Light at the end of the tunnel

In a small office, a kindly Gandalf-looking old gentleman garbed in robes sat behind a desk. He was listening to a young blonde woman, his daughter, give him a report. After she finished, he was quiet for some time, "Good job, Sarah. I'm glad you came back safe, not that I expected anything less. The group of mercenaries that helped you is a bit of an anomaly, though."

The blonde Paladin relaxed from her parade rest posture at her father's wave of his hand and nodded, "Yes. Quite effective and well-trained, as local mercs go anyway. And, they had an Assaultron even if it seemed to be missing the laser. Especially that supposed Doctor that was either in command of them or, perhaps, had hired them for security. Here, listen to this recording. This is her transmission I mentioned earlier; we think from a hand-held radio that our GNR relay recorded..." She pulled out a small holotape and inserted it into a player.

Static played over the speakers, followed by a woman speaking in a light French accent, "Golf November Romeo, please tell them zeir enemies consist of at least forty raiders of above average armament and bearing, including a crew-served Russian Dushka fifty calibre 'eavy machine gun, and two mortar teams that are about to begin ranging fire against zeir position. We are set up in enfilade on ze third story of the Coolidge building, and in position to provide raking fire. We especially intend to silence their heavy weapons and indirect fire capability. We would appreciate if once their 'eavy guns are silenced, a coordinated attack, although we understand you may not trust a random voice on the radio. We're going to attack in 90 seconds. Lastly, the Assaultron is ours, not raider equipment, so please don't fire on it. Over, out."

The eyebrows of the Elder Lyons rise considerably, "Thank you for playing that; your report that she coordinated with you over radio doesn't, in fact, give the whole picture here. She sounds like someone who has at least gone through our Small Unit Tactics leadership course..." he trailed off before continuing, "Or a similar course offered by an organization that is at least on a similar level as us."

He tapped his fingers on his desk, "Certainly, neither the average Doctor nor the average Wasteland local would know the specific term enfilade; even if they were a military prodigy and intuitively understood the tactical evolution, they wouldn't have the vocabulary and instead would have described it as flanking, or similar."

The woman remained silent but nodded after a moment, conceding the point. The Elder continued, "The HMG you brought back, was it a DsHK?"

Sarah nodded, "Dual barrel Chinese copy of the Russian DsHK, manufactured circa the 1970s or 1980s. Scribe Anderson says she plans to build a new auto-turret with it after adjusting it to fire US standard 12.7mm cartridges that we can manufacture ourselves in quantity. That thing was as terrifying as any minigun from which I've been under fire from."

She paused before wondering aloud, "Maxson knows where the raiders got it. The mortar tubes looked even older. Anderson thinks they must have looted a military museum and have been manufacturing their ammo, somehow. I've made a note for the Pride to be on the look-out for any raiders featuring red skull decoration. This capability implies some sort of pre-war industrial tech that we could use if they can manufacture arbitrary ammunition for weapons that do not even use any standard US calibres. The mortar rounds and ammunition for the HMG we recovered seemed newly manufactured, anyway."

The Elder nodded, "That's a good idea, Sarah. But back to this Doctor St. Claire, not only does she seem to be as educated as a Paladin-Sergeant in tactics, but she appears to be able to recognize an old pre-war Russian heavy machine gun either by sight or sound? And this is in addition to what you called a classical education that she revealed to you? What she said is true; most Wasteland doctors would not recognize the term Hippocratic oath or its history."

Sarah nodded slowly this time. "That is true. Honestly, I definitely didn't recognize that HMG as anything but a particularly scary heavy machine gun. And, I had to look up what exactly Asclepius was, or rather who Asclepius was, when I got back to base. Could she be an Enclave deserter? Maybe the whole 'mercenary band' are former Enclave? A doctor or researcher with four soldiers all deserting together? We know they've had issues with desertion. That would explain why a doctor was so educated in military matters -- if they had to become mercenaries to feed themselves, she would HAVE to learn."

"I was considering that possibility until you played that recording but didn't you hear her accent? There is no way someone born into the Enclave would have a French accent, and there is no way that someone," Elder Lyons made the universal air quotes gesture before continuing, "... recruited ... would have an easy time deserting, or be likely to receive either advanced medical or military training from them. Maybe if she were already a doctor before being kidnapped by the Enclave, but it doesn't quite fit the facts."

Sarah tilted her head to one side, "That's a French accent? I knew she sounded like a bit like a Miss Nanny, but I couldn't actually place it."

Gandalf brightened for a moment, apparently eager to share a favourite movie with his daughter, "Oh, then we've got to watch The Fall of Vichy tonight after dinner. It is one of the better WW2 films, it starred Verra Keyes, and while I don't think her accent was very good, there are several actual French actors and actresses in the film that you can hear. The action is quite good, also." Then he coughed a couple of times, "But as I was saying, none of the facts fit precisely. I think she must have been targetting that pre-war lab specifically, hired these mercs for back-up, and it was just a chance that she was there to assist you. What did the scribes say about the lab? Do we know what she was after and probably got in there?"

Sarah winced a little, "Ah, the Scribes say it was a pre-war lab that studied viruses, bacteria and infectious diseases in general. We know that she took away one cryogenic freezer because we saw parts of it that she disassembled left in the lab that matched an identical model she left behind. The one she left behind had some frozen bacteria and viruses inside. Scribe Ferguson surmises that it wouldn't have been difficult to jury-rig the missing freezer to be powered temporarily off energy cells or maybe even fission batteries."

The white-bearded man blinked, then offered a simple, emphatic, "What?"

Sarah held up her hands placatingly, "Yes, I was very concerned too. But the Scribes say it was all civilian research on normal diseases and a low-level lab -- the most dangerous thing we found was some prion diseases. So there definitely wasn't any kind of bio-weapon or FEV research going on here; the scribes have totally ruled that possibility out." Her father relaxed quite a bit at that but still had his eyebrow raised to the ceiling. It was awe-inspiring; Sarah had attempted to master this gesture in front of a mirror ever since she began to lead Initiates in battle but had not quite pulled it off, yet. She wondered if you had to perhaps live through many subordinates giving you heart attacks before it became second nature. If so, she should have it down in two years, tops.

She continued, "St. Claire called it a damn 'life sciences laboratory,' which wasn't, even, really, lying. I don't know why she would even have told me about it if she was doing anything nefarious there. We might never have discovered it. 50/50, I'd say. My best guess is that she didn't even think we would care, so whatever she took in that freezer, if anything, is probably not very harmful. Perhaps the freezer was empty, and she just wanted some lab equipment? Would a medical doctor be even interested in common, un-weaponized pre-war viruses and bacteria?"

Her father roll-tapped his fingers on his desk again; it was something he often did while he was thinking. "Not a regular doctor, no. Maybe you're right. There is nothing, in itself, that seems more than mildly suspicious." He sighed, "Well, okay, we have more questions now than we did when we started ,out. I'll have a file started on the good Doctor -- both as a possible friend of the Brotherhood who has done us a good turn and also to collate any future mention of her in the Capital Wasteland. I guess that's all we can do now. I'm not too fond of mysteries, though, Sarah. Dismissed."

---

Sophie was very concerned when Lily returned, trailing Matilda, who obviously had seen some heavy combat. But all Scott said, after looking at the Assaultron, was, "You're fixing that."

Lily just snorted, trying not to laugh. Her trip was definitely a bit more perilous than she had intended when she agreed to go, but she returned with a lot of riches.

Grace had intended to sell most of the electronic and general items to the trader in town; Lily believed she was dealing with Louis' brother, who ran the transhipment hub. However, they ran into a problem where there were too many drugs -- they wouldn't sell those here. Instead, Grace had a contact in Megaton. But it prevented a proper split from being accomplished as the team didn't have enough liquidity held in common to buy her out on her share of the drugs.

So, instead, Lily took some electronics and a fair bit of the analgesic drugs, although there was so much more that she didn't take that she just didn't need. Still, even with all the extras she was taking, she ended up with over two thousand caps more to her name. Grace's Grenadiers would likely end up with more than that when they sold off the drugs in Megaton.

She planned on making most of the electronics a gift to Scott before she left. There was a company mainframe that serviced the discount electronics repair and sales centre. Lily felt that she could probably get it running again, which would make it a lot easier for Scott to coordinate all the simpler bots like his small army of over four dozen Protectrons and half dozen or so of Sentrybots that were in various stages of repair.

Lily's parting gift to Sophie had been planned for some time. She had managed to get full scans of her chassis and planned to fabricate a replacement exterior chassis in diamondoid materials. Since her fabricator working area was so small, it would take building the shapes of each cowling as something like three-dimensional puzzle pieces that fit together without the composite form losing much strength.

She also planned to include a rapid-firing laser from a Protectron. While it was too big to fit in Sophie's manipulators, Lily could fit it inside her chassis and then run specially fabricated diamond-based fiberoptics that would serve as a flexible waveguide through the robot's manipulator arm so the firing aperture could be formed in her claw. This would allow her to fire the laser as a normal Mister Gutsy could, and they could reuse the same targeting software in case Miss Nanny's did not come with that sort of thing standard.

The high rate of fire laser had a relatively low damage per hit, but it was perfect for protecting oneself or one's boyfriend from being swarmed. Swarmed by, say ... a swarm of ants. Lily hadn't forgotten about AntAgonizer's potential future murder of the sweet Miss Nanny. And the planned diamondoid-based chassis would be all but immune to an ant attacking it. It would also be somewhat more resistant to lasers, but this would come at the cost of being vulnerable to plasma weapons. Diamonds, despite being incredibly strong, were still just made of carbon after all and carbon burned.

Lily knew that there was no such thing in this world as solutions -- there were only trade-offs, and this trade-off was a pretty good one. Lily would warn Scott not to get in a shooting war with the Brotherhood or Enclave, and it should be fine.

Lily sat in her room in the Mechanist's secret lair, programming these plans on her CAD software while her fabricator ran another nanohive. She had gotten it down to six hours per nanite factory fabricated. She would have the ten spare nanohives built in less than a week. Getting pure carbon was already becoming a real hassle, though, so she already had one of the spare nanohives earmarked to build a recycler. Dump unwanted trash in, and receive feedstock out. Sadly, it wouldn't work very well on most metallic items, but it would work perfectly on organic ones.

Lily finally felt like she was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, a point where the only constraint to her building projects might be one of discretion and not of capability. Soon.