72 Daytrip

"Sweep and clear all 'azardous non-sapient entities up to zhe zhird floor, please and zhank you," Lily ordered the four, who nodded and proceeded as a team to clear the hospital, leaving her alone. The personality of any of the gestalt Kaytrons left something to be desired, but they were clearly more intelligent. However, they weren't anywhere near the level of even an average Mister Handy, as they still leaned considerably on the finite state machine tasks Lily and the Mechanist had constructed.

However, they generally did not need a controlling or supervisory computer to handle the overhead of that system any longer. And they were smart enough to select the best task or even a list of tasks to accomplish a goal if they were ordered to do something in natural language, at least most of the time. All in all, Lily felt they were excellent robot labourers. Not intelligent enough to be considered alive and starting to form a union to ask for wages and not too dumb to be useless, like the original Protectrons.

Lily spent the half hour or so that it took the team of four Kaytrons to clear the hospital to practice her movement in the Assaultclone. She accidentally jumped too far and struck her head on the ceiling a few times, knocking down a bit of ceiling material each time but after that managed to contain herself, keeping her movements limited to walking, jogging, running, small jumps and rolls.

When she got a report that they were done and little to nothing was found, she nodded and started heading up the stairs while sending an order for the four to meet her at the same door in the stairwell that she used the last time. She had a lot to do today and little enough time to accomplish all of her goals. She definitely didn't want to be out of town for more than one day.

She found her small team of robots next to the locked door and tried to hum, but realised that she actually couldn't unless she sent what amounted to a text message through the text-to-speech converter and instead just shook her head. She couldn't sigh while in robot form, either.

She tapped the terminal's keyboard to get the screen to light up and tried to input the password that was given to her by the ghoul Missy, but mentally frowned as text that read, "SECURITY OVERRIDE IN EFFECT. ACCESS DENIED" was displayed on the screen.

Well, at least she would get to test out some of the tools she installed on this robot's arms. She was using it as a test platform to test what she wanted to include on her replacement arms when she could get to the point of it being more or less indistinguishable from a biological arm. She wasn't too far from this milestone, either, considering her cloning machine could create organs and limbs by themselves now, and not only complete organisms.

She just had to settle on the potential genome for a skin substitute that would thrive while implanted on a synthetic arm, and she would be more or less good to go.

Glancing down at her left hand, she focused on it mentally, and the hand and upper arm split open to reveal about a half dozen tools on tiny armatures. Controlling them took a little getting used to, but after a few minutes, she had the panel to the terminal open, as it did not feature an externally obvious port she could plug into.

Finding the internal auxiliary port, she reformed her left hand and used it to pull a small cable out of her right and plugged it into the port inside the terminal. If necessary, this would cause the input and output to be relayed to her as her senses were. However, in this case, it was not as she had included locally on the robot what amounted to a bunch of scripts which identified which operating system was running on the attached device and then launched pre-programmed attacks using known vulnerabilities.

Lily didn't even see anything herself until she saw a brief text overlay indicating that a RobCo terminal had been hacked and listed its version number and exploit that was used. Nodding, she unplugged herself and placed the terminal's outer case back on it but didn't bother replacing the fasteners she had removed earlier.

"Okay, start with zhe quarter charge on zhe electrolasers; I would like zhem to be repairable," Lily spoke to her team of robots. The only downside to using the text-to-speech function to talk like this was that her intonation was a bit monotone, which wasn't like her. She'd either have to create some sort of emotion-based hypertext markup language, like XML, that she could tag the text with or alternatively incorporate the system that monitored her Broca region for sub vocalisation and change it to also monitor and pipe over actual vocalisations while using the robot.

She nodded and made a note as that seemed the better solution.

Before she opened the door, she glanced internally at the Kaytron's queued-up commands using her interface to make sure they seemed to be appropriate. She couldn't find anything obviously wrong with them, so she tapped the enter key on the terminal, which unlocked the magnetically locked door with a loud clunking sound and said quietly, "Go."

One of the four robots opened the door, and they entered the first room together, with Lily following behind her. She had a laser rifle with her, although it was a normal version and not the tribeam that was still in the truck, and she shouldered it as she stepped through. She could already hear an electrolaser discharge, followed by something crashing to the ground.

She wasn't entirely sure about what the programming the eyebots had, but she had the feeling that the entire company of robots on this floor would try to swarm them. And it turned out she wasn't wrong.

They didn't even have to leave the first large room as eyebot after eyebot came floating at them. The only fortunate thing was they weren't programmed with any tactics. Otherwise, all the eyebots would have formed up in one group and attacked as one instead of in drips and drabs four and five at a time.

Still, each of her robots, including her Assaultclone, took a few hits from lasers, one of the Kaytrons getting disabled while Lily put down about three or four eyebots herself with her laser rifle before the last eyebot crashed into the ground.

Keeping the rifle raised for a few more moments, she counted thirty eyebots that they had disabled, which seemed a little bit more than she expected, so she was pretty sure that was all of them. Then, she shouldered her weapon and walked over to her fallen robo-comrade. Her damage was minor on her own chassis. Her armour was damaged, but there wasn't even a single area that had a burn-through.

"Fuck," she said in a complete monotone as she diagnosed the damage. The robot took four beams in the same area, which compromised the armour, allowing the last beam to burn through and destroy the quantum processor of the robot. If it was anything else, she could have repaired it. Instead, she mentally sighed and ordered one of the two Kaytrons downstairs to come up to take its place, as she was pretty sure she'd need more than three robots to drag all the damaged eyebots to the truck. Plus, she needed the plasma rifle she brought with her, and it could bring it up on the way.

Well, that was one Tron she was down permanently. Honestly, she was surprised it hadn't happened already. She'd take its body back, analyse the damage, and possibly rework the armouring strategy, especially near its processor. That area was already armoured more than the rest of the machine, but she could add more, even if it meant taking some armour away from other areas. She didn't mind repairing damage post battles, after all. She'd much rather have two temporarily disabled robots than one permanently destroyed after a fight. But she'd have to analyse it and do some simulations, as it wouldn't do to remove armour from areas and lose the fight altogether.

About a third of the Eyebots were still in various stages of functionality; most in this category had their levitation systems disabled. She carefully went around and hacked each one, then shut them down so that they wouldn't shoot at her ankles like an angry chihuahua if she walked in front of one.

Each functioning robot carried one Eyebot and started down the stairs, while the one she brought up from outside passed them and offered the plasma rifle she refurbished to her. Taking it, it then took another Eyebot and headed downstairs as well. She'd need this plasma rifle in a bit, so she just carried it for now.

She went straight to the security office and unlocked the secure storage door again before walking straight in that direction. She sat the plasma rifle against the wall and pulled out the laser rifle before slowly opening the access door. The door swung outwards, so she managed to hide behind it. At the same time, an Eyebot darted out of the secure storage area, giving Lily an easy upskirt shot, quickly disabling the hovering menace.

Nodding, she made sure the door wouldn't close behind her and walked into the storage area. Immediately after stepping in, Lily found herself disoriented. She was back in the truck cab, and floating text in front of her eyes read "CONNECTION LOST."

She groaned. That room was a faraday cage, also? She remembered the steel bars in front of the wall, but there must have been another layer of much finer wire mesh, probably embedded into the drywall or something. Her current angle didn't allow her to utilise the gap provided by the open door to get a good signal through inside, either, and all of the Kaytrons' positions were the same. She mentally ordered one of the Kaytrons to walk next to the open door instead of making a trip with an Eyebot when it came back upstairs and just waited a bit.

A few minutes later, she noticed the connection with the Assaultclone was available again through the Mesh and reconnected. She found herself sprawled on the ground. Apparently, she had tipped over when she lost connection. She stood up carefully and dusted herself off, and then began carefully carrying each briefcase filled with FEV outside of the storage area.

The amount of FEV concentrated into a single vial was incredible; she hadn't even made a dent in one vial's worth. Not even one-five-hundredths of a vial had been utilised in her experiements in Vault 108, and she had a briefcase filled with a couple of dozen vials still. She didn't think she would ever need all of this, and it was somewhat incriminating evidence. She'd get rid of it. Plus, virions were self-replicating, so it wasn't as though she would ever be without if she, for some reason, really needed a lot.

She found a metallic wastebasket of the cylinder type and carefully put each vial from all of the briefcases inside, filling about a third of the wastebasket up. Then she set it on its side carefully across the room and grabbed the plasma rifle. The standard way to destroy pathogens was intense heat, so she took careful aim and fired three or four shots directly into the wastebasket, melting everything into slag, wastebasket, vials, their contents and part of the floor as well.

Glancing at the briefcases, even leaving a bunch of briefcases, was a bit suspicious, especially since they had the Vault-Tek logo on them and had suspiciously vial-shaped cutouts in foam inside. She took about fifteen minutes and located each one of the near-field communicator devices in each briefcase.

In the past, when she brought them through the storage room door, those devices originally caused the red alert that forced her to jump out of the fourth-story window. However, they weren't long-range tracking devices, as far as she could tell, but she smashed each device just to be sure anyway. She would take each of the briefcases back to Megaton and recycle them.

She added collecting all the briefcases to the Kaytron queue and then closed the secure storage door. While they were working, she went around to every operable terminal she could find and used a malicious worm to delete all data locally before attempting to infect any connected mainframes. By the time she had gotten down to the second story of the hospital, all of the terminals that she had once read e-mails on were bricked, but she infected them as well.

The mainframe itself was on the second floor, so she visited that, infected it and then, for good measure, melted its storage array to slag with her plasma caster. There wouldn't be anything at all suspicious for the next group of scavengers to discover, except perhaps the weird skeletons on the top floor. Certainly, there would be no suspiciously redacted e-mails to read that mentioned Vault-Tek or unknown projects.

Nodding, satisfied with her precautions, she walked outside the front door. Her Kaytrons already had everything loaded, including their fallen comrade on the bed of the truck. She hopped up, entered the cab and sat down before terminating the connection.

Looking up from the driver's seat, she put the truck into gear and started driving off to the southwest. She still had one stop to make, and she needed to make sure she wasn't observed stopping there, so she sent her overhead drone off ahead a little way.

---xxxxxx---

She ended up having to diver quite a ways to the south to avoid being discovered by raiders in the Fairfax ruins but managed to approach the so-called Fort Independence from the south to the point where her drone detected the small neighbourhood of houses, in good repair, of Andale. If she recalled, they were, from all appearances, a simple and law-keeping community, but the truth was that they were inbred cannibals, like some sick combination of The Hills Have Eyes and The Stepford Wives. At least, if things were the same as the Fallout 3 game, anyway. But those crazies weren't her circus, weren't her monkeys. She'd leave them be.

She was hoping that Fort Independence was unoccupied, in which case she could bury the nuclear demolition charge inside the foundation of the building. However, it was clear that a small number of raiders from Fairfax were using it as a home, so this would have to be a sneak mission.

She was a little concerned that her presence and interactions with the Brotherhood of Steel would accelerate the schism between the Outcast faction and the Lyons faction. If things went as normal, the Outcasts should betray Lyons in about eighteen months. However, Lily intended to modernise the settlement of Megaton as rapidly as possible, at least to the same standard as Rivet City.

She did not know the consequences of this action precisely. There were various possibilities, from the Outcasts attacking her directly but what she felt was more likely was an acceleration of an already more or less inevitable reaction. Something in eighteen months was the straw that broke the camel's back as far as Protector Casdin, the leader of the Brotherhood Outcasts, was concerned. Again, she did not know what it was, but it was eminently possible that she might become that straw in this new timeline. If so, they might rebel in six months instead of eighteen. Or they might do it tomorrow!

It became ever more important to have her plan to deal with them in place and to not accept any more delays in clearing out the VSS building. She did not want to show up there and find ten Outcasts in power armour had already beat her to the punch.

She glanced at her robot and shook her head. For this mission, she would have to risk her own neck; she was much better at sneaking in her own flesh. She grabbed the large backpack that contained the rebuilt nuclear explosive and a small entrenching tool and left the truck.

She immediately triggered a StealthBoy at her hip and began a slow jog towards the least populated area of the Fort Independence building. Instead of placing it in the centre of the building, she would bury it against the wall on one of the sides. Either way, it would be sufficient.

She got to the wall of the building undetected. It wasn't as if the average raider really paid much attention when they were "safe" at their own base, in any case. In any event, there weren't any lookouts that she could see from her eyes or the drone.

She turned off the StealthBoy and unfolded her entrenching tool into a shovel, and started digging a small hole directly next to the southeast wall of the building. She made it a good half a metre by half a metre and a metre deep, so it took her over twenty minutes to dig it all up, even with her metabolism and physical fitness.

Opening the backpack, she lifted the device out of it. The bomb she had reconstructed out of the core of Megaton's bomb was a simple fission-only weapon. That was dead easy to do. All she had to do was build an electrical circuit that would trigger each of the detonators as close to instantly as possible. However, she did include a mechanism for injecting a small amount of deuterium gas into the hollowed-out sphere of the fission core right before detonation, making it a "boosted" fission device. Without boosting, she expected maybe ten kilotons. However, with the boosting, she expected closer to thirty-five to forty.

It would be easy enough to incinerate this building using this device buried in the ground, but it probably wasn't enough even to kill the cannibals to the south in Andale since it wouldn't be an airburst like most strategic nuclear weapons were designed to do. The destructiveness of nuclear explosives sounded very scary when you talked about kilotons and megatons, but the main damage dealt was through atmospheric pressure waves. And a bomb configured to maximise the pressure wave would be detonated, depending on the weapon's yield, at about one hundred metres.

Even if she was optimistic and met the forty kilotons she was aiming for, only things within about one hundred metres would be completely destroyed, but there should be less than one-tenth of a pressure wave compared to an airburst. Most of the energy of the blast was going into the ground, after all. The pressure wave might somewhat damage the cannibals' houses, or if she was lucky, they would be smashed by a random rock as the bomb dug out a small crater, but chances were that nobody that wasn't relatively close to this building would die. Not even the raiders in ruins to the north.

She settled the device into the hole and connected a small wire into it, carefully setting the wire which trailed a small antenna aside before she refilled the hole and smoothed down the dirt, using a nearby tumbleweed to camouflage the fact that any dirt had been moved recently. She then ran the wire up the side of the building using a handheld stapler to secure the wire to the wall, carefully concealing it and the antenna as best as she could along an existing path of electrical conduits that she suspected was once a phone line installation.

She spent over twenty minutes just concealing the device and its antenna before nodding. Even if you really inspected this corner of the building in-depth, it was difficult to detect. It looked pretty natural, she had intentionally designed the antenna to look from the exterior like a normal frayed wire, so it wasn't something unusual to see at all.

Nodding, she collected her things and triggered the StealthBoy again before returning to her truck and carefully driving back to Megaton, using the overwatch to ensure she wasn't driving near anybody who might report that she was nearby in the future. She had received word that Madison Li would be arriving in two weeks, and she wanted to finish the research she had done on a device to refill the fusion cores before the woman arrived. She wanted as much as the woman's research on fusion power as the lady would part with, and it always helped to have more to trade.