GNR Plaza
If Ellen never saw another Metro tunnel, it would be too soon. The flashlight Mr. Mills had recommended had made the slog from Friendship Heights Station to Chevy Chase a little easier, but only in that it let her see trouble coming from further off. The tunnels still stank, the rubble was still difficult to negotiate, and train cars still blocked the tunnels at the oddest places. Frankly, the next time she had to find her way through the ruins, Ellen intended to do everything in her power to slug her way through before giving up and looking for a metro tunnel ever again.
She squinted up with one hand shading her eyes as she made it to the top. Some ancient sculpture or monument of some kind still stood- a globe of some kind, suspended from four widely-spaced legs in the middle of a huge metal ring. It looked as if there was a rocket orbiting the globe on a smaller ring of wire, but she couldn't be sure. How it could still be standing all these years after the fact, she didn't know... not that it mattered. If she was reading her Pip-Boy right, she was practically on top of Galaxy News Radio. She dusted her hands off, returned the flashlight to her belt-
"Come out, come out, wherever you are," rumbled a gravelly voice from just out of sight behind a pile of rubble.
-activated her armor's stealth field and drew the Gauss rifle. That was a supermutant voice if she ever heard one. Moments later she was proved right: not one but two of the green-skinned giants lumbered into view, both carrying assault rifles and scanning the ruined landscape around them. There was no time for a scoped shot- they were practically on top of her!- so she took approximate aim and fired. The bolt tore into the nearer mutant, sending it spinning backwards into its companion, but it wasn't quite enough for a kill. She sucked an angry breath between her teeth and darted for cover, reloading as fast as she could and firing again. And a third time, and a fourth; aiming was tricky when there were that many bullets and lasers in the air.
... wait. Lasers?
Ellen risked poking her head out from behind her cover and caught sight of a dusty grey figure a dozen yards away. The crack-crack-crack of automatic gunfire dragged her attention back to the remaining mutant, who'd taken half-a-dozen wounds and was still laying waste to everything in sight. With a silent prayer that taking the extra time wouldn't get her killed, she lowered her eye to the Gauss rifle's scope, centered her crosshairs on the mutant's skull, and pulled the trigger. It tumbled backwards with a most satisfying BANG.
For the moment Ellen couldn't hear any more gunfire, or laser blasts for that matter, so she turned to look for the grey figure again. That looked like Brotherhood of Steel power armor. More than one set, in fact- there were other figures joining it now, one apparently without a helmet. That was a reasonably good sign; she deactivated her stealth field and started in their direction. Unfortunately, the first thing she heard was one of them murmuring to another, "Is this the idiot who blew our ambush?"
"Um," she began.
She never got any farther. The helmetless figure- a blonde woman, surprisingly young-looking- whipped around to face her. "Look," the blonde snapped, I don't know who you are, but you don't belong here. The supermutants have overrun our brothers at the Galaxy News Radio building, and we're headed there to back them up." She cast a skeptical eye over Ellen's equipment and reluctantly added, "You can tag along if you want, but keep your head down and try not to do anything... stupid."
Ellen's jaw was working, but no sound made it out of her mouth. The best she could manage was a half-squeaked "Who are you people?"
The blonde woman barely suppressed a snort as she said, "I'm Sentinel Lyons of the Lyons' Pride. With the Brotherhood of Steel." She paused, watching Ellen for some sign of recognition. "Don't worry. We're on your side. At least, I hope so."
Ellen didn't know what to make of that last part, but a few words still hung in her brain. Cautiously she said, "You mentioned GNR?"
Lyons nodded. "There aren't a lot of safe places in the ruins right now, but the GNR building is sort of our port in the storm. Unfortunately, the building's been hit pretty hard lately," she said. "We're their backup. So if you don't mind, we need to move out."
Ellen winced. "I'm sorry," she said contritely. Lyons merely nodded and took off at a run for an alley Ellen hadn't seen before; Ellen followed. The Sentinel's armored footfalls echoed off the barren concrete walls and ceiling, joined shortly by more from behind. For all that the Chinese armor was respectably tough, Ellen felt suddenly small and naked. She said nothing. What good would it have done her? At least this group was ostensibly on her side...
Lyons turned a corner; Ellen caught sight of an armored form huddled against the wall up ahead, and another crouched not far away, aiming its laser rifle at something in the distance. "What's the situation?" Lyons asked as she came to a stop.
There was a long silence, and then a ZAP!; a moment later the crouched figure stood up. "All clear, Sentinel," it said, its baritone muffled by the helmet's filters. "Five mutants, released from their torment. The rest are keeping their heads down."
"Good," Lyons said. "Jennings?"
The armored man glanced over at the mattresss, and then back to Lyons. "Negative," he said quietly. Then, turning Ellen's way, he commented, "New recruit?"
Ellen blinked in surprise, but Lyons just shook her head. "Nah. Just a stray we picked up- one that blundered into the Uglies over on Forty-second."
Excuse me? Ellen nearly said. The man just tossed her a gesture not unlike a salute and called, "Welcome!"
"All right," Lyons cut in before anything else could happen, "it's the usual drill. Reddin, you do whatever Paladin Vargas says and keep your mouth shut."
"Yes, ma'am," came a woman's voice from over Ellen's shoulder; Ellen turned and caught sight of the two other armored figures who'd followed them.There was no time for anything else, though. Lyons and the man with the laser rifle were already moving out, and she had no choice but to follow. They came into the daylight again outside the tumbledown brick remains of what had once been Early Dawn Elementary School.
A moment later, the air came alive with bullets.
Ellen had been in battles with multiple opponents before- raiders, mostly, and three-man groups of Talons- but nothing like this. The one time she'd gone into a fight against mutants with more than one person backing her up, it'd been the Oucasts, and it'd mostly been on level ground. And there'd been a lot fewer mutants. Here, they seemed to be firing from every window on every floor, and Ellen scarcely knew where to dodge or fire from for fear of interfering with the Brotherhood gunners behind her. The most she could do was dart for some pile of obliging rubble and aim for anything green, reload, and run for the next bit of cover. Anything else would get somebody killed, she was sure- herself, or one of the Pride, she didn't know. All she knew was that the battle seemed to go on forever, and her ears were ringing worse at the end of it than they'd been at any point in the Anchorage simulation. At least everyone was still standing. There'd been a few explosions...
"Okay," she heard Lyons saying, "the GNR outpost is to the south of us. Colvin, you're the eyes. Vargas, Reddin, secure this building."
"What about our friend?" Colvin- the man with the laser rifle, from before- asked. Lyons shrugged.
"Vargas and Reddin can handle the building, so I guess she comes with us." She nodded towards a roughly door-shaped hole in the southern wall nearest them. "Coming?"
There were a good six or seven mutants in the plaza on the other side, all heavily armed. On the other hand, they were fighting in the open, and the only high ground to be had (the top of a building's stairs) was claimed by a handful of armored Brotherhood fighters. So long as nobody ruptured the engine compartment on any of the cars that lay around the edges of the plaza, it was a survivable fight. Not that Ellen thought of it that way, exactly. That would require thinking. She was too busy scrambling for safe spaces to fire on the mutants and shutting out the sound of their gruesome threats to think.
It wasn't until she stopped to stanch the bleeding of one wounded forearm (she had a stimpak around here somewhere, damned if she could find it) that she realized the fighting had stopped. She looked up, panting. Lyons was still on her feet, as were the rest of the Pride, but one of the other Brothers was down. His weapon had fallen from his dead hands; Ellen realized with a shock that it was a mini-nuke launcher almost exactly like the ones in the Anchorage simulation. There were several of the horrible things scattered about his armored corpse, even.
She started to back away slowly. Behind her, Reddin said, "So- how'd I do, Vargas? I pass my little trial run? Am I in the Pride or what?"
"You think those were all the Uglies in DC?" Vargas answered. Ellen found a stimpak and managed to inject herself with it. "We've still got tidying up to do. I'll sweep the west side. You take the east."
"Okay, okay," Reddin grumbled. Ellen leaned back against the heap of concrete behind her and held her hand over her wounded forearm as the stimpak did its work. She'd speak to Lyons in... a...
... in a. . .
... why was the ground shaking?
It all happened in one horrifying instant. Something struck the bus that blocked off the eastern side of the plaza with unspeakable force- the bus went up in a blinding white thunderous explosion- Reddin screamed-
"BEHEMOTH!" she heard Vargas cry as a thing erupted from the wreckage where the bus had been.
It was shaped like a man, more or less- if that man were green-skinned, unbelievably thick-necked, and outdid every other mutant alive for sheer physical strength and hatred. There were car parts strapped loosely to its torso, whole body panels relegated to the role of local patches of armor. It waved a length of pipe easily wide enough for a small child to fit in as its weapon, and it charged at the surviving Pride members as if neither bullet nor laser meant anything to it at all.
( I'm not sure I'd be willing to use a mini-nuke, but I've never been in a situation where it'd be necessary )
She glanced at the dead Brother and his weapon a moment. The creature smashed a hole in what remained of the school wall, the shower of bricks nearly burying Vargas.
( it seems like a pretty good thing to have around, just in case )
The Gauss rifle had flipped an armored Outcast end over end, and a mutant as well.
( I don't want to make it worse )
It wasn't enough to knock the Behemoth over. But it diddestroy one of the monster's knees on a single hit, and leave a huge red hole in the thing's other leg. As it staggered a moment, howling in pain, the Pride stepped up its fire, hurling everything they had into the fray. Ellen reloaded her gun and aimed for the monster's spine, firing as quickly as the charging electromagnets would let her. Die, she found herself praying between shots. Just die, please, for the love of God, just die!
When it finally toppled to the earth in a massive bleeding heap she just stood there, staring at it and shaking. The Brotherhood fighters were assessing their situation, and Lyons and Vargas were talking, but Ellen only barely heard them. It was, bluntly put, the biggest living thing she'd ever seen. It was bigger than trees. Bigger than buses, even- well, maybe not that big, but close. It could probably have snapped a Deathclaw in half with its gigantic green bare hands. Even in death its lips seemed to be pulled back from its monstrous yellowed teeth in a snarl of hatred. She shuddered, wanting to turn away, but simultaneously not wanting to turn her back on that vile corpse.
"-talk to the Scribes," she distantly heard Lyons saying. "Let it be chronicled that Paladin Reddin passed her test-"
Reddin. Oh, God, Reddin hadn't made it, had she? Ellen turned away from the awful thing's corpse and went to find the armored woman's body instead.The explosion had flung her halfway across the plaza; she lay like a heap of engine parts where she'd fallen. Not really knowing what else to do, Ellen started straightening her out as best she could, then closed her eyes to pray quietly for a moment.
When she opened her eyes and looked up, Lyons was there. "I guess it's my turn to thank you," the blonde woman said quietly. "Anyway, the area's secured, so you're free to talk to Three Dog if you need to."
"Thank you," said Ellen, who was doing her best not to look in the direction of the fallen Behemoth. "You, uh... you guys don't mess around, do you."
"I'll take that as a compliment." Lyons gave a small smile. "If we don't try to keep the mutants from killing everyone and everything in the Capital Wasteland, who will? The Brotherhood does its best, but sometimes it needs a little something special. That's where the Lyons' Pride comes in."
"So I see," said Ellen. "Um... where do I-"
"That door there," said Lyons, "and upstairs. Just keep going up. You can't miss him."
She squinted up with one hand shading her eyes as she made it to the top. Some ancient sculpture or monument of some kind still stood- a globe of some kind, suspended from four widely-spaced legs in the middle of a huge metal ring. It looked as if there was a rocket orbiting the globe on a smaller ring of wire, but she couldn't be sure. How it could still be standing all these years after the fact, she didn't know... not that it mattered. If she was reading her Pip-Boy right, she was practically on top of Galaxy News Radio. She dusted her hands off, returned the flashlight to her belt-
"Come out, come out, wherever you are," rumbled a gravelly voice from just out of sight behind a pile of rubble.
-activated her armor's stealth field and drew the Gauss rifle. That was a supermutant voice if she ever heard one. Moments later she was proved right: not one but two of the green-skinned giants lumbered into view, both carrying assault rifles and scanning the ruined landscape around them. There was no time for a scoped shot- they were practically on top of her!- so she took approximate aim and fired. The bolt tore into the nearer mutant, sending it spinning backwards into its companion, but it wasn't quite enough for a kill. She sucked an angry breath between her teeth and darted for cover, reloading as fast as she could and firing again. And a third time, and a fourth; aiming was tricky when there were that many bullets and lasers in the air.
... wait. Lasers?
Ellen risked poking her head out from behind her cover and caught sight of a dusty grey figure a dozen yards away. The crack-crack-crack of automatic gunfire dragged her attention back to the remaining mutant, who'd taken half-a-dozen wounds and was still laying waste to everything in sight. With a silent prayer that taking the extra time wouldn't get her killed, she lowered her eye to the Gauss rifle's scope, centered her crosshairs on the mutant's skull, and pulled the trigger. It tumbled backwards with a most satisfying BANG.
For the moment Ellen couldn't hear any more gunfire, or laser blasts for that matter, so she turned to look for the grey figure again. That looked like Brotherhood of Steel power armor. More than one set, in fact- there were other figures joining it now, one apparently without a helmet. That was a reasonably good sign; she deactivated her stealth field and started in their direction. Unfortunately, the first thing she heard was one of them murmuring to another, "Is this the idiot who blew our ambush?"
"Um," she began.
She never got any farther. The helmetless figure- a blonde woman, surprisingly young-looking- whipped around to face her. "Look," the blonde snapped, I don't know who you are, but you don't belong here. The supermutants have overrun our brothers at the Galaxy News Radio building, and we're headed there to back them up." She cast a skeptical eye over Ellen's equipment and reluctantly added, "You can tag along if you want, but keep your head down and try not to do anything... stupid."
Ellen's jaw was working, but no sound made it out of her mouth. The best she could manage was a half-squeaked "Who are you people?"
The blonde woman barely suppressed a snort as she said, "I'm Sentinel Lyons of the Lyons' Pride. With the Brotherhood of Steel." She paused, watching Ellen for some sign of recognition. "Don't worry. We're on your side. At least, I hope so."
Ellen didn't know what to make of that last part, but a few words still hung in her brain. Cautiously she said, "You mentioned GNR?"
Lyons nodded. "There aren't a lot of safe places in the ruins right now, but the GNR building is sort of our port in the storm. Unfortunately, the building's been hit pretty hard lately," she said. "We're their backup. So if you don't mind, we need to move out."
Ellen winced. "I'm sorry," she said contritely. Lyons merely nodded and took off at a run for an alley Ellen hadn't seen before; Ellen followed. The Sentinel's armored footfalls echoed off the barren concrete walls and ceiling, joined shortly by more from behind. For all that the Chinese armor was respectably tough, Ellen felt suddenly small and naked. She said nothing. What good would it have done her? At least this group was ostensibly on her side...
Lyons turned a corner; Ellen caught sight of an armored form huddled against the wall up ahead, and another crouched not far away, aiming its laser rifle at something in the distance. "What's the situation?" Lyons asked as she came to a stop.
There was a long silence, and then a ZAP!; a moment later the crouched figure stood up. "All clear, Sentinel," it said, its baritone muffled by the helmet's filters. "Five mutants, released from their torment. The rest are keeping their heads down."
"Good," Lyons said. "Jennings?"
The armored man glanced over at the mattresss, and then back to Lyons. "Negative," he said quietly. Then, turning Ellen's way, he commented, "New recruit?"
Ellen blinked in surprise, but Lyons just shook her head. "Nah. Just a stray we picked up- one that blundered into the Uglies over on Forty-second."
Excuse me? Ellen nearly said. The man just tossed her a gesture not unlike a salute and called, "Welcome!"
"All right," Lyons cut in before anything else could happen, "it's the usual drill. Reddin, you do whatever Paladin Vargas says and keep your mouth shut."
"Yes, ma'am," came a woman's voice from over Ellen's shoulder; Ellen turned and caught sight of the two other armored figures who'd followed them.There was no time for anything else, though. Lyons and the man with the laser rifle were already moving out, and she had no choice but to follow. They came into the daylight again outside the tumbledown brick remains of what had once been Early Dawn Elementary School.
A moment later, the air came alive with bullets.
Ellen had been in battles with multiple opponents before- raiders, mostly, and three-man groups of Talons- but nothing like this. The one time she'd gone into a fight against mutants with more than one person backing her up, it'd been the Oucasts, and it'd mostly been on level ground. And there'd been a lot fewer mutants. Here, they seemed to be firing from every window on every floor, and Ellen scarcely knew where to dodge or fire from for fear of interfering with the Brotherhood gunners behind her. The most she could do was dart for some pile of obliging rubble and aim for anything green, reload, and run for the next bit of cover. Anything else would get somebody killed, she was sure- herself, or one of the Pride, she didn't know. All she knew was that the battle seemed to go on forever, and her ears were ringing worse at the end of it than they'd been at any point in the Anchorage simulation. At least everyone was still standing. There'd been a few explosions...
"Okay," she heard Lyons saying, "the GNR outpost is to the south of us. Colvin, you're the eyes. Vargas, Reddin, secure this building."
"What about our friend?" Colvin- the man with the laser rifle, from before- asked. Lyons shrugged.
"Vargas and Reddin can handle the building, so I guess she comes with us." She nodded towards a roughly door-shaped hole in the southern wall nearest them. "Coming?"
There were a good six or seven mutants in the plaza on the other side, all heavily armed. On the other hand, they were fighting in the open, and the only high ground to be had (the top of a building's stairs) was claimed by a handful of armored Brotherhood fighters. So long as nobody ruptured the engine compartment on any of the cars that lay around the edges of the plaza, it was a survivable fight. Not that Ellen thought of it that way, exactly. That would require thinking. She was too busy scrambling for safe spaces to fire on the mutants and shutting out the sound of their gruesome threats to think.
It wasn't until she stopped to stanch the bleeding of one wounded forearm (she had a stimpak around here somewhere, damned if she could find it) that she realized the fighting had stopped. She looked up, panting. Lyons was still on her feet, as were the rest of the Pride, but one of the other Brothers was down. His weapon had fallen from his dead hands; Ellen realized with a shock that it was a mini-nuke launcher almost exactly like the ones in the Anchorage simulation. There were several of the horrible things scattered about his armored corpse, even.
She started to back away slowly. Behind her, Reddin said, "So- how'd I do, Vargas? I pass my little trial run? Am I in the Pride or what?"
"You think those were all the Uglies in DC?" Vargas answered. Ellen found a stimpak and managed to inject herself with it. "We've still got tidying up to do. I'll sweep the west side. You take the east."
"Okay, okay," Reddin grumbled. Ellen leaned back against the heap of concrete behind her and held her hand over her wounded forearm as the stimpak did its work. She'd speak to Lyons in... a...
... in a. . .
... why was the ground shaking?
It all happened in one horrifying instant. Something struck the bus that blocked off the eastern side of the plaza with unspeakable force- the bus went up in a blinding white thunderous explosion- Reddin screamed-
"BEHEMOTH!" she heard Vargas cry as a thing erupted from the wreckage where the bus had been.
It was shaped like a man, more or less- if that man were green-skinned, unbelievably thick-necked, and outdid every other mutant alive for sheer physical strength and hatred. There were car parts strapped loosely to its torso, whole body panels relegated to the role of local patches of armor. It waved a length of pipe easily wide enough for a small child to fit in as its weapon, and it charged at the surviving Pride members as if neither bullet nor laser meant anything to it at all.
( I'm not sure I'd be willing to use a mini-nuke, but I've never been in a situation where it'd be necessary )
She glanced at the dead Brother and his weapon a moment. The creature smashed a hole in what remained of the school wall, the shower of bricks nearly burying Vargas.
( it seems like a pretty good thing to have around, just in case )
The Gauss rifle had flipped an armored Outcast end over end, and a mutant as well.
( I don't want to make it worse )
It wasn't enough to knock the Behemoth over. But it diddestroy one of the monster's knees on a single hit, and leave a huge red hole in the thing's other leg. As it staggered a moment, howling in pain, the Pride stepped up its fire, hurling everything they had into the fray. Ellen reloaded her gun and aimed for the monster's spine, firing as quickly as the charging electromagnets would let her. Die, she found herself praying between shots. Just die, please, for the love of God, just die!
When it finally toppled to the earth in a massive bleeding heap she just stood there, staring at it and shaking. The Brotherhood fighters were assessing their situation, and Lyons and Vargas were talking, but Ellen only barely heard them. It was, bluntly put, the biggest living thing she'd ever seen. It was bigger than trees. Bigger than buses, even- well, maybe not that big, but close. It could probably have snapped a Deathclaw in half with its gigantic green bare hands. Even in death its lips seemed to be pulled back from its monstrous yellowed teeth in a snarl of hatred. She shuddered, wanting to turn away, but simultaneously not wanting to turn her back on that vile corpse.
"-talk to the Scribes," she distantly heard Lyons saying. "Let it be chronicled that Paladin Reddin passed her test-"
Reddin. Oh, God, Reddin hadn't made it, had she? Ellen turned away from the awful thing's corpse and went to find the armored woman's body instead.The explosion had flung her halfway across the plaza; she lay like a heap of engine parts where she'd fallen. Not really knowing what else to do, Ellen started straightening her out as best she could, then closed her eyes to pray quietly for a moment.
When she opened her eyes and looked up, Lyons was there. "I guess it's my turn to thank you," the blonde woman said quietly. "Anyway, the area's secured, so you're free to talk to Three Dog if you need to."
"Thank you," said Ellen, who was doing her best not to look in the direction of the fallen Behemoth. "You, uh... you guys don't mess around, do you."
"I'll take that as a compliment." Lyons gave a small smile. "If we don't try to keep the mutants from killing everyone and everything in the Capital Wasteland, who will? The Brotherhood does its best, but sometimes it needs a little something special. That's where the Lyons' Pride comes in."
"So I see," said Ellen. "Um... where do I-"
"That door there," said Lyons, "and upstairs. Just keep going up. You can't miss him."