The opposite of Tranquility Lane

Lily sat at her workbench underground, quickly assembling customized satellites for the mission that was planned later that evening when the first-stage aircraft returned from their successful mission.

Things were, somehow, both going very well and simultaneously falling to shit, Lily thought. Her personal space-based projects were going quite well, finally, though.

She had thought once the first probe had gotten through that, it would take no time at all for the rest to make it through. However, the anti-satellite system held out for another month and a half.

Right now, she was watching the debris of the last large railgun-mounted system begin to slowly deorbit while nodding her head in satisfaction. She had a group of thirty small satellites ready to launch as soon as the aircraft returned and was working on even more. Her first goal was to defang President Eden before he dropped a nuke on her someday, soon. She had a list of American orbital assets, including a number of assets equipped with nuclear-armed re-entry vehicles as well as their approximate orbital elements.

There were only three left that she could see unless there were others that weren't on the list she received. It didn't appear to be comprehensive as far as America's orbital assets were concerned. The only two that were a real threat to her at present were the Highwater-Trousers and Bradley-Hercules satellites. HT was in geosynchronous orbit over North America and wasn't a large threat because of the time necessary for the re-entry vehicles to retrorocket and fall from thirty thousand kilometres. She now kept a pretty constant radar watch above her and would have plenty of warning and may even be able to intercept the falling weapons.

In the Fallout 3 game, a ghoul scientist was trying to gain control of this satellite, and you could even call down a strike from it, but it seemed pretty weak sauce. All that happened was a number of mini-nuke explosions near the SatCom Array after you left. However, she suspected that was just a limitation of Fallout's game engine as the specs in the design sheet she got from the Brotherhood indicated that each re-entry vehicle should contain a MIRVed payload, with each of the ten warheads being in the one hundred kiloton range. It should have incinerated you in the game, but there was no fun in that.

The more immediately dangerous weapon was the one President Eden had the codes for, which was Bradley-Hercules. It was also in low-earth orbit on a particularly elliptical orbit reaching only 150 kilometres in its perigee, and it could very well release a number of re-entry vehicles on its orbital approach such that her radar systems couldn't see them until they were close to right over Megaton as they began their retrorocket burn. It was an existential threat.

None of the Brotherhood data included any access codes, encryption keys or anything of that nature. She was pretty sure that if they actually had them, they wouldn't give them to her in the first place, though.

About seven probes were earmarked to deal with that as soon as possible and do so on the far apogee of its elliptical orbit. It only had an opportunity to launch its weapons in specific orbital windows, and only a few times each day.

That tracked with the game, as in the Broken Steel DLC, you assaulted the Satellite relay station in the southwest of the map, along with Liberty Prime, and the Enclave just nuked it, destroying the robot. Lily thought it was anticlimactic, as the Brotherhood spent so long trying to rebuild this giant robot, and it got blown to pieces practically the first time they used it. After you defeated a couple of dozen enemies in that location, you had the chance to nuke either Adams Air Force Base or The Citadel.

Options to nuke Megaton and a few other locations were disallowed, stating the orbital elements were not favourable for a launch at those targets. If she was ambitious, she would try to assault the relay station, but that was a high-risk manoeuvre, and the gain was relatively small. She already could nuke Raven Rock if she wanted to, so gaining the use of a nuclear weapons satellite was not that useful to her, but denying it to others was paramount.

Three probes would boost to approach it on a converging orbit on a tangent at the farthest point away from the Earth in its elliptical orbit, approaching within a hundred kilometres or so. They would simultaneously activate broad-spectrum electromagnetic frequency jammers and then attempt to simply burn all of the antennas off the exterior of the space vehicle with lasers. These satellites were armed with lasers, but not that large of ones. She could make them now, and the ones she placed on these probes were only about twice as potent as the ones you could find in a laser rifle.

Being in a vacuum made their range, theoretically, unlimited, but realistically these weapons would only be effective at a few hundred kilometres at most due to diffraction lowering the amount of energy per square millimetre on the lased target.

If that didn't work, or even if it did, the four chasing probes would collide with it when it made its orbital turnover and started returning to its perigee. Its orbit was so low that it would deorbit pretty rapidly after that.

Those four kinetic kill vehicles also would be backup in the event that there was some sort of fail-deadly programming, where the satellite would release its payload in the event of a loss of communication. She assumed such programming would likely target China in any event, but there was no point in being complacent.

She had found the satellite tender, as well. Or tenders, as the plural was the correct word. It appeared to be a small space station and stayed in a high orbit with about a dozen automated space vehicles departing from it from time to time. It wasn't listed in any of the orbital elements the Brotherhood gave her, either. There were a few anomalous satellites like that, but she guessed that the station might have been a relatively recent placement at the time of the Great War and that the data the Brotherhood had might have been dated. There was no telling what the source was.

While the Great War on the planet was much more even in the sense that both sides killed themselves, the Great War in orbit was a decisive American victory. Lily didn't think that there was anything but American satellites still up there now. Not even the dead satellites in graveyard orbits that she would expect to see. It was quite clean. Actually, even the small debris in long-lasting persistent orbits from destroyed satellites in the war or even just a wrench accidentally dropped overboard during an EVA were missing.

If there was some manner of an automated station that was both refuelling and tending to the debris in orbit, it had to be getting resources from somewhere, and her best guess was the Moon. A similarly automated Moon base, if it had an electromagnetic railgun, could shoot both reaction mass, oxygen and resources mined from the Moon to the station.

She hadn't seen any deliveries yet, but she was on the watch for them.

While her orbital ventures were going well what was going to shit was the Capital Wasteland. Well, not precisely, but it was headed in that direction as things became increasingly chaotic. She should have expected it, and it was either entirely or partly her fault. People were telling tales about Megaton now, and the tales had invariably gotten exaggerated in the retellings and and it had started to attract organized raiding activity both from the Pitt, Norfolk and as well as Baltimore. She supposed that was inevitable when people told tales that there was cheap water and food. It certainly increased immigration into and around the city, too.

From what she could tell, Baltimore was where her spat of recent suicide bombers were coming from. Her soldiers had taken to having robots with chemical sniffers approach people a few kilometres away from Megaton, as there had been a number of similar incidents. The last two they had managed to incapacitate before the suicide bombers could trigger the explosives, and Lily had examined them.

They were... not really alive. Well, they were. But their brains were so messed up that she wasn't even able to get hardly any useful information out of them even when she tried to download their memories, it was a psychedelic trip along with some unrelated memories from the individual's childhood, but she thought it must be some kind of serious brainwashing technology. That or they were drugged and tortured somehow for a very long time. Maybe all of the above?

She tried a few methods to revert them to something more human, but the trauma was too deeply wound up in their neural network. She could use the machine from the VSS building to wipe their memories, but it was too big of a chunk. They would be dead one way or another, so she had just quietly and painlessly euthanized them.

She was already manufacturing more drones to try to put some around Baltimore, but she had a dearth of fission batteries. Building the batteries wasn't too hard, but finding the non-contaminated plutonium necessary for their construction was. It was honestly easier to pay people to bring them to her than to try to build them. She thought that they were mass-produced by a company in Texas, so she couldn't really loot their production method, either. And even if she had it, she was sure that that company wasn't vertically integrated; they probably bought plutonium from someone else, maybe even the government.

Her recyclers didn't discriminate too well on different radioactive isotopes because the medichines didn't operate at their best close to highly radioactive atoms, so she couldn't really use her recycling technology to help her. The standard procedure of the machines was just to dump the radioactive bits amalgamated into the waste chute of the "inseparable" elements.

If she wanted to produce plutonium, she would have to build some manner of the fission breeder reactor. Well, The Mechanist already had one, but she didn't think it was really the type designed to actually produce plutonium, just use all of the fuel very efficiently. But it was a breeder reactor, technically.

Still, she would have enough fission batteries for her to put some of Baltimore under surveillance soon, including watching the obvious approach down the highway. If she could backtrack exactly from what part of Baltimore these suicide bombers came from, she could maybe bomb it.

Nobody really knew too much about Baltimore, except that most people didn't come back from there, sometimes not even from near there. Who knows what was going on there, but it might be interesting to see from a thousand metres in the air. If it was really such a hellscape with no innocent people in it, she wouldn't mind using nuclear weapons, either. In addition to about two dozen mini-nukes, she had a few larger warheads of a design that was really scary to her, which she was calling a "nuclear explosion in a bottle" type.

This used the quantum-locking forcefield technology, the same way micro-fusion cells kept superhot plasma inside. Such forcefields were, as far as she could tell, capable of completely containing fast neutrons, causing them to bounce around inside. So, if she put a fair bit of a fissionable element into such a bottle, the neutrons would bounce off the forcefield and quickly create a chain reaction, even if the amount was much less than the supercritical amount for that element.

However, she was quite scared to actually try this. She had built a number of prototypes but was unwilling to go as far as attempting a detonation. She didn't know for sure that the "quantum forcefield" would contain a nuclear explosion, even though the idea was it could contain and isolate everything, and additionally, the containment only held so long as the stabilizing electronics were functioning properly.

You needed electronics on both sides of the plane to create such a quantum-locked force field. That made using them as barriers or shields basically impossible because the electronics were fragile, and half of them would be the outside of the shield, susceptible to damage. That was unfortunate because they would be ideal for that purpose, other than that.

The microfusion cells managed to get around this by having one emitter on the outside of each plane in a cube. For example, the emitter on the top of the cube would control both the outside of the top plane and the inside of the bottom plane, so there didn't need to be emitters inside the cube amongst all of the hot plasma.

However, that meant that any damage to any of the electronics that were positioned on each side of the cube, or even momentary interruptions, might tend to let the nuclear explosion out of the bottle, which would be bad. That was basically how microfusion cells worked; the electronics were interrupted in a semi-controlled fashion to either let a standard amount of plasma out or force fuel in. It would be the opposite of a safe weapon once fissionable fuel was introduced.

Microfusion cells did fail from time to time, but all that happened was a small explosion as only a small amount of plasma was kept inside at any one time. Most of the potential plasma was kept as fuel, instead, and shoved into the quantum-isolated plasma chamber as required. This would be a very large explosion, and the nuance of that was important. It would be even larger than the input of the fissionable material would suggest, as traditionally exploded nuclear bombs were rarely all that efficient in their use of the fissionable fuel.

On the plus side, if she ever had to use one of the prototypes she built, the explosion would be very ecologically friendly, at least as much as fission-powered nuclear bombs could be anyway. Right now, the devices were ready, with the quantum forcefields already activated and a small pellet of fissionable plutonium fuel aimed at one side of the force field, ready to be violently accelerated inside it. She was considering throwing one into the ocean to test it, but wouldn't that be a bit hard on the aquatic wildlife?

She didn't consider such a device safe to keep around, though, once it had been "armed." That was a bad word to use. It wasn't armed, it was already exploded. There was no way to disarm it, as the explosion had already happened or was in the process of happening, and it was only the forcefield separating you from the effects.

It was also hard to use as a weapon because she didn't know precisely how long it would take for the chain reaction to propagate once the "arming" process started. Her intuition told her "not long after being enclosed in a perfect forcefield", but that wasn't entirely precise, and she wasn't actually a nuclear physicist. However, if the pellet was completely used up, then the yield should be easily calculated at twenty-five kilotons per device, though.

The actual scary part of these devices was how cheap they were to manufacture. If she ever had to use them, she was going to claim she had looted some traditional nuclear bombs from Fort Constantine. To the powers of the Wasteland that had nuclear bombs, they were a rare and treasured deterrent. She thought people would look at her a lot differently if they knew she could produce them for what amounted to fifty caps a piece or so.

It did make her feel like that, so long as she could survive personally over the next year or so that she had already reached the point where essentially nothing could threaten her except the "wildcards" that always existed in the Fallout universe, like the aliens, Cthulhu and the other nuclear powers. And perhaps, the protagonist of Fallout 3. She had the suspicion that he would either be a total badass or a total non-entity. It was May of 2076, so there were a little over fourteen months until the plot of the game started.

She would normally have expected her butterflies to change that, but the Vault was still a completely closed environment, so she expected both James and his son or daughter to pop out more or less on schedule. It made her chuckle at what James would see when he came out of the Vault in August. That was long enough for her first generation of kudzu and crabgrass to spread a bit, so long as she got the design of the organism finalized by February or so. It would be interesting to see a little bit of green around the wasteland.

The increase in the raider population in the Capital Wast was stark, though. They weren't to the point where they were organized enough to attack Megaton or even Rivet City itself, but they were a danger to anyone that travelled the roads away from well-protected settlements. She had been pushing out her patrols a little bit, going as far as the Potomac river bridge to the north and about halfway to Fairfax to the south, but she didn't have enough manpower to actually make them regular.

She recruited the men requested by Gary but wasn't giving him any permanently assigned soldiers. He had the number of men he requested, but it was a rotating assignment. She didn't particularly consider him likely to stage a coup, especially when he said his plan was to leave the area, but it was still better to have the men under his command rotate in and out every couple of weeks. Otherwise, over time, they would become more loyal to him than to her. That was still a possibility, but much lessened. If that happened, well, they could go on Gary's adventure with her blessings.

Megaton had close to eighteen thousand people living in it now, with perhaps two thousand more living in a kind of shantytown at the edge of the security fence. The first extra quarter of fencing expanding the town, concrete walls and turrets had been built as well, although none of the areas was as of yet wired for power, sewage or water.

Still, she had run auctions for about ten per cent of the land area, and the demand was quite high, even knowing it might be six months before the area was hooked up to utilities. She was setting some aside to start building large warehouses. As long as she got a concrete slab, she could build them like hangars, using thin aluminium segments.

Gary had taken over the judiciary, at least for the moment, and had started a sort of bounty program for dead raiders killed outside the walls. Normally that would be fraught with difficulty, as how would you identify what a dead body was actually a raider but honestly, it wasn't that difficult around these parts.

He was also experimenting with punishments other than death, expulsion, or chopping off of hands, too. It wasn't like anyone ran any prisons. She certainly didn't. She had a jail, but it was strictly temporary. Nobody had the extra resources to feed criminals long term. But he was sentencing small-time criminals to restitutive labour in some cases. She didn't really like the idea of a criminal justice system that could order someone to become an indentured servant. Still, it was better than the present alternatives, given the state of civilization.

It was semi-voluntary, with the caveat that if the offender didn't accept, they would be expelled from Megaton permanently and, if found inside the city again, shot.

On the plus side, the raiders from the Pitt were fighting with the disorganized raiders from Norfolk, and both were fighting with the Super Mutants.

Glancing down at the last completed satellite and both of her hands which had deployed a number of tools that she was using to build them, she nodded and folded all of the spindly little arms back into her arms and arranged each of the finished probes so that her robots could take them to the runway.

She was going to go perform surgery on the Apprentice, and then tomorrow, she was going to go take her memory downloading machine and go download the memories of a genius.

---xxxxxx---

"Wait, what?! You didn't even implant the eel's electrical organ in yourself?! You spent so much time on it... why the hell am I getting one, then?!" she demanded after I admitted I never actually ended up implanting the last generation of the electrical organs in myself.

It was kind of embarrassing. Lily did spend a fair bit of time on the genetics involved. She thought she would go faster in the development, and she also thought it would take longer for her to get an acceptable design of a cybernetic leg and arm that she would want to use on herself. But, in addition to holding eight legs, her lower cybernetic limbs each carried a miniature fission battery. Lily didn't really need the organ anymore.

She didn't even need it for the shock-touch ability, as she had built electronic tasers into her fingers.

The Apprentice did need it, though. She still charged herself every day like a peasant. Lily explained the difference and why she no longer needed it.

"You have cybernetic mechanical legs? What's different about them?" Alice asked, interested.

Oh! She had indeed forgotten to "show" them to the girl. She glanced down at what she was wearing and nodded. She was wearing a pencil skirt today, and one that she had specially designed to not be destroyed, merely removed, if she deployed her legs. In addition, she was wearing a pair of spankies under the skirt instead of just regular underwear, similar to what she remembered a cheerleader might wear in her past life to prevent anyone from getting too much of a glimpse of what was under her skirt, for the same reason.

She grinned at the Apprentice, "Oh. I'll show you!" At that, she triggered the deployment effect, and in under a second, all eight legs were deployed and spread out. She stretched out the metatarsus of her back legs like a cat; it felt good.

Alice, however, shrieked and backed away, "What the fuck!" She glanced at her and then said, "Fuck this; I'm out!" At that, she turned around and started departing with some speed.

Lily laughed at her and called as she skittered after her, "Don't run! I'm SO much faster zhan you!" She skittered after the girl. She was a lot stronger, too, due to her cybernetic arms, so she just grabbed the girl and grinned at her. Then she tossed her up in the air, jumped up into the air herself to redeploy all eight legs quickly, landing back on her human-like feet to catch the shrieking Alice out of the air in a princess carry before settling the disgruntled girl back on the ground.

"Don't worry! I put zhem back in. See? You can barely see the seam on these new leg models. And the seam self-heals in like an hour, too," Lily told her, incredibly proud of the invention.

Alice, after a moment, stopped looking like a startled cat and asked with some emotion, "Why would you ever build something like that? Are you just going to be some robot spider again in ten years, like you told me you used to be? Because I object!"

Lily harumphed. What was wrong with being a robot spider? "No. I kind of like zhe human form, more or less, now. But honestly, eight trumps two any day of zhe week. I can walk on walls and zhe ceiling and run over forty kilometres an hour. You're just an arachnophobe."

Alice nodded rapidly while Lily sighed and went over and retrieved her skirt and pumps, slipping them back on. "Anyway, I built special fission batteries for each leg, so I don't need the organ anymore, but you still do. Especially if you want to keep your mainly biomorph build-type."

"Okay, I understand. But it is still a little disconcerting when you talk about people's bodies like they are so replaceable. People that aren't you don't really think that way," Alice told her.

Lily sniffed, offended, and delicately inspected her nails, ignoring her.

"Fine. I still do want independence from a charging station, as long as it is safe. I may go out on an adventure myself one day, away from civilization. What are the drawbacks?" Alice asked.

Lily stopped looking at her nails and said, "A metabolic cost, certainly. You have zhe latest metabolic efficiency upgrade, but zhis might increase your daily caloric intake requirements a bit. Only one or two 'undred calories zhough if you just use it to keep yourself charged, zhough. And, of course, it is safe! I would install it in myself if I didn't have a better use for zhe space in my thorax." She ignored the comment about Alice going on an adventure. She didn't like the idea of her leaving Megaton. Certainly not by herself.

Lily didn't understand what the big deal was anyway. It was like pulling teeth to get the Apprentice to agree to this. Who wouldn't want to be part eel? Most humans were weird, being such species-chauvinists. It had always been the case, but now at least, she could sort of understand their position. The number of human-born members of transhumanity that would agree to sleeve into an uplifted animal body were infinitesimal.

She couldn't understand it. Not really. Especially humans around here that were all mostly flats anyway. It simply wasn't true that the human species was the pinnacle as far as all biological processes were concerned. So long as you looked human on the outside, who cared from which organism the gene expressions in your liver originated?

Alice nodded, "Alright. I'll go get undressed, and you can get ready in here, I guess."

"Excellent!" Lily chirped.

---xxxxxx---

In the middle of the night, Lily was awoken briefly from her brief sleep period to the pleasant news that the Bradley-Hercules satellite had been destroyed. It self-destructed in a large but brief nuclear plasma ball after her probes hit it with their lasers. Well, good riddance and hopefully, President Eden was just perplexed when the satellite never returned back in the line of sight of North America as it was scheduled to.

She was out of contact with them now, but the four contingency probes should shift priorities and, over a week or so, use a series of transfer orbits to slowly rise to the geostationary level in order to put paid to Trousers satellite. Hopefully, by then, she would have a small global communications network established and could reestablish contact. She fell back asleep, pleased with herself.

Submajor Wilson greeted her the next morning. There was no Captain rank in her org chart, nor were there two grades of lieutenant like was normal in NATO countries. The officer ranks she had made up were specifically to be different from anything that had existed in the past.

They were: Aspirant, Leftenant, Submajor, Major, Subcolonel, Colonel, and Brigadier. She did not have a particular rank herself, the same way that King Henry didn't have a particular rank in the red coats.

She did this to build a unique military culture and esprit de corps, as there were still too many organizations like the Enclave that utilized the old NATO-style rank structures, and she wanted to discard all previous traditions and separate herself from such organizations.

"How many people are we bringing today?" Lily asked the man, curious. If it wasn't for some of the equipment that she had to bring with her, she would have been tempted to go alone. Honestly, she took over this town so that she could do whatever she wanted and it kind of grated on her that she couldn't do whatever she wanted.

Well, she supposed she could, but it would end in drama, with everyone worrying about her the entire time she was gone.

Wilson nodded, "You said this was low risk, so just two squads." That meant four men and sixteen robots. One squad was two fire teams which each consisted of one person and four robots.

Lily nodded. With the heavy weapons on her vehicle and the one truck they were bringing, that should be more than sufficient, even with the increased raider activity.

Her goal was Vault 112. Tranquillity Lane. It was a Vault unlike all of the others in that most of the original inhabitants were still alive, including its overseer, a genius that was probably smarter than her by the name of Stanislaus Braun. He was supposedly the inventor of the G.E.C.K. that utilized matter-to-energy-based technology.

The same one that was sitting in Vault 87, waiting for the Lone Wanderer to get it to jump-start Project Purity.

She had been intentionally ignoring this place because she always intended for James to get stuck there, just as it happened in the game. Why? So she could see what the Lone Wanderer was made up of. Was he or she a complete psychopath? A good person?

She'd find out when they adventured around the Capital Wasteland in order to find their dad. She'd give them some "side quests" herself!

However, that became more and more untenable after she got the technology to download most of a human's memories. If Braun really did invent the GECK, then she was giving up that knowledge if she didn't scan him.

Especially now. She didn't think she would have made as quick progress as she had. If this was a game and not her real life, she was at the point where she would be tying up loose ends. Although, she still had the Enclave as a threat but without their ability to nuke her from orbit they were mainly just as deadly threat and not an existential one. She could see them coming.

Also, who knew what the Lone Wanderer would do to him? Braun was such an asshole that she mostly trapped him in his own simulation as a punishment, but that was unrealistic. It was the kind of slick end to a quest that you'd expect in a game when in reality, she would have found his Tranquility Lounger and put several armour-piercing rounds through it.

Leaving a genius with a grudge against you and only time on their hands alive? That seemed stupid in the extreme. Lily didn't believe he didn't have access to the real world at all. She would have built some kind of virtual override so that she could control one of the robots in Vault 112 if she was him, anyway.

Braun wasn't going to survive her visit, especially since Dr Stanislaus Braun was canonically the one behind all of the bizarre social experiments conducted by Vault-Tec, almost all of them being completely torturous or fatal.

"Alright, I'm going to be working on a few zhings, Submajor. Just tell me when we arrive," Lily told him before entering the armoured RV, sitting in the passenger's seat in the front.