Chapter 76: Nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the muties
Arefu was a small settlement in the game, and it was a small settlement in this universe, too, one of the few times that her "game knowledge" was pretty accurate. It was hard to make a large settlement when your settlement was built entirely on a bridge, even if it was a large bridge. Even then, though, it had about fifty people in it from the guess her surveillance system made.
All of her aerial surveillance drones had full spectrum visual sensors now. Normal visual sensors, including 10X zoom and thermographic FLIR, as well as normal night vision. At the moment, they were still in contact with her network, and her surveillance system running on her mainframe could make inferences based on heat signatures detected, past activity and a number of other factors.
It both sucked and was fantastic that all of the drones were completely obsolete now that she had the levitation technology. When she got back, she would start building the little boogers with stealthed features, using levitation technology to fly them like helicopters.
They didn't stop there at Arefu at all; they just let the six people get out and grab whatever they looted from Vault 106 and continued westwards. As they pushed further west, they were leaving the range of Lily's network, but she still had eight drones that were centred on the RV, which handled the computation for them, so it wasn't too difficult to dodge anyone she saw in the wastes five, and six kilometres away before anyone ever saw her small little convoy.
The only place Lily stopped was briefly at what she thought might become the location that the Nuka-Cola crazy woman Sierra lived at, but if she existed, she did not live there yet, nor did anyone else. That woman was one of her favourite gag characters in the Fallout 3 game ever since she heard the line when she said: "He said he was going to butter my muffin, now if only I could find some muffins!"
She knew there were a lot of dangerous areas around this west side of "the map", so to speak, including yāoguài, which were some sort of mutated bear if she recalled, but she didn't have a photographic memory of the Fallout 3 map, so she just tried to avoid suspicious areas that looked odd, like any caves or tunnels.
However, before turning south, she did send a number of drones into the area Little Lamplight was at to identify the entrance to those caverns, but she didn't stop to say hello to the little gremlins there. She hoped their generator was working okay, though.
"Where are we now?" asked the Apprentice curiously. She had access to all the pins and labels I had put on my moving map, but a lot of them were somewhat nebulous. Like I only had an approximate location for the RobCo factory to the east. Lily could tell she was looking at it because the girl asked, suddenly, "Why is this spot marked 'crazy cannibals'?!"
Lily chuckled. The Apprentice was looking ahead; they would pass by Fort Independence and Andale in an hour or so; they hadn't even gotten past Tenpenny Tower yet. Due to all of her advantages in night vision, she was timing their arrival at DC to be after sundown.
"Because zhere is a small settlement of crazy cannibals zhere," Lily remarked mildly as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Why else would she have marked an obvious settlement as "crazy cannibals"?
The girl looked flummoxed. "You know they are cannibals, and you aren't going to do anything about them?!"
"Not unless zhey try to eat you. Zhey're a clan of generational cannibals. Zhat means we'd have to kill every man, woman and child zhere. Want to?" Lily asked.
The Apprentice fidgeted, "Uh. Not really. Couldn't we just, like, get rid of the adults?"
"Zhat would be crueller zhan killing zhe children right away," Lily scolded her.
The Apprentice sighed, "But maybe we could like, uhh... help the kids afterwards?"
Lily shook her head, "I'm not bringing any cannibal brats home with us. We could take zhem to Little Lamplight, but I would be obliged to tell zhe kids zhere zhat zhey were from a cannibal family. Who knows what zhey would do, but zhe Lamplighters don't shy away from tough decisions. Zhey might not care, or zhey might kill zhe cannibal brats as soon as we left, or right in front of us. Consider zhat zhey only have two paths leaving zheir settlement, and one of zhem zhey call Murder Pass. You can't save everyone, Alice."
The Apprentice sighed and nodded, "I suppose you're right, Dr St. Claire."
Lily slowed down as she passed abeam Tenpenny Tower, about five kilometres to the south; she was letting her drones close to the high-rise building to get a set of good close-up images of it.
She froze for a moment as the live image from one of the drones showed an elderly-looking man on the penthouse level sitting on a patio overlooking the Wasteland. There was a large calibre hunting rifle propped up against the railing of the patio, and the man was sitting under a large parasol, such that the drone had to descend a fair bit and get images from the side at a slant angle.
She didn't trust her game knowledge enough to condemn a man to death on that factor alone, but she had asked a lot of people about Alistair Tenpenny, and not a single person said a good thing about the psychopathic Englishman. Plus, she was already pretty confident his man Burke tried to have her killed by the Children of Atom when she went to disassemble Megaton's megatons.
She carefully designated the parasol as a target from her drone's feed, and mentally hit a trigger. There was an incredibly loud *THWUMP* from outside the RV, easily audible inside the armoured cabin, as one of her loitering munition drones was thrown into the air through a pneumatic launch tube.
The kamikaze drones weren't quad-copters; they were traditional aeroplane-style drones. They had stubby spring-loaded wings and a spring-loaded propellor at the rear that began turning furiously as soon as it left the launch tube. They had the explosive charge in the nose, either shaped charges for anti-armour or anti-Super Mutant purposes or a normal high-explosive charge surrounded by steel ball bearings for anti-personnel; it was the latter type that she had launched.
They weren't that fast either; she could have designed a faster design, but if you designed an airfoil for a high-speed cruise, that meant it had a really poor low-speed performance. And that would have meant they wouldn't have been able to be launched just by pneumatics; an air cannon just wouldn't have gotten it up to speed fast enough by itself to reach steady flight, and it would have crashed on launch. Her first three designs met this fate. She'd have to have included a rocket assist for the first phase of flight to get them up to speed, and Lily didn't have any way to manufacture solid rocket motors at the moment, and she definitely didn't want to lose any of her limited number of missiles to cannibalise their rockets.
Lily pondered. Perhaps she should have used some kind of electromagnetic linear accelerator. She had that technology from plasma guns, but she hadn't tried to build actual rail guns with it -- because she knew there was a railgun inside the VSS building that she intended to loot, and it seemed kind of like a shame to reinvent the wheel if you were going to the loot the wheel store real soon.
However, they could still fly at about 50 kph, which was fast enough for her purposes. Alice glanced at her, "What was that sound?"
"Ah." Lily said, and forwarded the girl a link to the drone footage. "Remember zhat bad man I told you about, who would randomly shoot people from the top of zhe Tenpenny tower and wanted to blow up Megaton?"
Alice nodded.
"Well, I figured zhat what is good for zhe gander is good for zhe goose, yes? That zhwump noise was a pneumatic air cannon shooting a small autonomous drone zhat carries an explosive charge," Lily said, smiling.
The Apprentice blinked, "Wait. You're going to blow him up?!"
Lily nodded. "Like I said, he wanted to blow us up, no? Eet seems equitable."
Alice nodded slowly, "I suppose so. Everyone seems to agree he is close to pure evil. But... I don't really want to watch an old geezer get blown up though." Lily also noticed her stop watching the drone feed.
'Well, neither do I, really,' Lily thought. She just had to be sure the first drone did the job.
It was a good thing she was watching the feed so closely, too. And a good thing Alice had dropped off. If she had just kept driving and allowed the tiny cruise missile to do its work autonomously, it would have struck right as a woman, clearly, some kind of prostitute or perhaps merely a kept woman, arrived and started plying her trade on top of his lap, gyrating lewdly.
Sighing in disgust, she both zoomed out the drone, so she didn't have such a good image and triggered the kamikaze to break off its attack run and start circling. It still had over twenty-five minutes of endurance.
After a moment, the Apprentice glanced left and right, "But there was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom?" she asked in an affected voice.
The girl had been getting into Lily's Earth media again! That was clearly a Marvin the Martian impression. Lily gave the girl a side-eye, "It's only a half-kilo charge, and we're five kilometres away! You won't hear anything!" Then she paused, "Plus, a non-combatant came onto zhe penthouse patio, and I didn't want to blow zhem up too, so I have zhe drone circle right now."
Alice smiled, "That's a good thing you did, Mistress. How long do you think they will be in the target area? I remember you telling me these types of drones had a limited flight time."
Lily said with disgust in her tone, "I'm judging only two to zhree minutes at most. It should be fine." Her obvious disgusted tone had Alice tilt her head to the side, an amused and curious expression on her face, but Lily didn't enlighten her.
Rather than watch herself anymore, she set a timer to pull up the feed every minute and waited.
It turned out her estimate of two minutes was optimistic. At the two-minute mark, the woman was already gone. Lily had worried that Alistair Tenpenny would have left back into his penthouse, too, and if so, she would have just aborted the attempt and got him another day, but he was looking through the scope of his rifle, sort of in the direction that their RV and truck was stopped. Could he see them five kilometres away? Possibly. But he was likely just looking for some random wastelander or ghoul to shoot, as was his custom.
Nothing like a little post-coital murder, she supposed?
Before she triggered the kamikaze to resume, she had two drones approach closely and look through each of the windows into his penthouse to make sure that woman wasn't, say, lounging seductively on a chaise recliner near the patio.
She had estimated the kill zone of the HE anti-personnel charge at about thirty to forty metres in all directions. She didn't really expect it to go through to the next floor down, as the patio was built out of strong-looking masonry, but anyone in his penthouse might have gotten gibbed.
But fortunately, there wasn't anyone there either. Not even Burke, which was a shame.
She triggered the kamikaze to continue its attack. It was already circling the building at a few hundred metres, and once triggered, the little devil nosed over into a dive-bomb and zipped down with impressive speed before exploding right before colliding with the colourful parasol stuck in the middle of the table Tenpenny was sitting at.
Lily winced. Yeah, there was no surviving that. She put the RV back into gear and started exfiltrating away from the crime scene. It was possible she would be linked to the attack later, assuming anyone cared enough to inspect the bomb site forensically. Although she made sure that the computer processors and sensors would be destroyed by encasing them in magnesium and silicon dioxide, essentially making a thermite casing, which she already saw cooking off on the drone film, but she was pretty sure some of the parts of the drone would survive the explosion. The carbon-fibre wings, perhaps, or part of the fuselage? In her tests of the system, admittedly, which only amounted to four units tested, in most cases, a wing survived and, in other instances bits of the fuselage.
But Tenpenny didn't have any friends. She doubted that even Monsieur Burke would look that deeply into his untimely demise. Plus, she intended to shoot that asshole in the face at the first opportunity if he didn't beat feet out of her town; she just hadn't gotten around to him yet, but she sure as heck hadn't forgotten him.
---xxxxxx---
"Dr St. Claire, why aren't there any colours in the night vision?" Alice asked curiously. The sun had set, and they were inching slowly towards the VSS building.
Lily hummed, looking for a location to hide the deployed RV and truck from casual observation. "Colours are just how we observe specific wavelengths of light. That's why if I put a red filter over a flashlight and light up this cabin with it, everything would appear to be the colour red, yes? Because I am only shining red light, and it is only zhe red light zhat is bounding off things and reaching your eyes."
She didn't have a red flashlight, but the interior cabin lights, which were LEDs, did have a red-light mode to preserve night vision. It was kind of useless for her, but she thought it looked very tacticool, so she included the feature. She turned it on, and the dim light in the cabin turned red, "See? So to show any visible colours, we would have to shine visible light, zherefore it wouldn't be night vision; it would be a searchlight." She turned the light back onto white light mode to demonstrate.
Lily had already spent most of the day with the girl, which was more time than she usually liked spending with her, but things were a bit different when they were on an adventure for some reason. They generally travelled in companionable silence, for one, which Lily appreciated a lot, except for times like this when the girl had a question, and it was a good question, Lily thought.
"Ahhh... that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. You explain things a lot better than the books do, most of the time," Alice said cheerfully.
Well, of course. She was the best, after all.
She pulled the RV into the crook of a demolished building right next door to the VSS building and told the girl to park the truck much closer to the exposed elevator.
There were about four Super Mutants nearby, but the greenskins hadn't noticed them yet. Lily had already designated them in her targeting system but wanted a simultaneous time-on-target attack as well, "Okay, let's get in zhe armour again. I can see at least four Super Mutants with heavy weapons. We'll try to blow them up and attack them on the ground while hiding behind our robots, ok?"
Now the Apprentice looked very nervous. It was one thing to talk about adventure, but it was another to fight your first Super Mutant. They got in the armour quickly but stayed in the RV for a moment. Lily wanted to give Alice experience in how her drone targeting system worked, so she forwarded the girl the drone footage and walked her through re-designating them as targets.
"How many drones should I send at them?" asked the Apprentice curiously.
Lily hummed, "Let's try with two and let's test zhe regular HE, not the shaped charges. And make sure you program zhem for simultaneous time-on-target. That way zhe first drone will circle until zhe second drone is launched. It takes about twenty seconds to recharge the compressed air to fire the second shot." Another reason a railgun-based launcher would be far superior.
Lily waited until the girl nodded and told her, "Okay. I have the 'fire mission' programmed and ready. Why did you call this a fire mission anyway?"
Lily shrugged her shoulders, "It's a military term. It means when you specify both a target and a number of zhe ordinances. I zhink it is more of an artilleryman term, but I'm not too sure." Lily wouldn't admit the real reason was that it sounded cool. "Okay, let's get out with zhe robots, then you trigger the mission and then the robots will advance, us behind zhem, Okay?"
She gave the Apprentice her tribeam rifle while she herself took the plasma rifle she rebuilt. Plasma was very effective against Super Mutants, and she felt she had the best aim.
She should have built the girl a plasma rifle, also. Even before she got the technology to fabricate micro-fusion cells, she still should have done it. Micro-fusion cells are... or rather were pricey and expensive, but the Apprentice's life was irreplaceable.
Still, the tribeam rifle was almost as good and possible better against certain threats like military bots. Her modifications to it to make every beam hit the same spot gave it unparalleled burn-through potential, so it should put even a Super Mutant down if you shot them in the head or heart.
It was also a lot easier to aim, just point and shoot. The plasma rifle's plasma bolt was actually quite slow, so there was significant leading involved in shooting anything but a stationary target. Although, most of that was handled by her battle system, as it provided a lead-assist reticle to aim at any hostile targets.
They stepped out of the RV, and Lily closed the ramp behind them. The. ten Kaytrons Lily had brought were already waiting, crouched in something that might be considered stealthy? At least Lily changed their exterior to have a matte black carbon fibre layer above the steel alloy, which was a little shiny. It made them look more like Kaylons, too.
They were about forty to fifty metres from the Super Mutants so Lily nodded at Alice while sending orders to the Kaytrons mentally. Alice triggered her pre-programmed fire mission, causing a *thwump*. The robots started moving towards the enemies, and Lily and the Apprentice followed behind as another *thwump* sounded.
The Super Mutants weren't that near the VSS building, but they were near enough that they would definitely have seen their vehicles, so Lily judged they had to be taken out.
She was watching on the drone surveillance as they snuck up on them, her feed having a count-down until the impact of the two drones, who were already climbing up high for their dive-bomb terminal manoeuvres. She and the Apprentice stopped about twenty metres away, which she felt was super plenty for safety's sake, while the Kaytrons approached to about ten.
However, as the two drones tipped themselves over and started their dive, Lily noticed something one of the Super Mutants was carrying. It was an anomaly, as the others had heavy weapons, and this one was just carrying a football-shaped item.
Lily was now able to think about two things simultaneously, so long as one of her thought processes was fairly simple. While one part of her mind was asking herself, 'What is that?' which caused her Muse to pop up with an explanation [That is a mini-nuke], the other part of her mind was screaming, 'Fuck!'
It wasn't possible to call the drones back once they had started a dive bomb; their energy was too high for the puny little propellers to overcome, so there wasn't anything she could do. Instead, as the counter ticked closer to zero, she yelled at the Apprentice, "On the deck! Cover your head, now, now, now."
She gave a girl a shove in the correct direction so that she would lay her body perpendicular to the potential oncoming pressure wave instead of head-on, which might cause spinal compression injuries, and then joined the girl on the ground in a brace position.
The two drones struck as programmed simultaneously, and a number of Kaytrons had started firing, but they were backing up too as their gestalt intelligence wasn't too smart, but it knew what a mini-nuke was too. Still, they tried to accomplish their orders at the same time.
At first, Lily thought they had dodged a bullet and even stupidly glanced up just in time for the flash to burn out all of the visual sensors in her armour's helmet.
---xxxxxx---
AN: I considered cliffing you guys here but I decided against it. ;)
The yield of mini-nukes was actually really small. Much smaller than even the Davy Crockett nuclear artillery in her past life. That said, it still was close to the equivalent of a ton of high explosives, which was the equivalent of a truck bomb or two two-thousand pound general purpose bombs detonating simultaneously, and they were only slightly above twenty metres away from it.
Lily didn't think she had totally lost consciousness, but perhaps she did because the next thing she knew, she was at least thirty metres away from the blast. Had the pressure wave picked her up and tossed her another ten metres?
She looked around frantically to see where the Apprentice was and called out audibly and on the radio, "Alice! Where are you? Are you okay?" She couldn't see her anywhere!
Speakers crackled, and I heard beneath me, voice slightly slurred, "Ugh... underneath your fat iron ass, Mistress. What the hell happened?"
Well, she was making jokes, so she couldn't be too badly injured, Lily hoped. As for herself, she might have a minor concussion, and she had a broken wrist, presumably from when the shockwave threw her into the air; she had landed wrong. That armoured wrist joint on her armour was also damaged. Also, a number of visual sensors on her armour were damaged, and her armour took a lot of rads, both prompt x-rays and continuing neutron emitter contamination, according to the report she was seeing in front of her eyes.
The x-rays were obviously from the mini-nuke going off, and she had probably taken a bit of the atomised uranium and other nuclear explosive by-products on the steel armour. If so, she would likely have to replace perhaps the first outer layer of parts of her armour.
Lily rolled forward several times until she was on solid ground and stood up. "Are you injured?" She was trying to ping the girl's medichine implant, but those were only designed to surrender its host's privacy in the event that the host was very seriously injured. That was a good sign, Lily supposed.
"Broken left clavicle, concussion; my armour says I took some rads, but it already administered some Rad-X. Did someone fucking nuke us?!" the girl asked, astonished.
"Language! And...sort of. I really am not sure why, but one of zhe Super Mutants was carrying a Mini-Nuke. Did it intend to zhrow it at zhe enemy? Was it zhe suicide bomber? I 'ave no idea," Lily explained, clearly astonished herself. It was another case of her relying on her knowledge from the video game too much. Super Mutant suicide bombers sounded kind of plausible, even if Fallout 3 never had that type of enemy.
The Apprentice stood to her feet, a little unsteadily, muttering that she was allowed to swear in response to getting nuked, which Lily actually didn't have a real argument against. She started examining the feed from her robots. Out of the ten they had, only five were still on the network, and two of them were reporting serious damage.
Lily sighed. Hopefully, at least some of those five were repairable. They weren't in the incineration zone by a long shot, but the shockwave tossed them through the air like they were plastic Army men a kid was playing with, not combat bots. She had redesigned their processor housing to be even more ruggedised, so she had some good hopes there. She'd have to go collect them, drag each of them back to the RV and conduct repairs.
Same with the Apprentice and her Armour. They couldn't leave the armour for the temporary radiation hazard, and Lily didn't like the idea of staying in the armour when part of it was irradiated either. She needed the sensors inside the RV to figure out which armour segments got the most rads and needed to be replaced.
Well, so much for the idea of sleeping tonight.
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