Chapter Two

Willamette River, Oregon

April 11, 2275

Corporal Adler's carbine rips a staccato rat-a-tat-tat. Mr. Virgil's laser is a hissing sear. Enemy bullets pound into the speedboat's hide while Private Best's corpse on the wheel keeps us turning a right so hard that I fear we'll capsize. Another explosion spits a geyser which soaks us all.

Still screaming, I try to crane my head to see our attackers, but Valerie presses me down. She can't weigh more than a hundred ten, twenty pounds, tops, but her armor adds a bit. And I'm no supermutant. She shouts curses as I struggle. I've lost my fedora, I think stupidly as I watch water gush through little round holes in the aluminum hull. I wiggle until I can see Mr. Virgil, mounted on the aft deck.

He wasn't made for combat, and it shows. One of his eye-stalks dangles limply. Smoke fumes from his undercarriage. He's my best friend. He practically raised me. I have to do something. I scrabble in my pockets for my gun.

The boat bounds across something solid, and we're airborne.

The crash flings us into a world of slime and weeds. I slam on my back, my brain seeming to bounce into the sky. Gunfire pops sharply from somewhere far away.

My minds idles and stutters, but then I roll over and see my laser pistol sticking barrel first in the wet earth. I have just enough time to snatch it up before Valerie grabs the scruff of my coat and drags me sliding back to the speedboat, which is now on its side like a giant, partly-sunken clam-shell wall.

I'm lying down, too discombobulated to act. Beside me Best is sprawled in a pose grotesquely seductive. Adler is leaning against the now-sideways driver's seat, his right arm bent in ways it shouldn't. Mud streaks his confused face. Valerie crouches with her 9mm sidearm in a double grip.

Fire from the far bank continues to plink through the hull, but at least they can't see us. Those on our side of the river, however, I can hear shouting as they close in.

By the boat's bow a ragged man with a hunting rifle rises from the tall grass and charges. Valerie fires a half dozen shots, and he falls. Two more take his place. She empties the clip into them both. The one still standing staggers, but raises a lever-action rifle.

Oh, right. I have a laser.

I've always found energy weapons easy to shoot. No recoil, and even if you miss, you just wobbled the beam until you hit what you want. Coherent, blazing red light sets the man's burlap clothes aflame. He drops his gun and flails back screaming, but as his tunic smolders and curls black, I see the shiny metal breastplate beneath, warping with heat. I focus on his head instead, which after a half-second bursts with crimson steam.

I freeze as the headless body goes down. I've never killed a man before. The smell is sickening.

Valerie lunges forward, grabs Adler's carbine and sprays suppressive fire at any upcoming shooters before retreating back behind the boat's bow. Keeping low in the mud, I crawl over Best's body to get to Valerie. Adler's between us. He seems half-asleep. One of his pupils is more dilated than the other. I tug him down so he's lying prone. The cushioned seat where he'd just been leaning pops yellow stuffing as a bullet passes.

"Call for help!" I cry over the gunshots.

But she's already shouting into her PipBoy's mic. She waits, and then repeats her message. But over the tiny speaker comes only eerily howling white noise. She tries the boat's radio. Same thing.

"They're jamming us," I say in disbelief. From the metal armor I know these must be Wolves. And Wolves are savages. Savages shouldn't be able to do this.

Valerie reloads and looks about skittishly, the whites of her eyes wide and bright in her dark face. There may be a dozen or more of them out there, and she's already fought one battle today. She's about cashed out.

I gaze into the mud and think. The one with what was probably grenades must on the river's far bank because otherwise we'd be dead. But the enemy on our side have got us pinned down. They don't have us surrounded yet--all the shots have come from the north--but they know their window's closing. Soon they'll have to flank us and start lobbing explosives.

On the other hand, Harrisburg's river patrol can't be more than a few miles away. They just need to know we're here.

As always with me, the answer comes like a bolt in darkness.

I pull pliers from my lab coat and crawl back over Best to the stern. The boat's radio antenna is snapped in half, but it'll have to do. After I unscrew it, I open the engine compartment and disconnect the H-cell microfusion battery. Big as a ham-set and as heavy as an anvil, it nearly snaps my wrist as it plops from its housing into the mud. I'm already turning around to ask Mr. Virgil for his internal oscillator when I realize he's not here.

My gut sinks. Where's Mr. Virgil?

I've lost my glasses, but I can still spot the ball of scrap up the slope of the bank, by a barbwire fence. The crash must have flung him from his docking port. I force myself not to panic. His neural network's pretty deep in his chassis. As long as it's intact, he's alive.

Valerie leans out as she unleashes a burst. A return volley splashes tiny craters in the mud by her feet. She winces as something deflects off her green ceramic plates. "What are you doing?" she snaps.

"Counter-counter measures. It's called signal agility. We boost our transmitting power and switch frequencies until we find a weak spot in their jamming spectrum. We won't be able to receive, but we may be able to broadcast." I scamper beside Valerie, tug wires loose from the boat's set and add, "I need to go get a part from Virgil. I need you to cover me."

She regards me with blank perplexity, as if seeing me for the first time, and then steals another glance out beyond the bow. "No, I'll go," she says finally. "Tell me what you need."

I'm about to argue, but practicality trumps chivalry. She's wearing the combat armor, after all.

I pass her my priers and I quickly tell her how to open Mr. Virgil's dorsal maintenance panel and remove his oscillator. While she listens, she takes road flares from a supply chest and tosses them around the boat. The tall grass is wet, but the bright magnesium torches soon throw up a thin veil of gossamer smoke. I watch one of the men she shot earlier thrash and moan weakly as small spreading flames envelope him.

Gripping Best under the arms, Valerie awkwardly drags the body over the now-unconscious Adler and props it by the bow, resting the neck against the nub of the snapped flagpole. She motions me over.

"Keep behind her. You don't have to hit anything. Just keep them down. I'll be right back."

I crouch almost in the lap of the corpse, superstitiously fearful of its dead eyes. With no preamble, Valerie sprints through smoldering grass and up the bank. The gunfire gets excited. I timidly lean from cover and shoot my laser in their direction. Smoke and my nearsightedness imbues randomness to my aim.

I spare a peek at Valerie, afraid I'll see her head pop like Best's. By the fence, she ducks behind Mr. Virgil's shattered form.

I continue firing. The red light decoheres through the smoke, but I have the satisfaction of seeing a blurry figure run as the fogged beam passes over his head. Valerie may be right about the pitfalls of lasers, but despite their shortcomings, they make excellent terror weapons.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

The burning foliage stings my throat, so I hunch down and keep my head low, not even looking as I hold out my arm and pull the trigger. Best's slumped torso sashays as bullets slam into her back armor. Fear is a funny thing. I've been afraid since the ambush began, but only now do I realize we might not get out of this. We could die on this muddy shore and Valerie would never know how I feel about her.

But I have little time to reflect on this. I'm slapping a fresh charge into my pistol when Valerie races back down the slope. She grabs her thigh and nearly slips, but makes it to the boat and hands me the small gray box, dimpled on the side with vacuum tube diodes.

I waste no time. I plug the oscillator into the side of my PipBoy and use the wires from the radio to attach it to the battery and the broken antenna. Valerie doesn't even question what I'm doing. She may have a near-genius IQ, but she's no engineer. She lays down fire with my laser.

A simple signal has a better chance to break through, so instead of speaking, I use Morse: S-O-S-A-M-B-U-S-H-N-H-B-U-R-G.

Perhaps two minutes go by as I tap out the message again and again, my world receding to a finger on a button. Then Valerie knocks me down and shouts, "Molotov!"

Glass breaks. There's a whoosh. By the bow the smoking grass erupts into an inferno which even across several feet nips through my damp lab coat. Valerie grabs my scruff and drags me behind the stern, tearing my PipBoy loose from its connections. She runs back and drags Adler to safety before standing upright with her laser at the ready. I huddle behind her and peek over her shoulder at the wall of flames that's already consuming Best's body. The humid air reeks of burning wood alcohol and flesh.

Valerie shoots a couple of blasts down the keel-side of the boat. Enemy bullets ricochet off the boat's twin propeller blades, which spin from the impacts. Any second, a second firebomb will crash at our feet. I hug Valerie from behind, and in her ear whisper, "I love you."

She stiffens. A buzz-saw rips the air. This is it, I think. But the screeching continues, and yet we're still in one piece. Then we see the patrol boat pass us by.

The soldier manning its bow-mounted Minigun swivels slowly as he strafes the bank. Along the gunwale, a half dozen others fire assault rifles. Across the water there's another, more blurry boat engaging the Wolves on the other side. Over the crackle comes screams of the dying.

It's over quickly. We're safe. Inches from my face, the back bun of Valerie's hair carries an intoxicating musk over the nightmare smells of battle. I laugh giddily and bury my nose into the kinky blackness.

"Uh, Dr. Polakowski," says Valerie slowly.

"Oh, Sorry." Reluctantly, I withdraw my arms from the cold, mud-streaked contours of her combat armor and step away.

---

Mr. Virgil looks like a smashed mechanical cephalopod, but it's not as bad as it could be. His voice modulator is shot, but his remaining eye-stalk twitches as he watches me kneel beside him. I pat his bent hull reassuringly before stepping back down the bank. The Republic has a large cache of Mr. Handy parts. I'll fix him up in no time.

The medic has already bound Adler's arm and shot him with a stimpak. I watch as his stretcher is carried onto the deck of the patrol boat. A prisoner--the lone survivor among the enemy--is dragged aboard behind him. He was screaming about 'freedom' and 'death to slavers' before the soldiers had the good sense to gag him.

I myself saw the tattooed barcode on his forearm. He's not a Wolf. He's one of our laborers. All of them were.

Well, that's ingratitude for you. Here I am, fighting to give them more rights, and they go and pull a stupid stunt like this. But I guess I can't be too angry with them. Having inferior intellects, they're more easily led astray by foreign propaganda.

I ask a private for a cigarette, and as he lights me up I wonder who put the workers up to it. Their metal armor suggests Wolves, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NCR was behind it. That'd just be like them, sow discontent before an invasion. Either way, the prisoner will tell us. Our interrogators are top-notch. They'll have ways of making him talk.

It takes a while for the patrol to prepare. Mr. Virgil's no lightweight, so four of them have to carry him pallbearer-style. Another soldier snaps photographs of the carnage, even taking one of me beside the wrecked speedboat. I pose with as much dignity as I can muster, though my white lab coat looks as if it'd been soaked in brahmin dung.

I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around. Valerie hands me my laser

"Thanks," I mutter, slipping it into my coat.

She gives me a tired smile. A bandage is wrapped around her knee, but thanks to her armor it's little more than a nasty bruise.

"You did good," she says. "We'd be dead if you hadn't thought of that radio trick."

I try to shrug nonchalantly. "Ah, golly, it was nothing. I didn't even know it was going to work. But I had to try something and, uh . . ." Puffing my smoke, I grin nervously and rub my wet hair, trying not to be too self-conscious over how bald I must look. "Look, about what I said . . ."

She holds up a thin, long-fingered hand "It's cool. I know you have a crush on me. You haven't exactly been subtle about it. But you're really, really not my type. So . . . consider yourself friend-zoned."

I can't say I'm exactly surprised. All her boyfriends have been big tall black guys.

"So, you're saying we can be friends?"

She blinks. "Sure."

"I can settle for that," I say cheerfully. And in the meantime I can work my subtle charm: follow her everywhere, do everything she tells me, and just be an all around nice guy. That's sure to win her over.

And complimenting her couldn't hurt.

"Anyway," I go on, "I may have helped out, but you're the real hero. And twice in one day! I know it seems like bad luck, but by gum, you sure came through!"

She frowns. "I don't think luck has anything to do with it. They didn't set up an ambush with jammers just to shoot up a random boat. You were on board. And without you, half the Republic's ray guns and robots would break down."

I look at the wreckage and charred grass and the dead bodies strewn down the bank. I'd assumed the Wolves were attacking because that's what Wolves do, and I was just in the wrong place in the wrong time. I think of Best. That bullet that emptied her brains was meant for me.

"Oh," I say.

She kneels and picks my glasses out of the mud. She uses her thumb to wipe the cracked lenses before passing them to me and saying, "Yeah, 'Oh.' But hey, they tried to kill you and failed. If I were you, I'd call that a good day."

The boat ride to Eugene is long but thankfully uneventful.