81 Unanticipated consequences

"Just how are you going to take this system apart and put it back together again? It looks like spaghetti in here," Alice asked, her gaze sweeping across the floor, which was covered in various cables of one type or another. The girl had never had spaghetti before until Lily found some merchants who were trading pasta; now, she loved it, even if there weren't any tomatoes for sauce. There was butter and brahmin cheese, though, so it was still pretty good. But Lily would plan and conduct an Ocean's Eleven style heist for some marinara if any existed.

After she "graduated" boot camp, she tried the Anchorage sim one more time and did a lot better but still got killed at the point where she was supposed to plant demolition charges on the artillery on the top of the cliffs. After that, she had had enough of a simulated reality for a while but claimed that she would beat it eventually. Lily was just glad that she was more dangerous and, therefore, less likely to be injured.

Lily hummed, considering this a learning experience, "'ow would you do it, zhen, Apprentice?"

"I guess I would put a label on each computer system, then make sure I recorded the memory of me disassembling everything and play that back in reverse when reassembling it," the girl said after sighing and considering the question for a moment.

Lily nodded, "Zhat might work, but it sounds like a really awful experience when you put it back together." Then she explained her solution. There were four cable types, two power and two data. She was already in the process of printing simple and inert carbon-fibre dongles that would slide into each female port after unplugging a cable. Two for each cable. For example, the first cable she unplugged would be A-1, and there were two A-1 plugs.

When she reassembled the device, she didn't plan on keeping it in this configuration. She wanted more pods in a single room, for example, so she would end up having to redesign some of it in any case. She'd probably hide the computers in the sub-basement and wire the pods in one of the floors of the hospital, so reusing the same cables themselves was probably not going to be an option. Still, a cable could only connect two things, and if she labelled the destination of each end of a cable the same designation, it would be easy to reassemble the system.

But she stole the idea to label the servers. She'd use the same designation VSS used and label them the number the terminal called them to make future maintenance a lot easier.

Meimei had been borderline OCD about cable management, and if Lily was still the same spider, she would have likely blown a resistor just sitting around this room without fixing it.

A little while later, the Apprentice had a box of paired plugs, as did Lily. The girl asked, "It doesn't matter what I unplug first or what the label says so long as I put the same labelled plug on both ends of a cord, right?"

"Precisely. Let's get started," Lily said.

---xxxxxx---

They drove through the gate of Megaton. Lily made sure the two SentryBots and sets of Power Armour were under tarps, with a rectangle frame so that they didn't just look like two SentryBoys under tarps but kind of a crate.

She had a lot to do as usual, but while running back to the VSS building from the RobCo factory, she got a message that there was a problem with her proposed fence construction project. She had remotely printed the plans and had a robot deliver them to Tombs, who in turn sent a message to Dr Taylor that Lily should contact him when she got back in town.

She wondered what the problem was; hopefully, it wasn't a big deal. Spider Company, along with some of her robots, would provide security while Tombs' workers laboured outside the fence, so perhaps he just wanted some security guarantees? She was ready to start rolling out the fencing. She had settled on a height of five metres for the fence, and the chainlink weaving machine was operating correctly.

She chose five metres because that was about the size of the perimeter fence, at least the surviving segments that weren't destroyed anyway, next to Fort Independence; she figured that a military base was an excellent emulation target.

They pulled into her hangar, and Lily would have the truck unloaded and the loot delivered to the basement. She had surreptitiously tunnelled a sloping entrance to her sub-basement in her hangar, although it featured a ridiculous number of automated turret-based defences and was also rigged to be collapsed in on itself with command-detonated explosives if it was discovered and attacked.

Now that she might have robots numbered in the hundreds, as a longer-term project, she intended to slowly burrow several tunnels several kilometres away from Megaton for covert entrances and exits, as well, if she could disguise them well enough. She could send robots on missions and recover them without the people of Megaton being the wiser.

Wait, wasn't that what the Institute did with their force of robots? Well, it wasn't a terrible idea. They were just awful for being so evil with it. She could see a point where her entire infrastructure was underground too. She suspected with very high confidence that was where the Institute was, from what she had heard from the synth Natalie Turner. She'd suspect directly under the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, but they might have been smart enough to dig away from their historical location, especially if they had teleportation technology, so there was no real telling where they were, but it couldn't be too deep as Lily had quizzed the synth-woman about what the interior looked like.

If it was too deep, the Institute would have to design independent life support into their residential construction, and Lily didn't detect hints of that from Natalie's stories. Although, she supposed it was possible that Natalie didn't notice or that the Institute's life support technology was way ahead of what Lily thought it would look like, so that wasn't proof either way.

As for her own depths, she was digging out her third level now and building the interior on the second; she was up to three robotic tunnel-boring machines operating twenty-four-seven and would have had more if she hadn't run into problems disposing of all the excavated dirt and also run out of ruby lasing rods.

She intended to continue excavating for the foreseeable future, down at least until the point where the ambient geothermal energy proved too dangerous or costly to dissipate with her available cooling technology. So in practice, probably only about two and a half kilometres at most. At that point, she would have to design her habitats like they were a space station, as a closed system with integrated life support. Fancy ventilation from the surface wouldn't cut it.

After reaching that maximum depth, she would just shift to moving horizontally. Although, now that she had the workforce to potentially send some on missions outside Megaton, she would stop digging down now, temporarily, in order to dig horizontally, both to give robots a way in and out as well as to give her a way to more easily and covertly dispose of the fill, the dirt and rock she was excavating.

She was already having trouble disposing of it. She had reached a point where she couldn't recycle it all as fast as it could be produced, not by any means. That was the main reason she built the passageway in the hangar, to covertly load dirt and rock into. She'd been having some of the Spider Company drive it out of Megaton several times a day, dumping the dirt somewhere where it wouldn't be immediately obvious. She had to chop part of the bed off of the truck and reinstall it with a hydraulic dump-truck mechanism after the third day; otherwise, it took the poor recruits hours to complete the task with shovels.

She wasn't fooling anyone, she already knew everyone in town knew she was doing some excavating, but she was pretty sure she was fooling them on the scale and speed of it. She had also begun using seismographic technology and ground penetrating radar and sonar to map out directions for her efforts, and she now planned to dedicate one boring machine to exclusively creating a tunnel to what appeared to be a great void underground. She suspected it was a large underground cavern, and if so, she could dispose of her excavated dirt there for many months and maybe go spelunking. It was too close to the surface to be an aquifer, thankfully.

At least long enough to get other surreptitious entrances set up to her underground domain. There were three old abandoned quarries to the west in Virginia within ten kilometres. The closest one was only six kilometres away, directly to the west, in the middle of the barren Wasteland. She could slowly fill up over a period of years, not months, and it would make a good secret entrance for any missions in that direction too.

Lily emerged from the RV and told the Apprentice, "Okay, I'll close zhe doors behind us. I'll have zhe robots unload zhemselves and work on moving zhe servers downstairs."

"Okay, I'm going to go check on the rugrats, bye!" Alice told her, speaking rapidly and was already running out the door, headed to the hospital proper. Hmm, that had probably been the longest she had been away from her siblings in some time, perhaps ever. How sweet.

---xxxxxx---

"What do you mean it won't be acceptable? Automated turrets every thirty metres, light poles every ten!" Lily complained to Tombs at his kitchen table, then she took a shot of whatever engine degreaser the man and his wife served her every time she came over.

She made a moue, although whether it was from the drink's taste or what he was telling her, she didn't disclose.

Mr Tombs chuckled and said, "Yeah, that does sound nice. But a raider sniper could set up a klick or two away and take potshots at anyone walking down the street. Also, it just doesn't look sturdy. The security fence is about appearances as much as anything else, you know. I'm just telling you what the city will say; there's no way they'll let you dismantle the old fence after building your new one."

Lily did know that. Megaton's security fence was porous as hell already and made of scavenged metal from a nearby airport. It was almost entirely security theatre, but she thought that a new, modern-looking fence with actual defences might look better. She certainly thought it would look better and knew it would work better.

Lily pinched her glabella for a moment before sighing, "What would you say would be needed to make it acceptable?"

Tombs shrugged, "A metal or concrete wall behind it. Both to block the view and to give a secondary barrier. I'd suggest concrete since you've been supplying some cement to me."

'But the fence now doesn't have a secondary barrier,' Lily thought churlishly to herself.

"Only in small amounts to secure posts and other zhings into zhe ground," Lily said with a sigh, "I 'ave to create zhe quicklime, the calcium oxide, for the cement myself, and although I 'ave a lot of elemental calcium, I'm not set up for industrial production." She shook her head several times, "It's impossible. I just 'ave too many zhings on my plate to add something else like zhis to manage on top of it."

Tombs shrugged, "So give someone the ingredients and teach them how to do it. I doubt you care about making caps in the concrete business, so you wouldn't care if some guys did start making it industrially."

She considered that. No, she didn't particularly care. She wouldn't be willing to guarantee these people calcium forever, though. Not blanketly, even if she never really intended to stop excavating. But calcium was a minority of what she was recycling from the excavated dirt, and she had been accumulating tons and tons of it, and it was one of the more annoying things she had to store, as it was very reactive with air and water.

She had to create special air-tight barrels and then flush out all the oxygen with a noble gas, nitrogen in her case. It would be really nice to get rid of some of it. She didn't dispose of it because it was hazardous just to dispose of. The process of oxidising it to create calcium oxide, lime, was pretty simple, and she could teach pretty much anyone to do it, even in industrial quantities.

In fact, she had all of the four materials that cement was made out of, and in large quantities. She wasn't sure about the additional gravel that was added to cement to make concrete; that would be up to them. Maybe she could point them to the sites she had Spider Company dump all the dirt and rocks she excavated; the boring machine didn't make it gravel-sized, but she bet there was a lot of gravel there regardless. She'd be willing to supply them if she could get free concrete herself.

"Okay. I could do that. Do you have anybody you know zhat would be interested in starting zheir own business? I don't 'ave any properties zhey could use, though," Lily said, finally. She only had two warehouses, one was already being used, and she wanted to save the other. The rest of the properties she owned were either residential or light commercial, for example, she owned a number of single-family dwellings, two much smaller apartment buildings and what was once a convenience store. None of which was in very good shape, although she was renovating at least one of the single-family homes as a possible safe house for the Railroad if they ever came back.

Tombs nodded, "I reckon I do. One of my team leads has been wanting to move on to bigger and better things. I bet I could help him get set up in exchange for a small piece. Do some venture capitalism, ya know? Concrete and even just cement is a salable commodity and difficult to find in the Wasteland."

"Alright, fine. I'll make some simple industrial equipment to create zhe cement, but zhey will need to find a source of gravel for the aggregate to create concrete zhemselves. I'll also provide the ingredients for cement; in exchange, I want one 'alf of all concrete produced for free," Lily said, putting her cards on the table.

Tombs hummed as he considered that and then nodded, "One-half is a lot, but since you're providing almost everything but the labour, it is fair. But that one half is only for what you provide; if they can get their own sources of limestone or whatever, they don't have to provide you anything, okay?"

Lily nodded. She might need to set up a second heavy-duty recycler. Their power station had the capability of producing twenty megawatts of power now, which was a lot more than anyone was using. Plus, she wanted to use Madison Li's plans to build an actual commercial fusion power station somewhere in the future.

She didn't really care about making money off electricity; in fact, she would prefer it if it was almost free. Electricity, being energy, was one of those "build it and they will come" types of things in the world. With almost free energy, there would be an innumerable number of innovative uses devised for it. She wouldn't be able to do that with just the little power systems she had built so far.

Providing a ton of energy for the city was the fastest way she could reintroduce civilisation and innovation in the city. Who knew what businesses and services might spring up that were previously impossible due to the unavailability or price of electricity? Sometimes Lily didn't have the best imagination, she was too literal a lot of the time, but she would like to see it when it happened.

If she was going to have to make a secondary concrete barrier, then there was no need to go halfway. She would work up a second set of plans, extending the city further several blocks, also including a seven or eight-hectare plot poking out where she could start construction on an actual fusion power station. It might take a year to build or more, but it would be worth it if she could run several of the 400-megawatt reactors to produce power in the gigawatts.

She'd definitely need to start building another heavy-duty recycler, no, at least two to supply enough calcium for the industrial production of cement.

After bidding Mr and Mrs Tombs adieu, she started walking back to the hospital. Thinking about the possible future power station, she considered three reactors would be sufficient. Then, when she did the math, she paused and then started laughing.

"One point twenty-one GIGAWATTS?! Great Scott!" she yelled in her best Christopher Lloyd impression.

---xxxxxx---

Five days later, she was amusing herself with nothing important, basically taking a break when she received an alert from her Muse, as well as heard a radio call from her men, reporting they were under attack.

Eyebrows raising to her scalp, she pulled up the link her Muse provided, which was a real-time image of three squads of her Spider Company guarding about twenty of Mr Tombs' workers outside the wall; they were beginning to install the fence. She wouldn't be getting any concrete for two weeks, minimum, but she figured that with the fence constructed, it would be much easier to install the second concrete barrier as well as the turrets and light poles.

They were being attacked by a group of raiders, about thirty strong, which outnumbered them slightly. However, Spider Company had the advantage of having a team of five Kaytrons supporting them as well. Lily ran to her room upstairs, while sending a transmission only to the three squad leaders, using her text-to-speech function, "Squad leaders, zhis is zhe Commander. Prioritise zhe defence of the non-combatants, use zhe vehicle for cover and sacrifice zhe robots if necessary. Squads two and five are being rousted as a quick reaction force, but ETA is one zero mikes."

She got a quick reply from three sources acknowledging her orders. She didn't know, particularly, if those were good orders or not, given the situation. She wasn't, by trade or interest, a commander of men in battle. Most of her experiences in battles always involved just herself, and they almost always were the result of her surprising others. Meimei was, almost by definition, an ambush predator. However, the three squads seemed to be moving with a purpose now instead of just reacting, so she felt that was good.

She grabbed a set of normal combat armour and put it on rapidly. Her first instinct was to respond in her Power Armour, but not only did she want to keep that secret, but it would be difficult to get through the security fence unless she just demolished it like the Kool-Aid man.

After getting the armour put on over her clothes, she grabbed her tribeam rifle and ran down the stairs. She just leapt out of the second-story window and began flat-out running to the south, where the first segment of the fence was being constructed.

She could already hear the reports from small arms, as well as the distinctive crack of electrolasers ionising the air as they fired as soon as she jumped out of her hospital. She could run pretty fast these days, and people on the street had definitely noticed her, as they were looky-looing at the gunshots just outside the fence. Well, they would probably get a good eyeful of this, then.

So long ago, she had asked the Apprentice how to improve tibias and fibulas, and Lily was hoping the girl would suggest shock-absorbing, as that was what she had built into her legs. Spring-like shock absorption. However, if operated in reverse, if she powered the mechanism to begin coiling the springs, she could temporarily reduce herself by five centimetres of height and then, at command, get a spring-assisted jump.

She did so, combining it with a leap of her own. She didn't quite clear the fence, but she jumped way higher than any unaugmented human had a right to do so, and she scrambled up and leapt over the top of the fence shortly after. She already had targets designated, sharing a feed with the Kaytrons who were firing aimed, accurate shots at the enemy. She began firing her weapon even in her parabolic arc of free-fall. Really, her men were handling things adequately. The raiders had kicked an iron plate, and even before Lily had arrived, it looked like the Raiders were considering retreating, but she would make their decision a lot easier.

What heavy weapons the Raiders had had been expended on the robots, with three of the Kaytrons down. The raiders started turning to run right away, which surprised her. She didn't think she was that scary, but maybe she was. In any event, her appearing with accurately aimed shots at the raiders must have been the straw that broke the camel's back, and the raiders that were still alive began to rout, running back the way they came.

"Two squads pursue, try to take prisoners if it is safe and efficient to do so. One stays to protect zhe workers and wounded," Lily digitised to the three squad leaders, leaving it up to them to pick which squad stayed. They knew which ones were most combat-effective, and Lily wouldn't micro-manage.

Lily had a specific man she wanted to take into custody, herself, but that was a secondary objective to providing medical assistance. It looked like six of her recruits were casualties, with two KIA for sure. That deeply angered her, at least as much as she could get angry anyway, which sort of surprised her. She knew that her mercenary force would take casualties when she got the idea to make them; it was naive to assume they wouldn't. Still, she was feeling somewhat possessive and protective.

She ran over to the wounded men and began providing medical attention. If she could stabilise these men quickly, she would attempt to take into custody the suspicious-looking man that had been watching the raiders attack Megaton, especially considering her surveillance indicated that this was a coordinated assault from both the west and south as well.

Sheriff Simms was pinned down at the main Megaton gate. However, the two squads of Spider Company that were off duty were already leaving their barracks in a flat run to the gate of Megaton. She digitised a report to their two squad leaders, informing both of them of the situation and ordering them to put themselves under the command of the Sheriff when they arrived at the gate.

With that, she pulled out the medical kit at her waist and got to work saving the lives of these warriors.

---xxxxxx---

James 'Raptor' Novak watched the last of the rabble get mopped up by a rather professional-looking team that solely utilised energy weapons. They had identical uniforms and armour, and identical weapons. It was clearly a military force, although there was nothing in his briefing about any new force at the Megaton government's disposal, so chances were that they were part of the secondary target's forces.

Especially since the hospital owner had non-standard bipedal robots that might be combat models, which was clearly the case as five of those robots accounted for nearly half the casualties of the raiders. Rather disproportionate, he felt. They fired the same unusual blue energy beams as the soldier's SMG-sized weapons.

The briefing did indicate that the secondary target, a hospital, had dedicated "security guards", but this was a bit beyond that. Their training and bearing left a lot to be desired, but they were making up for their deficiencies with their excellent equipment. The Commander would be interested in this report, for sure.

He felt the raiders would have done better, but a blonde woman leapt over the Megaton fence like it was nothing and started picking off leaders with a laser rifle that fired similar blue beams as the robots. The description matched the secondary target. Wasn't she supposed to be a doctor or something? Whatever, it wasn't his problem anymore. He stretched his muscles; it wouldn't do to get a cramp after laying here for an hour.

Yeah, these raiders were fucked. Welp, it was time to get while getting was good. His part in this op seemed to be an utter failure, but hopefully, the other attacks were producing better results. Talon Company had been paid well for this attack on this city, and although Commander Jabsco informed everyone that the raiders they were using should be mopped up afterwards, assuming any survived, he hoped they did at least enough damage so that the client wouldn't bitch at them at the cost.

Placing his expensive binoculars in their carrying case, he got up and started walking down the stairs of the ruined building he was using as an observation post.

However, some movement caught his eye and suddenly, in pain, his body started spasming, and he fell over onto the ground bonelessly, and he lay there twitching. He had seen a flash of blue from his peripheral vision. He could still move his eyes, for the most part, and he saw that blonde-haired woman approaching him.

Fuck.

---xxxxxx---

After securing the unknown man in dark black combat armour, she made her way back to her men so that they could take all of the prisoners into custody. She didn't actually have a donjon, but she was going to make an improvised version.

Not only did she intend to test the VSS brain scanning device on all of the enemy survivors, but she was considering using them as experimental test subjects more generally. She had a couple of genetic brain therapies she had devised from her studies of both FEV and the study of Gary's brain. The only problem was that there was no way brain therapy like she intended would ever be reversible.

The way neurons were created, and new paths and connections created in the brain weren't predictable, and any "reversing" would just be inflicting brain damage on the person, whether it was selective brain damage or not.

It wasn't like there was a Geneva convention around these parts, after all.

After double-checking that her injured were stabilised, she told them to take the wounded to the hospital and the prisoners to their barracks for the present time. She was already fabricating diamond bars she could use to make temporary jail cells in the first subbasement level.

This was the first mass casualty incident that her hospital would respond to. Dr Taylor, who was on duty today, already requested she and Bonesaw come in on their days off to assist. Judging from the scale of the assault, even the Apprentice might be doing unsupervised surgeries, even if it was only minor things like cleaning and suturing wounds.

It looked like Sheriff Timms, with the assistance of her forces, had managed to push back the men assaulting the main gate, but the raiders in the west had penetrated the west security fence and were currently wreaking havoc in the west side of town.

She leapt on top of the truck the Spider Company were using to transport Tombs' men and their equipment and then gave another leap and cleared the Megaton fence completely this time, rolling and sticking her superheroine-style landing for the first time. Awesome!

She glanced around but scowled when she realised nobody had seen the feat.

Sighing, she jogged back to the hospital. Sounded like today was going to be a long day. She wondered what triggered this mass coordinated assault. Hopefully, she would find out by the expedient method of downloading the memories of those responsible.