Late fees assessed

Scott's voice was always a bit more tender when he talked to his favourite robot, "Thank you, Sophie. Please run the data line back to the terminal, and we can start after Lily finishes up with that... giant... water heater?" He seemed a little at loose ends, seeing the extensive collection of eclectic items the blonde woman had prepared.

Lily was, in fact, setting up a giant water heater, among other things. After that was done, it was time to test the first generator. And, to do that, she had to run it at its maximum rated continuous power, well, continuously.

That was a non-trivial problem, but one most people wouldn't consider, namely -- what do you do with all that power you've generated? It had to go somewhere, and despite what many people would think, you couldn't just wire into the Earth and call it a day; that just wouldn't work reliably.

So, Lily had wired in a number of power-intensive appliances, for lack of a better word. The station she was finishing would heat a huge tank of water, about the size of two hot tubs and heat it rapidly, essentially converting electricity into heat.

Another station had a bunch of lasers from disassembled Protectrons set to fire as fast as their cooling could manage, targeting the ground.

But the most significant power draw was something she had found at a nearby wrecked satellite dish. Lily felt it must be a former military radar station because she carted off the biggest cavity magnetron she'd ever seen. It must have weighed two metric tons, and it was a real pain, involving several robots and a lot of rope, getting it back to Scott's lair.

At first, Scott had been questioning why she had spent nearly four hours trying to cart the thing back until he saw it. But then, all he said was, "That is really cool." He still admitted he had no idea what the hell they would ever use it for, but he no longer complained about having it.

Lily had rigged a crude dish antenna, about the size of an umbrella, and hooked it up. She was careful to use superconducting wires going from the generator to the magnetron and then a flexible waveguide from the magnetron to the dish; otherwise, she would need over three centimetres thick wire to handle the approximately one hundred and forty-kilowatt draw she suspected the dish to be able to output.

Scott asked bluntly, "So, what is this test about and why are we out here doing it?"

Lily smiled at him, "Ah, it is a test of my latest invention. Also, part of the parting presents I am preparing for you two. I shall be leaving to go to Megaton in two to three weeks. We've reached the, how you say, diminishing returns with our lessons, yes?"

Scott considered this for a moment before nodding, "Yes. You've learned more in a month and a half than I did in five years when I first started out. I still have more to teach, but it would be a lot slower, I agree."

Sophie floated up and waggled her manipulators, "Oh, we shall be sorry to see you go, Miss Lily! And you needn't have prepared any gifts! Is this... some sort of electric generator or battery?"

They all backed into what Lily designated the safe area before she powered up the generator from the terminal, which began powering the various power sinks. Lasers began firing at the ground at their maximum safe continuous rate, given their cooling, while the water in the tank began bubbling.

Scott frowned at the tank of water. "I wish we could collect the steam so we could condense it back into water; letting it all go to waste is inefficient."

Lily smiled, "Ah, yes. I 'ad considered that, but it would 'ave taken a lot more time. Perhaps you could make a project of it and turn it into a water purifier yourself. You even 'ave robot labour to deal with the radioactive waste products. And yes, Sophie, it is an electric generator of sorts. You slot in a micro fusion cell, which outputs electricity quite efficiently. But, ahhh... since it is doing this by accelerating extremely high-temperature plasma from the fusion cell, we shouldn't be within the immediate area of it while testing is being conducted."

She tapped another key, activating the magnetron. There was, immediately, a rather loud hum and buzzing noise. Lily frowned, squinting at the dish's angle. She realized she should have angled it a little more towards the ground. More than a kilometre away, she could see a patch of land about five meters in diameter start to blacken. Hopefully, it wouldn't start a fire, but it wasn't like there was much to burn. Lily thought there must be a bit of dead plant matter that she was microwave cooking which caused the discolouration.

Scott blinked, glancing between the dish and then squinting at the spot a kilometre away and back again. A pump began audibly running, running simple water as a coolant through the dish's outer ring, causing some steam to rise up from the dish in a slow continuous hiss.

Scott asked, "How long can that dish keep going like that?"

Lily considered that for a moment, "Ahh... I 'spose till the coolant runs out. Which might be two 'ours? I only need maybe an hour or so running at max output like this to see any issues." She had already adjusted the max output down to about 185KW; a little disappointing that it wasn't reaching the full 200 she was hoping for. She always liked nice round numbers.

Lily peered at the telemetry from the terminal. The Sentrybot coolant system was working without struggling at all. As it was only at high power levels that Sentrybots tended to overheat. If you went by the specs for the Sentrybot's cooling rods, she should be able to run this thing at three times the output, but she just didn't believe it.

There was a loud chittering; a mutated ant had gone to investigate the black spot, only for the microwave beam to hit it. It reminded Lily exactly of using a magnifying glass to burn ants. It just screamed, curled up and started smoking.

Scott nodded decisively, "Well, I've found a use for that giant magnetron you brought home, Lily." She raised an eyebrow, "This?"

He nodded, "I'll mount the dish on a gimbal salvaged from an auto-turret and mount it on the roof, pointing out towards the way to our front door. I might build a second dish, wire them both to that magnetron and put the second on a similar setup facing the back entrance."

Sophie interrupted him, "'Oney, 'oney... we can't just cook every solicitor who comes to our door!" Scott looked like he wanted to dispute the statement because he was looking at a way to do just that. In fact, he gestured right at the steaming dish as if he were impeaching her testimony.

Sophie paused, "Ahh... I mean, we shouldn't just cook any uninvited solicitors."

Scott sighed, "Ah, probably not... but what if we get put under siege? Or the town turns against us? I presume this device could be powered back to something less... fatal?"

He glanced at Lily, who coughed, "I would guess so, the range would suffer, and I certainly don't think you'd get many volunteers to test it. I know of similar weapons designed to use microwaves this way non-lethally, they're called Microwave Agonizers, and they are supposed to feel like your skin is on fire without actually doing any appreciable 'arm. As a riot control weapon. I guess it'd be a software problem for you, eh?"

The Mechanist nodded emphatically, probably already thinking of ways to work it out. Still, he asked curiously, "How does your generator convert the plasma inside a micro fusion cell to electricity?"

Lily spent the rest of the hour and a half or so briefly explaining the operating principles behind a magneto-hydrodynamic generator. He understood the broad strokes of her explanation, but the devil was in the details with a composite system like this.

Feeling satisfied, she began the shut-down sequence on the generator. She wouldn't be able to move it safely for several hours, as the plasma continued to spin down in the acceleration loop for some time before being, primarily, captured in the micro fusion cell. Some of it was vented overboard during the shut-down process, which made start-up and shut-down the most fuel inefficient part of this generator. Ideally, it should be run continuously even if it was only idle. Lily hummed a bit and made a note to add that to the user operator's manual she was writing for it.

"Where did you find all those books you lent me?" Lily wanted to know. She needed to find some basic biology, anatomy and medical texts so she could actually educate her new apprentice. She did not want to have to write them herself, even if she definitely would have to write some of the higher-order texts from memory, eventually.

Scott nodded, "Ah, there is an old municipal library about a mile and a half west of here. Sophie knows precisely where it is and can mark it on your PipBoy -- there was a surprising number of in-tact books there. I haven't been there in over a year, though."

Lily glanced up at the sky. It was still relatively early in the morning. She did not have anything else to do today and felt much more confident going around the nearby areas alone. She would head out.

Lily decided to travel light. She would only carry some water, a single meal, her laser pistol, her normal pistol, which she had installed a silencer on after purchasing one from a merchant in town, and the laser rifle she had finished refurbishing. After sitting in that dorm room for hundreds of years, it hadn't been in good condition. Lily had to replace some of the lenses in both the rifle and the attached 3x optics.

Lily checked on her print queue before she headed out. The fabricator was about halfway finished with the necessary parts for the construction of a recycler. The recycler was taking the form of a large drum or perhaps an extra large trash can. It would be relatively user-friendly, just drop unwanted organic trash and then later come to pick up the carbon feedstock.

The recycler would be ready for assembly by the time she got back. That was good, too, since she did not have much carbon left to build things with. She had been making do with three or four large bags of charcoal that she had found in discount stores as a carbon source. Still, considering as charcoal was actually extremely useful in the Apocalypse, she was amazed she had seen as many bags as she had.

The hike didn't take a long time at all. She had noticed she was a lot stronger and had a lot more endurance than when she got into this universe. She was at the point where she was slightly stronger than most men she had seen, although she would still lose out to men who tried even slightly to work out.

She did take the Mister Handy, in case she brought back a lot of books. Unfortunately, she still hadn't managed to build her one version, as nobody had any Mister Handy parts. It might have to wait until she settled in Megaton. Despite being a trade hub, there weren't many randomly available things to purchase or acquire. She was sure she would eventually have to destroy a Mister Handy or Mister Gutsy anyway, although she did not look forward to it because the latter were especially terrifying if they had their standard plasma weapons.

It might make more sense to reverse engineer the levitation technology, but it was another one that didn't seem immediately obvious how it worked. It seemed like one of those serendipitous discoveries that sometimes happen, as it didn't seem that similar to any other technology in this world that she had seen thus far.

She caught some movement in the area where her target, the library, was clearly visible and came to a halt, hand reaching back to manipulate the switch that deactivated the Mister Handy, which lowered down to the ground and shut down.

Clucking her tongue, she reached back in her bag and pulled out a pair of nice German-built binoculars and put them up to her eyes, crouched by some debris.

She had got a good deal on the binoculars as only one eye would work. She hadn't had a chance to scan and fabricate replacement diamond lenses for that side, so she used them as more of a telescope for now.

She relaxed a bit when the group of people did not look like raiders at all. But the more she watched them, the more her mood started to fall. There were only five of them, and she watched one of five lead three others into the library she intended to loot—three people who seemed to have metal collars around their necks.

Scowling, she replaced her binoculars in their case and put them back in her bag. She glanced at the Mister Handy, seeing that it was mostly concealed and began stalking towards the library, under cover most of the way.

Lily knew that she wasn't, intrinsically, a good person. Not really. If she were, she would have already sent a lot of the information she had from many play-throughs of Fallout 3 to those who could have leveraged it a lot sooner than she planned to.

For example, she could tell Elder Lyons today all about the F.E.V. EEP experiments in Vault 87. Wasn't he chasing the source of Super Mutants in the Capital like Ahab chasing his white whale?

But she did not want to endanger the G.E.C.K. inside Vault 87. If she told Lyons about Vault 87 and they purged the place, they'd bring the G.E.C.K. back to the Citadel. But what if the Brotherhood Outcasts stole it when they left? Then Project Purity would be fucked, as those neo-barbarians in the Outcasts did not give a fuck about people having water.

But most of all, she did not want to endanger herself. That was why she wasn't a good person.

Moreover, if she were being honest with herself, Lily detested the Brotherhood of Steel. She truly did hate everything they stood for. They were a band of backwards Luddites who hated technology but perversely wanted to keep it all for themselves while keeping the rest of humanity in some sort of forced Dark Age, supposedly for their own good. Why? Because of nuclear war? Nuclear explosives were not advanced technology! It was over a hundred-year-old tech even before the Apocalypse.

To keep humanity at the technical level where they would be unable to build a nuclear bomb was to keep them ignorant and brutish. And that was something Lily could never countenance.

She was only as friendly and open to helping the Brotherhood in the Capital because they did not act like the Brotherhood. The Outcasts were or rather would be, absolutely right in that claim. The Outcasts indeed were the true Brotherhood, which is why she would have nothing to do with the Brotherhood until the Outcasts did defect. The remnants of Elder Lyons chapter were nothing much like the Brotherhood she detested, so she could deal with them. They would call themselves something else in an ideal situation, but that was probably an impossibility.

She had to skid to a halt and crouch to avoid one of the two slavers, who decided to do an impromptu patrol around the building before ducking inside with his compatriot and their cargo.

If Lily were a good person, she would make burning Paradise Falls to the ground and killing every slaver inside a priority.

But, even so, she had some morals. She felt that there was, essentially, an unlimited amount of suffering in the world. She couldn't be bothered to dedicate her life to stopping it all; in fact, she was really only planning on ensuring Project Purity's success because the more people around, the better for her.

That said, even if she wouldn't go out of her way to search out injustice... if she saw it right in front of her eyes? That was different. She didn't have any plans to destroy Paradise Falls... she would leave that to the vault dweller, assuming he wasn't a psychopath. But she had plans to kill these two slavers and free their slaves.

Why? Because seeing them enslave people made her sad. So, ultimately, that meant she was killing them because seeing them die would make her feel good, she supposed. It was best, to be honest with yourself.

The municipal library wasn't a large one, but the building was in reasonably good condition. That must be why they stopped; it must be used as a place to rest. Perhaps they were taking an early lunch?

The possibility that they were meeting compatriots here gave her some pause, but not enough to make her reconsider her choices.

She had already resolved to kill two men here, today. If she let them go after that, it would give her depression. Still, it didn't mean she had to go about this stupidly.

She unholstered her pistol and carefully screwed on the suppressor. One of the tools Lily owned was a bullet puller, used to pull bullets out of perfectly good cartridges. 10mm, despite its mass, was still a super-sonic cartridge. Barely. But if you slightly reduced the number of propellent flakes in each bullet, it would be reduced to just under the speed of sound.

That would make a silenced pistol, actually, very quiet. Of course, it would be best if she could catch her targets one at a time, but if that wasn't possible, she would switch to her laser rifle and just surprise them with ferocity.

Lily considered her options but didn't spend long second-guessing herself as she snuck into a side entrance to the library. After all, a good plan violently executed today was better than a perfect plan next Tuesday.

As Lily skulked through the stacks, she couldn't help but notice that the Mechanist was correct and that there was a surprising number of books in what appeared to be in good condition.

She heard people about halfway to the front of the library, which caused her to adjust her sneak speed to dead slow.

Peeking her head briefly from out behind one of the stacks, she identified both her targets and the non-combatants before sneaking a bit closer. The slaves were in a conference room off the entrance, with the two slavers sitting in front of the only door in and out of the conference room.

Amazingly, a glass or plexiglass window on the wall of that conference room was still unbroken. Unfortunately, she would have to walk right past it before she turned the corner to surprise the slavers. She hoped these three didn't give her away.

Sighing, Lily carefully holstered her pistol before unslinging her laser rifle. She was a little disappointed that she wouldn't get to use her silenced pistol with her specially-prepared ammunition, but since the two slavers were together... there was really no point in being quiet after being discovered. She would have surprise on her side, and she was naturally quick, so that just left violence of action, so she would select her most violent weapons.

As she sneaked past the conference room, she could see the three people inside just staring at her, seemingly surprised. They looked like a family, a mom, father and teenage daughter. She looked directly at them and put a finger to her lips before winking. The enslaved man nodded, holding the hands of the girl and woman.

She could hear the two men joking, and she supposed probably eating lunch, just ahead and to the right of her. Holding her rifle one-handed, she pulled a small spherical frag grenade from her bag.

Turning back towards the glass, she waved the distinctive object at the three, who immediately recognized it and quickly moved to the very back of the conference room, crouching behind the table.

Smiling, Lily always liked it when people acted intelligently. Momentarily slinging her rifle, she carefully pulled the pin from the explosive. She didn't really want to give them much time, so after she released the spoon, which flew off with a springing noise, she held onto the grenade for a full one-second count before casually tossing it with her left hand into the hallway next to her.

As she took two steps backwards, she heard, "What was... FUCK!" That was followed by an impressive explosion, which blew the door to the conference room off the hinges.

She didn't waste any more time. She moved forward briskly, rifle at the ready. She didn't do any theatrical leaps into the room or anything but moved with a purpose. She saw two men on the ground next to the splintered and fractured table; they were both groaning, seemingly injured and trying to rise from the ground.

Nope. That won't do.

The laser rifle did not have an appreciable recharge time between shots, unlike the laser pistol, which required about a quarter to a half second to recharge capacitors, so she fired three blasts of light into each of them as quickly as she could pull the trigger, and besides her slightly ringing ears and two feminine voices screaming in distress in the next room everything was quiet.

Before seeing to the hostages--slaves, she supposed, she did a quick circuit in the rest of the rooms in the front of the library. She only saw two slavers, but assumptions make asses out of everyone.

When she was reassured that there were no more living enemies, she slung her rifle before half-opening and half-kicking the door to the conference room open, "Are any of you injured in here? Were there only just two of them?"

The man, who Lily was internally labeling as Dad, said, "No, it was just the two of them. Not that I didn't want to see them die but... Who are you?"

Lily tilted her head to one side like a raptor evaluating a mouse. "It is common courtesy to offer your own name... but I suppose I should have introduced myself first before asking you any questions, so I apologize. I am called Lilianne St. Claire, a medical doctor, scientist, and most important, from your perspective, I think, someone deeply philosophically opposed to the concept of chattel slavery. At your service, sir."

The man sighed, Lily thought in relief, "Thank you. I'm Bill Delacourt; this is my wife Ada and daughter Melissa. Honestly, what happens now? Those scumbags said these collars would detonate if something happened to them, I was expecting to have our heads blow up -- but I figured that was better than what was waiting for my wife and daughter at Paradise Falls."

Lily shook her head, "As far as I know there are no deadman switches utilized by the slavers of Paradise Falls. They can be command detonated, though, which Paradise Falls might do if these two slavers are overdue for a long time. Were you just stopping here for lunch, or were they meeting more slavers here?"

Dad looked ill, "We were just stopping to eat, as far as I know. They can track us and blow our heads off all the way across the Capital Wasteland?! What are we going to do?"

Lily nodded, not that she would entirely trust that. "I did mention that I am a scientist, yes? These collars are pre-War technology, the U.S. government invented them to control Chinese P.O.W.s. I can likely remove them without them detonating."

The two woman looked hopeful but the Dad looked slightly angry, "Likely?! How likely?"

Lily couldn't really blame him for being a little anxious, but she wouldn't let him work his way up to yelling at her either, "I'm not sure how to say this delicately, sir, but my hands are much more important to me than any or all of your lives. So, I would not offer if I were not fairly confident."

The older woman placed a hand on the man's arm, "Bill. It's not her fault. And I believe her. I'll let her try to remove mine first."

That got a loud, "Ada! No!" Lily kept the professionally neutral Doctor face on while, internally, she was sighing. She did not like drama, but she couldn't quite tell one of them to decide which of them was the best to risk first. After a minute or two of discussion it was decided to be Ada, after all.

Lily supposed that Ada did not have much confidence in keeping her and her daughter alive if her husband was dead, so the choice made sense to her.

Lily smiled at her, "Okay, sit here. We'll do this like this. First, I will take a look at it. Then I will go and consider the best strategy to remove it, and then I will return. Okay?"

While peering at it from different angles, Lily surreptitiously scanned the device around the woman's neck. "Please stay here, I will return shortly," Lily nodded to them and then left the room. She sat at one of the chairs the slavers were using, surprised it was still in one piece.

She opened the scan in her engineering CAD program and peered at the results. It wasn't really complicated, and she didn't expect it to be. The United States had produced these devices in extremely high quantities, expecting P.O.W.s numbering in the hundreds of thousands and thus limiting how tricksy they could be. Plus, it wasn't like these devices weren't ever intended to be opened or be serviced. There were two primary sensors, and there wasn't even an actual microcontroller controlling them -- just some pre-defined arbitrarily set threshold value, she supposed.

Lily closed her eyes and put her thinking cap on, reconsidering her conclusions on the device and her disarming strategy. Had she missed anything? After a moment, she shook her head. No, she hadn't.

She stood back up and hid her scanner again before re-entering the conference room and smiling at the woman, "Okay, I'm ready. Please do not move at all, ma'am."

The woman nodded her head, looking absolutely terrified.

Lily could get the collar off by bypassing only one sensor, the one that used ultrasonics which was designed for tampering-detection and then disabling the detonator, but if she didn't also disable the sensor used to detect the actual collar being opened the collar could still send a signal to Paradise Falls indicating it had been opened.

Lily didn't know for sure that would have any consequences. Still, she felt it was possible that an on-the-ball sociopath might see that signal and then rightly conclude the collar was removed by some good samaritan and then detonate the other two collars remotely before she could take them off. Or, worse, while she was taking them off.

Humming softly, it was only the work of about thirty seconds to bypass both sensors, disconnect the detonator from the firing circuit and unlatch the collar from around the woman's next. She took it carefully from around the woman's next and sat it on the table. "Next?"

The woman brought her hands up to her neck and started sobbing before quickly standing up and ushering her daughter to the seat next. The Dad nodded approvingly at his wife's priorities. How sweet.

She paused before she went to work. Could it be possible that the USA designed multiple collar variants, built differently, as a second layer of protection?

Lily decided that she couldn't say it was impossible. They looked identical from the exterior. Still, this couple probably wouldn't appreciate watching their daughter's head explode any more than she would like accidentally killing her, so Lily went through the whole thing of scanning, retreating into the next room and examining the scans, returning and disarming them twice more. They were all identical, but you never could tell.

The Dad was effusively respectful now, "Thank you so much! Do you know where we are? They kept us blindfolded for part of the trip until we kept tripping over things. I don't even know why they bothered; it wasn't like we could have run away with these collars on."

That made Lily curious too, but since she killed the only people who might have known the answer to the question, she ignored it, "You're about three klicks directly west of a small settlement called Canterbury Commons. If you continue heading west, you'll reach the Potomac river; crossing that river at the bridge and heading west southwest will be the city of Megaton. Does that help you?"

The Dad nodded, "Yes, it does. We will head to Canterbury Commons, then, first."

Lily smiled, "Feel free to take the slavers' equipment. They were kind enough to set their packs closer to the door and well outside the blast range of that frag grenade. I've searched their bodies already; they had about thirty caps each, which you can also take. There's a couple of shotguns, a pistol, and a variety of other small things that might be quite useful to you but are of little value to me at the present time."

The man looked conflicted, his pride warring with his pragmatism. Deciding that they might end up in the same position if he didn't have a little money or a weapon if they met the wrong person, he finally nodded, "Thank you very much, Doctor St. Claire."

Lily excused herself and went to search the stacks. She had biology books to find for her apprentice.

She stopped for a moment to consider the possible education level her apprentice had before today.

Nodding, Lily also decided to take basic math, algebra, chemistry and a few other basics if she could find them. No one learning from her would be ignorant for long. She would educate this girl or the girl would die trying!