"Well..." I said, stepping out of my Corvega and staring at the collection of scrap before . "I guess this must be the place."
"The location does indeed match the coordinates, Friend_Courier."
I was standing at what should have been the entrance to a narrow canyon. I say 'should' because the only level part leading deeper into the mountain range ahead of was completely blocked off by a large wall of twisted tal, rusty cars and wreckage. Like ED-E said, this place matched the coordinates, all right. But I had other reasons for thinking that this was the place: graffiti. Most of it was just words and phrases, scrawled in various different colors of spray paint (but mostly red).
Loneso Road
YOU CAN GO HO, COURIER
the Divide
All of those and more were scrawled on the various bits of wreckage. But the largest was a question written along the side of the charred hulk of a bus, painted in yellow and black, and underlined several tis for good asure:
COURIER SIX?
"The decorations adorning refid:CanyonWreckage seem slightly unnecessary," ED-E buzzed around as I approached the bus. He kept talking, spouting off sothing that I didn't quite hear. I wasn't really paying attention because I suddenly beca aware of one last piece of graffiti: scrawled in white on the door of the bus was the sa flag symbol I'd seen in the Big Empty.
White... the red symbols ant danger. I'd worked that much out. But blue and white... I didn't know. Not for certain. That is, if it actually ant anything at all... I reached out cautiously, to push open the door.
There was a hiss of released gas, a shudder and grind of tal against tal, and the bus door opened, disturbing a large cloud of sand and grit as it moved.
"That was needlessly over dramatic, Friend_Courier," ED-E said directly behind ; I practically jumped out of my skin. I hadn't realized he'd floated down yet.
"Hey, don't bla ," I said, shaking it off and heading back to my car. "I didn't set all this up..." I popped open the trunk, and started collecting my weapons. Bring all you can carry. The words echoed in my head. I wasn't going to bring everything. I wouldn't be able to move if I did that, and move was the one thing I was sure I definitely needed to be able to do.
I had most of my pistols on , if nothing else. Roscoe, That Gun, the Ranger Sequoia, the Pulse Gun on a holster sewn into the inside of the duster, the Sonic Emitter on the other side. The sawed off shotgun was on my hip, and I had at least five knives along with my brass knuckles. How effective the brass knuckles would be was marginal, considering I had an arm that could punch through steel doors, but hey.
I definitely wasn't going to bring the MP5, though, because... I don't think I'd ever be able to use that particular gun again. Maybe it was just my mind playing tricks on , but it still slled like that... that night. I did, however, have my G36 slung across my back, along with several magazines worth of armor piercing ammo.
As I debated with myself about whether or not I should bring so grenades, a faint glimr caught my eye. I reached into the trunk, and held out the pistol so I could see it in the sunlight: the alien blaster. Even now - even after everything else that's happened since - I was still having a hard ti actually believing that what Cass and I had seen that afternoon was really real. If it wasn't for this pistol (because, of course I kept it), then I might just have written it off as a hallucination. A fignt of my imagination, brought on by spending too long in the desert heat.
Should I bring this with , too? It felt... odd in my hands. Way too light for sothing that size and shape. Not to ntion, I didn't really know exactly what it did - would it disintegrate people, or turn them into goo? Or maybe sothing even stranger. I an, it was alien, after all. Plus, I had no idea how much ammo I had. There was only the one... energy cell? I an, it wasn't like the battery packs for normal energy weapons. It just had a small, glowing tube that fit into the side of the gun. Really, I was just assuming that's what fed it ammo.
After a few minutes, I shook my head and put it back in the trunk. Not today. Today isn't a day for gambling. I need reliability. Sothing that I know will work. Because once I get into the Divide... all bets are off.
"Are you ready to proceed, Friend_Courier?" ED-E asked. I nodded, slamming the trunk shut. I grabbed the Riot Gear helt from the inside of my car and buckled it in place. I'd definitely need the air filter and the goggles.
"Yeah, let's..." I didn't finish, because at that mont I got a very unwelco sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. I looked around behind , my hand reaching for Roscoe out of habit. I couldn't see anything except desert. There was a thin strip of tarmac - the Long 15 - and to my left was the faint smudge of Primm, far, far in the distance, almost like a mirage. But other than that...
"Friend_Courier?" ED-E buzzed along next to . "Are you all right?"
"Yeah..." I finally managed to grunt out, trying to shake my head clear. "Yeah, it's... it's nothing." But my head didn't clear. I made my way back to the door that led into The Divide, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being watched.
She was out there. I couldn't know. Not for certain. But I had that feeling. Maybe I was just being overly paranoid...
"C'mon, let's go, pal," I muttered, more to myself than ED-E. The eyebot nodded in place, and sped off above the pile of wreckage.
"I do not believe I will be able to fit in the wreckage tunnel. I shall take to the skies, and see you on the other side." I nodded, and walked into the bus - and, as I did, the door shut behind . I halted in my tracks, my brain latching onto sothing unusual ED-E had said:
"Wait, tunnel?"
He wasn't kidding. When I first saw the pile of wreckage, I just thought it was a simple wall. But no - there was a whole hell of a lot more than just one bus. I must have been walking through a twisting, turning corridor of rusty steel and corrugated tal for... fuck, I don't even know how long. After what felt like six years, I finally got the faintest hint that I was getting close to the other side.
Had he built all this? How the hell had he found this much scrap, and why the fuck did he even take the ti and effort to make it? And was this the only way into The Divide... or just the way he wanted to take?
When I finally made it to the end, there wasn't an automatic door like at the entrance. Just a thin sheet of tal, propped up against the exit. Orange light filtered in through the cracks, and it rattled against the wind. I gave it a single shove, and it fell without ceremony. I stepped out into the open air, and even protected as I was from head to toe in armor, I could feel the howling wind, not to ntion all the sand, grit, and dirt carried by the wind, pelting all over. ED-E was already waiting for at the edge of a cliff ahead of , and I walked over to him, getting my first look at The Divide... from this direction, at least.
Before was a sinkhole several miles across, surrounded by mountains and sheer cliff faces, and filled with churning, swirling sandstorms. The storms were so thick, it almost looked like brown soup, lapping against the side of the mountain-bowl, unable to escape except in the smallest splashes of sand. The vast amount of sand swirling around even had a noticeable effect on the sky; everything was bathed in a harsh orange light. It was like the sun trying to filter through smoke clouds during a wildfire.
Inside the basin was a giant fissure in the earth - a vast, yawning chasm, as if the land itself had been rent asunder by the axe of an angry, ancient god. The skeletal fras of skyscrapers and broken, ruined highways jutted out at odd angles all along the fissure. It was like looking at soone whose chest had exploded from the inside, sending pieces of their ribcage flying in every direction. Several antenna towers were also sticking up out of the ground, all along the fissure; their red lights cut through the sandstorms all around them, slowly pulsing in ti with one another like a heartbeat.
I stepped to the edge of the cliff, and held onto the side of a nearby pipe to keep myself from falling in; the pipe was sheared in half, and definitely didn't belong. It almost looked like the winds had thrown it up here, along with the rest of the wreckage. I just... stood there for a few seconds. The devastation was... it was so absolute. I'd never seen anything quite like it, and definitely not from this high a vantage point.
"Friend_Courier," ED-E buzzed from sowhere off to my right. "I believe I may have found a way." Carefully, I stepped away from the cliff's edge, and followed the robot. He was flying near the edge of the cliff, and (though it took so rather careful footwork) I managed to find what he was talking about: the entrance to a concrete bunker. The entrance itself seed to be... slightly askew. Like the mountain itself wasn't at quite the right angle.
I took one last look around as I approached the entrance to the bunker, and one thing did catch my eye: a ruined billboard, hanging by a thread off the side of the cliff. Most of it was blackened and charred, but I was able to make out a few words:
"Building the Arican Dream..." I said aloud, tilting my head to try and get a better view. "...on solid ground." I let out a single grim laugh. I should probably expect to see a lot of bitter irony like that, here. I turned back to the bunker entrance and approached the door. Like the bus, I saw one of his flag symbols painted on the door. Must be the right way.
The wide tal door to the bunker slid down into the ground, revealing a tal platform - a freight elevator of so kind. When the door opened, the small light above it flickered slightly. I was about to step inside, when I noticed that ED-E was floating over the edge of the cliff, gazing out at the broken landscape below us.
"ED-E?" I asked, holding the door open. "You alright?" He didn't say anything at first. He just kept staring... as much as a robot without eyes can stare, anyway.
"This place..." ED-E started, his steady hovering buffeted by the winds around us slightly. "Friend_Courier. Do you know what it is that happened here?"
"No," I said honestly. "I an, I can guess. You ask , I'd say that the world happened to this place. It'll get us all in the end, and I doubt many of us will end up half as pretty as this place..." I shook my head, looking away from the scene of devastation sprawled out below . "But I don't... I don't know for sure what happened. Why?" ED-E backed up, until he finally ca to a stop a few feet away from , and spun in place. For a few seconds, he didn't say anything - and then, he shook back and forth several tis.
"I am sorry, Friend_Courier. There is... sothing familiar. I do not understand..." I reached out, and patted him on the chassis, motioning with my head into the elevator. "Yes. You are right, Friend_Courier. We should continue moving forward." He flew into the door, and I followed right behind him.
YOU CAN GO HO, COURIER
That ssage was sprayed along the wall again. After a rather perilous trip on the freight elevator that lasted entirely too long, it dumped us into a tunnel that was tilted at a very alarming angle. This was an actual tunnel, too - built out of concrete. And that just made the angle all that more alarming.
"I suggest we vacate imdiately, Friend_Courier," ED-E said, dodging a sparking wire hanging out of the ceiling that ca to life just as he flew past. "I could be mistaken, but I do not believe this structure is entirely stable."
I was about to say sothing snarky, but Sue - surprisingly enough - beat to it.
"You're the one who suggested we co down here in the first place!" She squealed. "And now you've got cold feet because of a little sparkly wire?"
"I do not possess any feet at all, Stealth_Sue," ED-E replied.
"You know what she ans, pal," I said, opening the bulkhead at the end of the tunnel. "If you think it's so dangerous, why'd you suggest we go this way?"
"Because you do not possess any ans of scaling sheer surfaces, Friend_Courier," ED-E said, orbiting around my head as we walked into the next room. "My anti-gravity repulsor coils allow to circumvent difficult terrain, but your humanoid bipedal locomotion severely limits your options. If I may make a suggestion, it might be pertinent to invest in a grappling hook and so sturdy climbing rope."
"Why not just go the whole nine yards, and try and convince to get so hover-shoes, or maybe a jetpack?" I asked with a chuckle. Of course, now that I was thinking about it... a jetpack would be pretty aweso. It would be like living in the future!
"Jetpacks are highly dangerous and needlessly impractical, Friend_Courier," ED-E responded, poking a rather sharp needle into my hopes and dreams. I shook my head and tried my best to move on.
"Alright, where the fuck are we?" I asked, looking around. The room the tunnel had dumped us into was rather large, mostly square, and very dark. Only one light in the ceiling was still intact, and it was completely dead. At the far end of the room was a giant armored bulkhead, but because it was behind a large pane of (surprisingly unmarred) glass... it didn't look like it was the sort you were supposed to walk through. In front of the glass was a large console.
What really caught my eye was the emblem on the floor: a circular seal, and mostly faded and worn. In the center was a shield that looked a little like the bottom of a clothes iron, decorated with the colors of the stars and stripes. In front of the shield was a sword, and a blue circle on top of that. It had 13 white stars ringing the edge, and a large star in the center; on either side of the sword was a gold string of leaves.
"Ballistic Defense Division..." I said aloud, reading the words once I switched my eyes to nightvision. A lot of the letters were worn away, but it was still pretty legible. Mostly. "Commonwealth Defense Administration." I looked closer, and realized that under the shield was a ribbon, and more writing: "Exitus Acta... Probat? The fuck does that an? Is that..." Sue answered my question before I could finish my thought.
"It's Latin," She said simply. "The phase first entered the Arican lexicon with George Washington - that was the slogan on his family coat of arms. The simplest translation would probably be 'The outco justifies the deed'."
"How... how do you know that?" I asked, switching my eyes back to normal.
"All Big Mountain synthetic personalities are equipped with a standard language package, which contains a translation matrix for 50 of the most common spoken languages in 2065, as well as 10 dead languages," Sue explained happily. "Latin is one of them. I can also translate ancient Greek and Sanskrit!"
"Well, shit," I chuckled. "Maybe next ti Sasha starts barking at in Russian, you can explain what he's talking about."
"," Sue said with a girlish giggle.
"Hey, ED-E, do you-" I looked up, and realized that the eyebot was hovering directly over the console in front of , completely still as a statue. "ED-E?" I was getting a bit concerned. This was the second ti in fifteen minutes that he'd been transfixed by sothing here.
"I... this is... familiar..." ED-E said, without turning to look at . Suddenly, there was a very familiar beeping sound that ca from his chassis... and then a voice peppered with static echoed out of ED-E's speaker grill.
"Experint log 369248/B - Eyebot Durafra universal interface override system. This is Dr. Whitley presiding. We've boosted signal gain and enlarged the overflow buffer system. That should ensure 100% connectivity and control. ED-E, whenever you're ready."
There was a strange electric sound on the recording - and then there was a burst of lightning that shot out of the dish on top of ED-E's chassis, and blasted a small dish-shaped receiver on the console. The recording kept going, but everything in the room... everything started to shake. There was a buzz, and the one functioning light in the room flickered to life. A few rotating yellow lights around the bulkhead lit up and started spinning, complete with a klaxon over the speakers.
"Yes! Success! Uh..." Whitley coughed, trying to compose himself. "Reporting full success on 369248/B. ED-E was able to interface with and override the test panel in under three seconds. Great job, team! Now, let's start on the proposal for the full rollout." ED-E floated away from the console, wobbling and vibrating in midair slightly, and I rushed over to him to see if he was alright. Behind , the bulkhead finally started to grind open.
"ED-E? You alright, buddy?" I rested a hand on his chassis, and he imdiately stopped vibrating.
"Yes... I- I think so..." ED-E gave one last shake. "Yes, thank you, Friend_Courier. I am..." He trailed off, his speaker grill pointed behind at the bulkhead. Was he looking at sothing?
"What are yo-" I turned around, and instantly, my eyes went as wide as pie plates and my blood turned to ice. It was unmistakable where we were, now that I could see what was just beyond the glass:
That was a nuke.
It was unquestionably an intercontinental ballistic missile of so sort. The sa sort of weapon that ended the world. The words "UNITED STATES" were printed vertically on the side, alongside a picture of an Arican flag. We were inside a missile silo, re feet away from one of the most destructive objects ever built in history. And that just made the tilt of this entire structure even more alarming.
Right, that's not an ergency, it's just... ti to... empty your bowels. Fuck.
"What... what is that?" Sue asked softly. ED-E floated up to the glass, and started speaking.
"That is a Titan-II LGM-25C ICBM, fitted with a W-53 nuclear warhead in a Mark 6 re-entry vehicle. Effective range: 15,000 kiloters. Yield: 9 gatons." As he rattled off the statistics, I followed him, and noticed sothing else strange: there were eyebots floating around the inside of the silo, orbiting the missile.
"ED-E, I'm sorry for questioning you," I said, unable to pull my gaze away from the missile. "Let's get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible."
If ED-E was right, the only way out was through the silo itself. So, I steeled myself, clenched my ass as tight as I could manage, and followed him as he led through the twisting maze of treacherous hallways surrounding the missile. I had to do sothing to get my mind off the instrunt of death leaning perilously against the silo walls next to .
"So, ED-E... that was the voice of your creator on that recording from earlier, right? Whitley?"
"Yes. Doctor Whitley Stiggs," ED-E hovered over a set of mostly collapsed stairs. I grumbled under my breath, trying my best to monkey my way up a pile of rubble and follow him.
"Do you know what happened to him?" I asked (in between grunts). I looked up when I finally set foot on the intact part of the stairs, and saw that he was staring at the missile. Okay, yeah, this is starting to get seriously worrying now. There was another beep, and yet another burst of static. Another recording began playing:
"Dr. Grant?" Whitley's voice was faint, but got a bit louder, accompanied by the sounds of footsteps. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Ah, Whitley," said another voice. This was a female voice, and I could just... you know how sotis you can tell soone is an asshole imdiately? This voice gave that feeling. "There you are. Orders from Colonel Autumn. He feels the Eyebot Durafra project isn't advancing quickly enough. I'm to-" There was a muffled sound, almost like so kind of scuffle.
"You didn't even disengage his damage-avoidance protocols!" Whitley yelled frantically. "You're hurting him!"
"Don't be ridiculous," the bitch spoke up again. "It's just a machine. Robots can't feel pain. See here? I've already increased the navigation system's efficiency by 65%" There was a sound of so kind of tal banging against sothing, followed swiftly by Whitley bellowing at the top of his lungs:
"GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!"
"Fine," the bitch said with a laugh, her voice getting fainter. "It's your lab... at least until I tell the Colonel about this." ED-E beeped, and the static of the recording faded away.
"Another recording, huh?" I asked, resting a hand on his chassis. "Sounds like this Whitley guy really cared about you..." ED-E bobbed in the air into my hand.
"Yes..." ED-E said. "He... he was always trying to keep safe from the evil clutches of General Winters."
"Wait, who?" I asked, a bit surprised. "Who's General Winters? I thought that recording talked about a Colonel Autumn."
"I... I am not sure. There are files coming online within my databanks marked with tag:RALPHIE that are... sothing is... I do not understand." Neither did I, if I was honest.
"Wait, Ralphie?" I asked aloud. "I feel like I've heard that na before..." I racked my brain, trying to draw a connection. It definitely sounded familiar. But I couldn't place it.
"Sheason?" Sue spoke up, surprising . "There's sothing I've just noticed that I think you should know."
"Yeah?" I raised an eyebrow, looking down at my armored chest.
"The eyebots in the silo here... they look like ED-E," Sue said; ED-E wobbled away from my hand, looking around. I looked around as well, and couldn't see what was so important.
"So?" I asked. "They're eyebots, aren't they? I an, why wouldn't they look -"
"No, I an, they look exactly like ED-E! Exactly!" Sue interrupted . "Try and get a closer look at one, you'll see what I an." I looked down at my chest curiously, shrugged, and looked back up. As it happened, one of the eyebots buzzed around just above my head; I jumped up, grabbed it by one of the antenna, and brought it down to eye level.
"wOAh!" the eyebot in my hands exclaid. Its voice wasn't quite like ED-E. It was heavily synthesized, and seed to stress all the wrong syllables. I also couldn't quite tell - did it sound like a boy or a girl? It was an androgynous sound, whatever it was. "whAt Is gOIng On?"
"What the hell?" I asked, keeping a firm grip on the robot as I turned it around in my hands; the antenna wiggled uselessly. "You're right... I an, there's even... There's even a license plate on the side." I was honestly a little bit baffled. I thought the license plate on ED-E's chassis was a homade repair of so sort, but this spherical robot in my hands had an Illinois license plate in exactly the sa spot, and it looked exactly the sa. It even said "2ED-E59," just like ED-E's.
"plEAsE pUt dOwn!" The eyebot in my hands said in a strange sort of sing-song, wiggling against my grip. "I'm AfrAId Of hEIghts!" I coughed nervously, letting the bot go.
"Sorry, I just... sorry." I said with a nod. "There you go." The eyebot wobbled in place, and floated back up, around the missile.
"I dOn't blA yOU..." it said. Both ED-E and I stared up at the other eyebot as it floated away.
"I am terribly confused, Friend_Courier..." ED-E said.
"You and both, little buddy."
"So, this is the only way forward, isn't it?" I said, as quietly as I could manage.
"Unfortunately, Friend_Courier, yes. It is." ED-E said, just as quietly. We were both huddled below a large window, just a few feet away from the top of the missile. On the other side of the window, however...
Sentry bots. At least three of the robotic tanks with the vaguely humanoid torsos and the weapons at the end of each arm were patrolling the area beyond the glass. There were also several laser turrets mounted behind several sandbag barricades... and, just to hamr ho that everything was lethal, and - more than that - everything was active, there were several bodies littering the area.
"Alright, so what do you think?" I whispered, reaching into my duster. I pulled out both the pulse gun and the sonic emitter, holding up one in each hand. "Try and zap them into submission with EMP blasts?"
"We could try sneaking past them..." Sue offered. "All of us can turn invisible, you know."
Silence.
"ED-E?" I asked, looking around. He'd floated off sowhere, and it took a minute to find him: he was next to a wall-mounted terminal, blasting a small dish shaped receiver on a panel next to the terminal with a jolt of electricity.
"HOSTILE TARGET DETECTED!" One of the sentry bots bellowed loud enough that I could hear it clearly, even behind the armored glass window. "TARGET LOCK STATUS: GREEN!"
The next minute or so was incredibly entertaining to watch. The sentry bots and the laser turrets turned on each other, and the air beyond the glass was filled with lasers, rockets, tracer fire, explosions... Even when I stood up to get a better view, the robots and turrets didn't seem to notice . They were too busy shooting each other.
"So," I said, opening the door and stepping into the chamber when the noise and violence finally died down. "Not to sound ungrateful or anything, but what the fuck just happened?"
"And can we do it again?" Sue asked, practically squealing with joy. "That was aweso!" ED-E bobbed along ahead of , looking around at the wrecked pieces of robots and sentry turrets.
"I hacked into the Silo security network, and switched the IFF tags for the patrolling sentry bots from 'Friend' to 'Foe,' Friend_Courier," ED-E said proudly. "I calculated a 98.7% chance that the firepower of both parties would cancel each other out, and clear the way for us to proceed safely." I whistled loudly, looking around at the carnage as he spoke.
"I gotta hand it to you, little buddy," I said, kneeling down to get a look at one of the bodies lying against a nearby desk. "That's so serious outside-the-box thinking right there. Great... work..."
I trailed off as I inspected the body. He was lying face down, but there was sothing... odd. I pushed it over onto its back, and... oh holy fuck. Had this guy been... it looked like he'd been skinned. And I don't an like how a ghoul doesn't have skin. With ghouls, their skin looks almost rotten - but this guy, the skin was just completely gone. Like soone had taken a knife, and carved off the skin until nothing was left but dried, dark red muscle and tendons. Like skinning a bighorner, or another animal that you wanted to cook. The eyes were little more than shriveled spheres, staring up blankly out of the sunken eye sockets.
The really crazy thing though... this guy had clearly been skinned... but whoever skinned him had put his clothes back on. Why would they...
"What the fuck?" I said aloud, moving from body to body. It wasn't just that one. Every single human body here had been skinned in exactly the sa way, and whoever had done this had put the clothes back on each body after skinning them.
That didn't make sense. Of course, I didn't have much ti to dwell on it, because I heard a grinding, chanical sound, and tal scraping against concrete.
"ST-STATUS REPO-O-ORT: YELLOW." A still functioning sentry bot said from sowhere behind a nearby corner. Imdiately, I pulled out the pulse gun again. "PRI-I-IMARY SYSTEMS HAVE SUSTAINED SIGNIFICANT DAMAGE. REINFO-O-ORCENT RECOMNDED." When it finally ca into view, it was a pitiable sight. There were several gashes in the chassis, leaking so kind of viscous, oil-like fluid and sparking badly. The back leg looked exploded, and was dragging along uselessly behind it. It was such a sad sight, that I actually almost had a bit of trouble bringing myself to shoot it.
(No I didn't.)
There was an electric flash from the end of the pulse gun, and ED-E fired off a trio of laser blasts from his spot in the air next to . Lightning arced all along the outside of the chassis, and the robot convulsed violently. The red eye slits in the armored head flashed brightly, and then exploded from the inside with a puff of smoke. That was the last straw, and it fell onto its back with a heavy crash of twisting tal.
For a minute or two, nobody said anything while the dead sentry bot continued smoking away silently. I put the pulse gun away...
And then ED-E played his triumphant marching music. That just made feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
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