29 – To Kill A Courser – Part 2

November 30, 2287 – It just occurred to me that somehow, I missed Thanksgiving. I probably blocked it out. There hasn’t been much to be thankful for. At least, not much lately. Should I be thankful I’m alive? And that there are signs that Shaun is as well? Should be enough, right?

I know they still celebrate Thanksgiving in 2287 because a couple of weeks ago, when I was back at the Memory Den, I met a ghoul named Kent Connolly. We got to talking, and he mentioned he was looking forward to the holiday. He sure had seen a few of them and said he remembered one most fondly, in 2071. His mom had cooked up a twelve-pound turkey, and then the whole family had gathered around the radio to listen to the Silver Shroud.

Not having the weight of 200 years of additional history, it was easier for me to remember Thanksgiving 2071 because it was the year I heard the U.S. military took over the West Tek Research Facility in Southern California, not far from the Mariposa Military Base.

The tale was told by one of my battle buddies, who in turn had heard it from one of his friends. At the time, I didn’t know if it was just another war story or if it was true. But the story chilled me to my core. I never did hear anything about it publicly, so at the time, I had kept my mouth shut about it. In 2071, people passed around conspiracy theories like they were Mentats, and long before that, I had pledged that even though I was fighting for my country, I wouldn’t be part of its propaganda machine.

But even if the story of the West Tek takeover had gotten out, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. It would have been just another drop of shit in an ocean full of it. The country was a powder keg anyway, with disinformation flooding in everywhere – from enemies foreign and domestic – until nobody knew what to believe anymore. People’s day-to-day lives were caught up in just providing for their families alongside the ever-escalating resource wars, which were yet another tool the politicians and billionaire classes used to great effect, using careful manipulation of supply lines to stoke nationalism and division, turning neighbor against neighbor.

But even amongst all the relative chaos, by 2071, the U.S. and China were pretty much at a stalemate. For a while, a lot of us thought that maybe something would be worked out. Everyone was tired of fighting, and we were all just kind of holding our collective breath, wondering what was coming next. I think the billionaires and the military-industrial complex just thought that they could hang out like that for a while. Just keep shaping public perception by keeping the influencers of the time in enough coin that they played along, and when people weren’t listening to the influencers, they’d just buy the politicians, who had learned puppetry from their owners very well, becoming adept at stoking culture wars and getting the citizenry to occupy themselves with whatever scraps of comfort they were tossed. I mean, the billionaire class had always bought politicians, but by the time just prior to the Great War, they weren’t even trying to hide it anymore. Unelected billionaires were basically running the US government and were celebrated as efficiency experts on our Pip-Boys every day, “working for you for a better tomorrow.”

But it wasn’t a year later that the government’s failure to properly manage the country’s resources had led to tremendous damage to national security. When the US military announced the annexation of Canada in late 2071, it probably should have been a lot more surprising. But the stage had been set years earlier when heads of state had jokingly – at least we thought at the time – referred to the Canadian Prime Minister as “governor,” and floated the notion that the country should join the US as the 53rd and 54th states – one eastern, one western.

So when the annexation happened just after Thanksgiving, there was a lot less political pushback than most expected. Some thought it was just a matter of projecting strength. Others saw extreme recklessness.

Sorry diary, I’m getting a little off track. My point is, these takeovers by the military industrial complex were common. If they could take over an entire country, taking over a research facility in Southern California was nothing.

Still, I figured if I had heard about it, officials in China certainly would have as well. And indeed, my worst fears soon became real nightmares when China launched a new round of biological weapons, and any thought that we could manage the situation was out the window.

I think I had numbed myself to how good and to how horrible that time had been. We were still a great nation, by any measure, and I still had so much to be grateful for. The fact that I’m even writing this is testament to that. My life had been one of privilege. After the Battle of Anchorage, I thought things were turning in our favor. I could finally go home for good, to Nora and Shaun. But I had been naive.

I thought about the day I took the elevator in Vault 111 and the feeling of having been so knocked off guard by what had happened.

I should have seen it. It was right there in front of me all along. The whole timeline was obvious to anyone who wasn’t distracted by bullshit. It was like someone was writing the story of an ignorant, lost society that had become tightly interconnected, and then suddenly fell apart after a small group of oligarchs had gotten exactly what they wanted.

They just didn’t know the house of cards they had built relied on things that were out of their control. They couldn’t control everything, even though they thought they could. These big boys with their big toys made a big war that cost them bigly.

And now it seemed so obvious. So certain.

And as I stood in front of the sign on the building in front of me labeled “Greenetech Genetics,” I thought about gratitude and things to be thankful for.

I was grateful Nick was here.

He had his hand on the door, ready to push it open.

“Ready,” he asked?

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I said.

“What?”

“Um, Yippie, ki-yay?”

“You got a screw loose? Do I need to worry about you?”

“Nah. I’m ready when you are.”

“Good. Keep your head on, will ya? You’re making me nervous.”

“I didn’t know you got nervous, Nick?”

He didn’t reply, but moved up close to the door, ready to bust it open if necessary.

But it wasn’t necessary. As he flipped the door’s lever and pushed the door, it opened cleanly into a foyer, the site of a recent firefight.

All was quiet, except for the tracker. Old HVAC remnants spilled out of jagged holes in the wall. Through an open door to our left, the body of a young woman lay draped over the front of a reception desk, wet blood dripping down the front of it.

We went to get a closer look, and the room opened up into a spacious, almost cavernous lounge area with a stairway in the back that led up to a walkway platform. Beyond the platform was another open doorway that was either open to the outside or that had a skylight, because it was the most brightly lit space in view.

I saw movement in the corner, and motioned for Nick to hold still. It was just the top of a fan, spinning in the movement of air that was lightly streaming in from somewhere. Perhaps the area in front of us really was open to the elements.

We examined the dead woman. I touched her arm, and her body was still warm. She had been shot in the head, through her helmet. We approached the stairway, intending to head out into the well lit area beyond the walkway, but I heard something rustling out there and again motioned for Nick to stop.

“Hey – there’s another door in the back,” he whispered, and when we checked it out, it turned out to be a secondary stairwell, so we took that instead, so we wouldn’t be out on the open walkway as soon as we reached the next level.

The stairway wound around and accessed the same walkway, only from the back of the room. We had no sooner stepped foot on the walkway, when we heard a voice.

“The courser’s on the second floor. Kill on sight.”

Nick looked at me – shit. We weren’t the only ones looking for the thing. But who else would be looking to kill a courser, and why? Perhaps they were trying the same thing we were? Had they figured out how to get to the Institute?

The voice continued.

“Send reinforcements to the lobby in case there are more.”

“We gotta move,” cried Nick!

“Yeah, but where?”

Nick crouched behind the door leading from the stairwell, and we listened for a moment, but didn’t hear anyone coming, so we moved on, creeping our way forward to the brightly lit area.

We went through another doorway into an atrium, with several fossilized deciduous trees of some type. The area was open to the roof, and rose seven or eight levels higher than the walkway on which we stood.

Three floors above us, another walkway clung to two adjacent walls in a corner of the space, emerging from some inner room on the same wall against which we were standing, and leading to another door in the far wall.

Embedded in the atrium walls were rectangular windows with rounded corners at various intervals on each level. Through a window on the second floor on the far wall, a laser firefight erupted, followed by turret and missile fire. Most of it didn’t seem directed at us, but the turrets eventually zeroed in on us, so we had to take them out, calling unwanted attention to ourselves.

We thought we had them, but behind us, on a wall next to a walkway that stretched from side wall to side wall several floors above us, was another turret. As I trained my sniper rifle on it, the hired henchmen of the voice from the PA system emerged from doorways all around that led to our platform.

Now we needed to deal with turrets and a half dozen hired guns at the same time. We hopped over the railing onto the level below by the stairs which we hadn’t wanted to chance earlier, and began to fire, using the upper walkway we had just been on as cover.

When we had taken everyone out, the voice boomed again.

“What’s going on down there? How many are we dealing with?”

We kept moving. Down ransacked corridors with junk strewn everywhere, everything scorched to hell by laser fire. The dead henchmen were poorly equipped. Someone was using them as cannon fodder.

“They sent these jokers after a courser? What the hell was going on,” I asked Nick.

“I don’t think they’re for the courser.”

“Yeah. Actually, you’re right. Let’s keep going.”

We continued down an endless number of corridors, looking for a way up, which was where we had seen the earlier firefight. Along the corridors were offices filled with old scientific equipment – dull green machines with dials and switches everywhere.

We turned another corner and were surprised by a couple more gunners. Neither was wearing any armor, so a couple well placed shots ended the exchange.

We finally found a stairwell heading up, and as soon as we reached the landing between levels and turned the corner, yet another gunner poked his head out from the doorway at the top, and tried to pick us off. Another headshot, and we were on our way up to the next level.

We were now in the corridor with the window looking down at the atrium. More gunners lie dead here along the entire length of corridor.

“I wonder if the Courser has a few of his synth friends protecting him,” said Nick?

Directly in front of us, a collapsed piece of ceiling formed a ramp to the next level.

“Why take the stairs when we can take a shortcut,” I said.

“Works for me,” said Nick. “And why don’t you turn that tracker off for the time being? No sense calling more attention to ourselves.”

I appreciated the nice way he put it. I don’t know how I had tuned it out this entire time, but now it seemed obvious.

The ramp formed by the collapsed ceiling seemed stable enough, so we crawled up to the next level. The collapsed section was the corridor leading to the gangway we had seen reaching from one side of the atrium to the other. As we reached the doorway leading to the gangplank, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye above it.

There was another walkway above that, with several goons now directly targeting us. As we were fighting those, more appeared on the other side of the walkway on our level, and they were moving directly at us while firing. Despite using the doorway as cover, I got hit a couple times. Nick tossed me a stimpak, and just when I thought the battle was over, a separate firefight began in the room across the walkway on our level. There were screams and explosions along with the laser fire.

Then it was quiet for a spell, until I noticed movement again on the upper walkway. Two men in military garb, one with a rocket launcher over his shoulder, were making their way across the walkway toward what I assumed was the room on the other side of the walkway on our level. They didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry.

Nick shrugged, and we just waited. When we didn’t hear any more gunfire or movement, we soft footed across the walkway and into the room where the firefight had just happened.

There was blood and body parts everywhere, and we found that the upper walkway did not, in fact, also lead to this room.

We kept moving forward, dealing with firefights as we found them, until we got to a doorway that led to the top end-to-end walkway in the atrium. Just beyond it was the platform hugging the corner of the space. Above that in the opposite corner was a section of the atrium ceiling that had collapsed and was hanging out into open space above that corner platform.

Some massive battle was going on in whatever room that was. Nick and I were just grateful it had nothing to do with us. The explosions from the battle were multicolored, and lit up the entire top half of the atrium.

A few minutes into the silence that followed, the PA voice bellowed again.

“Fall back to original positions. The courser is nearing the elevator.”

“Does that mean they’re coming our way? Or what,” I asked Nick.

“Let’s hang back and find out from a position of strength,” he replied.

So we waited.

The voice returned, “the Courser’s after the girl. Anyone alive needs to get up to the top floor immediately. That’s an order!”

Nick and I looked at each other.

“Top floor,” we said in unison, and headed across the walkway, and as we rounded the corner into the next corridor, across a laser tripwire that tossed a grenade our way.

“Down,” said Nick.

And down we went.

That was a close one.

Through a set of office cubicles, we arrived at another opening in the room which led to another foyer. Directly in front of us, a flight of stairs led to a landing with an elevator, and more stairs going off that to the left and right. On either side stood two heavily armed guards, with more armor than the other hired hands.

The elevator was making a malfunctioning sound, and I was a bit leery of taking it, but this had to be *the* elevator. If this is where the Courser had gone, we needed to follow.

We were close.

The elevator opened into a pitch black corridor, beyond which was another larger room several stories tall, with a steel cage in the center going up to the ceiling. A spotlight circled the floor around the cage in the center of the room.

In the center of the cage was a steel door, and off to the right, a computer terminal buzzed, its screen beckoning.

“Nick, can you crack that?”

“Nick started typing away, the spotlight buzzing as it zeroed in on him, but nothing happened.

Inside the cage was more scientific machinery, and a couple of fusion cores, which I grabbed.

We took the stairs in the back of the room and climbed up to the next level, which was open in the center to the level below and above as well. On either side of this open room were more sets of machines behind steel cage type doors.

A terrified voice emerged, “I don’t know the password! I’m telling the truth!”

A colder voice responded, “I don’t believe you are.”

This was followed by pleading, and a single energy weapon shot.

The cold voice moved on to another scared subject.

“All he had to do was tell me the password. Now, are you going to cooperate?”

More pleading.

And another one down.

The next guy was more chatty.

“I already told you, I don’t have it,” said a male voice.

“I’ll help you find a way in, but listen. We took the girl fair and square. All we want is a little compensation in return.”

And that’s when I tripped on a piece of fallen ceiling, and the cold, calm voice was now talking to us, calling us up to the next level.

A face appeared over the railing. It was our courser.

“You.”

I looked up at our target.

“Are you here for the synth?”

“What synth?”

“The fugitive – institute property. If you’re not here for the synth, you’re here for me.

And that’s when Nick yelled up at him – “Z2-47, initialize factory reset. Authorization code Zeta-5-3-Kilo.”

The courser juddered, straightened, and then tumbled over the railing, and crashed in a heap at our feet.

“What the hell,” I said to Nick, in utter shock.

“Yeah, Mama Murphy might have given me that one,” he replied.

“You gave drugs to Mama Murphy?”

“I’m not proud of it, but aren’t you glad we didn’t have to deal with, well, whatever we were about to deal with?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t realize what it meant until just now.”

Nick bent down, and jogged the chip loose. It was a weird looking thing, like a stubby vacuum tube. He popped it in his pocket, and that’s when we heard another voice from up above us.

“Are you here to help me?”

It was a synth, who called herself Jenny. Said she had escaped the institute and was captured by a group of mercenaries. The institute had apparently dispatched this courser to bring her back. She thanked us, and went on her way, leaving us with the rest of the mercs.

“What do we do with these guys,” I asked Nick?

“Leave ’em?”

Sounded good to me. It was time to return to the Memory Den for a consultation with Dr. Amari to see if we could get the courser’s chip analyzed.

It felt like a huge step forward – we had gotten the chip without a boss fight and were that much closer to accessing the Institute.

But nothing could be that easy in the Commonwealth in 2287, could it?

 

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