered the revelations she had learned.

His mother and sister had the same ability, and it was sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker but could be traced throughout his matrilineal lineage.

That meant it was a dominant trait! Just how many people on this planet had this ability and didn't talk about it, then?! Was it a relatively recent phenomenon? Maybe only in the past five hundred years or so?

The ability to sense the emotions of a person provided such an incredible survival advantage in a social species like homo sapiens that it either had to be a recent mutation, or every noble or member of any aristocracy had to be swimming in it. According to her social assistant, it would practically guarantee leadership positions in any small village or town society.

She did not think the latter was true. If all world leaders had this ability, she believed that world war would be much less likely, but she had to admit that was just what her intuition was telling her.

She muttered, under the mists, "Zhere are more zhings in 'eaven and earth, Lily, than are dreamt of in your Science, huh?"

She lifted her hand from the small square button and then growled and yelled in a Chinese accent, slamming her fist back into the button with force, "That is bullshit! There is nothing science can't explain!"

She blinked. She had never made the mistake of speaking in the wrong accent, once, in this universe, yet. She was feeling utterly emotional! How odd! She sighed and instituted a recommended 4-7-8 breathing pattern that was clinically proven to help settle one's emotions. She recognized that outburst wasn't precisely nor solely due to this new curiosity. It was something she had been bottling up ever since she had come to this universe so inexplicably.

She calmed herself. The word magic only meant she could not explain something presently. Not that she would never be able to explain it. She would fully understand this new fascinating aspect of the human mind, just as she would eventually understand how to travel between universes, too.

She glanced down at her hand. It was bleeding, but her PHOENIX system had already healed the damage. However, she had completely broken the shower. It wouldn't turn off now. She sighed and reached up to turn off the valve at the small cistern that held the shower water. She would go grab a towel and fix this before anyone found out, and then she would cart up a replacement bucket of water from the well.

Nothing would escape her understanding. Not in the end. Nothing. She had nothing but time, after all.