Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ A Certain Machinist ❯ Expedition ( Chapter 11 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Every day one of the settlers would report something interesting or bring in an item for trade. For some reason, the locals could not build trading stations without high charisma, they said, but I could and I have no idea what my charisma is. And Ruby wasn’t someone I could ask because I’d seen her O-face. Also, she’s very sexy as a grown woman. Be that as it may, I was able to setup stands and assign people to sell things.

I even met a ghoul who was able to talk who’d been the original Vault Tech sales guy that signed up Nate for his family spot in the vault, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. Yes, Nate was alive, but the vault had also gotten Sean kidnapped and Nora shot dead by some scarred mercenary, something I know from Nate’s nightmares. Well, that and my own nightmares about running from a bunch of Geiger Aliens and skittering facehuggers in an endlessly huge warehouse filled with crates to a ceiling a hundred feet high and most of the lights don’t work. You know that one. Anybody who saw those first two movies has that nightmare. But seeing your wife shot dead is pretty bad.

Is it wrong that I’m not super interested in hunting down this Sean kid? How much time passed? I didn’t exactly have a watch at the time. And Nora was frozen stiff as a statue when I got out of my pod, so Sean might not be a kid anymore. He could even be a grandpa, for all I know.

One of the items brought to me was a .44 magnum revolver, which has a nice mechanism despite sitting out in the rain for a century or more, and a few bullets. It is actually a pretty useful weapon for survival. The round lets you load all sorts of pressures and still works, from full magnum down to .44 bulldog, which is pretty similar to .45 Long Colt, the round used in the old western Colt Peacemaker. I could make copies of this mechanism and frame and make that 8-shot 357 cylinder, which would easily take all these .38 Special rounds lying around that I can’t use, even if all the locals could.

“So many trees! I’ve never seen so much green before,” commented one of the new arrivals. Apparently away from Sanctuary it is more blasted and there’s no trees, grass or ivy, so they say. Whenever I look towards Boston I see treetops and green everywhere, so I’m not sure what they’re going on about. After the Chernobyl accident and people left, that whole place overgrew and there’s plenty of overgrown vines and trees everywhere.

I finally got my furnace working, and the sheet roller to make sheet steel plates from hot iron from the blast furnace I’d made, and a crucible to melt lead and cast bullets, and I’d gotten good at recovering copper from wiring and other sources. Three of the houses were sealed up from the weather and I’d installed the rinky-dink decontamination arches in their entrances to remove radiation, because I can’t imagine that just because it will be snowing that it stops being radioactive.

I had my settlers harvest seed for spring planting and wished I had enough sheet glass to build a greenhouse so we would have fresh food over the winter. We would have to cope with plenty of dried options.

Hooking up clean water to the houses has been fantastic. True, showers are cold, but we have showers. And soap. People are actually getting clean. And everybody is super happy to have clean water to drink. Many people with weird sores were healing up, finally, and others swore that their radiation sickness was going away. I don’t question it. Physics is kinda wrong here.

One of the settlers turned up with a CB radio he’d found on a rooftop and a car battery to power it. This was useful. I activated the scanner and picked up signals from across the commonwealth, including some loon out at Salem who wanted volunteers to put down the crabby rebellion, presumably mirelurks. Another call came from someone screaming incoherently, then it looped. I think that might be a tape recording with durable power supply. Very sad, if so. There was some vault south of Boston asking for help from raiders trying to break in, and carrier waves from active radios that were broadcasting silence on their channel. More dead people, no doubt.

“I think I’m going to name my new rifle Spite,” Ruby said, polishing the blued steel to a nice sheen. She’d fashioned a silencer, which wouldn’t silence the bullet itself but would make the origin of the shooter harder to estimate. The supersonic crack will sound when it passes your ear, but only then. You’ll know you are being shot at, but not from where. Her bayonet was even longer and reinforced like a sword, something she’d demonstrated by decapitating an angry bear, what they call Yaoi… no, it was Yao-Guai. Something like that. Some Chinese for demon-bear. They were radioactive, but apparently good eating after treatment with RadAway and salt cure.

The radioactive isotopes I was getting out of the lake’s water purification system were going into my rifle sights, so they lit up for low light shooting. This was useful as I finished my barrel making hammer machine, which also put in the riflings. Hammer forged is not perfect, but it is less power demanding than button rifling. I just don’t have the electricity for that kind. Once I had rifle barrels I cut them to length and tapped chambers in them for my 10mm SMG and mounted the 2x sight with its nightvision reticle.

“You sure like your spray and pray,” Ruby commented.

“I’m a machinist, not a gun fighter. I rely on you and the settlers to protect me and my hands from damage so I can Reach Down And Bootstrap Myself,” I finished in a creaky old man voice.

“What is that?” Ruby giggled.

“Oh, just something we used to tease old people about. They were always offering us a shiny new nickel to mow their lawns,” I explained.

“So? What’s a nickel?” Ruby asked in curiosity.

“Less than a cap in the local currency.” She made a face. “That doesn’t sound like much,” she complained.

“It isn’t. It was way too little money, and they mocked us for turning up our noses at their good paying job. Of course, their brains were rotted, and that wasn’t good pay in literal decades,” I answered grimly. “They were stupid and old and couldn’t understand that inflation made nickles worthless. They refused to adapt.”

“So what happened then?” she asked me.

“I got hit by a drunk driver and ended up meeting you, sweetie!” I grinned and kissed her. She struggled to escape then settled in with more enthusiasm.

“So your rifle looks pretty good. Hope you don’t tear off the silencer when slicing up some monster in the wasteland,” I commented on her big rifle. She swung it around easily, but it probably weighed twenty pounds.

“Whatever happened with you and Jaune?” I asked her.

“Well, he and Pyrrha married and had a flock of kids, but then Blake and Yang approached him for paternity duties and he knocked them both up and caught the creeping crud, which pissed off Pyrrha till he got that cleared up. She had no nookie for around six months, which got her pent up and when they got his all-clear their sex resulted in the twins. The family home got way too crowded so I ended up taking a lot more contracts to get out of town. It was the only way to get a good night’s sleep.”

“No husband, no lovers?” I asked her.

“Nah. You were my first.”

“Really?” I asked her.

“Yeah. The goddess doesn’t grant this kind of wish very often. Not many people are actually serious enough to qualify.”

“Interesting. She say anything else?” I asked Ruby.

“Only that your being there was a favor for Jaune to fix Pyrrha. You know what she meant?” she asked me, curious.

“Yeah. I do. Not a worry now. Just know that me being there changed some things from before,” I answered vaguely.

“Are you avoiding my answer?” Ruby questioned me.

“Yes. And you don’t want to know. It is a sad story. Without me everything went wrong and Cinder Fall destroys Beacon and Vale and the entire ECT system. Many people die, too, including Pyrrha, making Jaune super-depressed for the rest of his life.”

“Ugh. That does sound bad. What happened to me in that other time?” Ruby asked.

“The show never finished, but most people thought you’d end up killing Salem the immortal grim queen and then her power would transfer to you and you’d replace her in a bout of irony,” I answered.

“So a lot worse?” Ruby confirmed.

“Yes, a lot worse. My way saved a lot of lives. I just had to kill some people.”

“Well, you gotta break eggs if you wanna bake some cookies,” Ruby opined philosophically. I considered telling Ruby that phrase applies to omelets but her metaphor works well for her so I dropped it.

The main difference between .45 ACP, used in the 1911 pistol and the famous Thompson submachinegun and the 10 mm is muzzle energy. The .45 is around speed of sound and a 230 grain fully jacketed bullet. It can be loaded to slightly lower pressure and subsonic, making it quiet for shooting with a silencer, however gravity never stops working. The time between dropping a bullet to your feet and firing one from a gun out level and hitting the ground is the same. So the drop on a .45 is appalling, making it a short range round. At 50 yards the amount you miss is multiple feet down. Most shooters aim down the sights and pull the trigger. They don’t aim up and hope it arcs just right. This is one of the reason the inventor of the round, John Browning, improved his original 1911 design into the hi power, which uses 9mm, a well established supersonic round used by Luger and has dramatically more useful range and higher chance of making a hit on a target further away.

He fixed a bunch of problems with the 1911, like the reversed frame rails that would pop off under a high pressure round, and the barrel linkage that broke and made the gun explode. The Hi Power was so successful that it was copied around the world and made by a number of gun companies under license (or not) by companies like Berretta and Colt and CZ-BRNO. This freed up browning to invent the .50 Browning Machine Gun and the round it fired. A true genius for mechanisms and gun engineering. He’d helped America win world war two well after his own death.

A prospector rolled into Sanctuary Hills with a huge grin and a heavy sack for its size. He showed me the blue-green dirt and inquired into furnace technology. He wasn’t really far away, but there were bandits and some animals and giant green cannibals near his mine that worried him, and would I send someone to help him with that so he could get on with mining and maybe sell to me? It was copper ore, and yes I really want that for my projects.

Ruby and several of the fighters went out and I waited for their return a day later, with big grins, booty looted from the bandits and news of a warehouse full of stuff and a nearby farm that had lost their daughter to bandits and would we be interested in a bounty to recover their family locket from the nearby dish station Ophelia or something.

I let the folks rest up and fed them well, buying up their raw materials and sending more people to retrieve stuff from the crates and shipping containers. For whatever reason, the locals had not gotten into such things in the last 210 years because they thought that crowbars are weapons? I don’t quite understand this. I had found stuff in the old cars, including working fusion cores with most of their charge left.

Ruby just rolled her eyes and then described in loving detail how the giant green cannibal dropped from her sniper shot, and the giant dog she beheaded before it could rip their medic apart. It was very exciting, she said. I believe her.The junk from the crates would be sold or broken down for raw materials. The actual raw materials were added to the stocks for building stuff.

I’d started making automated machines now that I had some working terminals like the one from the druggie’s house. It was a very primitive computer with very little memory, but the drivers in this world were efficient on the local operating system so I was figuring out the programming language. If I could find a library and get some actual manuals that would be a huge help.

They still have mainframes here, if you can believe it. They have mainframes, but working AI. Dumb AI, yes, but it works enough for limited consciousness and speech and a mimickry of expressed emotions. I setup a another furnace to turn the copper ore into copper ingots and wire. My plans for electrification and defenses would need this resource.

Thankfully I had access to plenty of steel and my Fusion Cell electric powered carbide portable saws let my scavengers cut open boxes, door locks and into old buildings sealed up down in Concord, the nearest town just across the bridge and down the hill. It was quite close, maybe a mile, though I haven’t been there. They tell me there’s a band of vicious raiders, and Preston killed a bunch but more showed up, as they do. From somewhere.

The assault on Ophelia Air Force Comms Station was a concerted effort by a team of snipers and CQC experts with good stealth. I went with them but stayed back in the rear with the medic and Codsworth as my guard. There were shots, yells, a beeping mole rat strapped with mines, an explosion, and then the top was cleared to the bunker. They entered and twenty minutes later emerged to escort me down.

The place had lights that still worked despite 210 years of age, lots of dust and splashes of blood and some dead raiders and discarded Jet inhalers here and there. I used my saw to cut open the secure Intel room and found a manual on stealth which I read, then passed to Ruby and a Fat Man nuclear weapon, just sitting on a table, several bottles of Nuka Cola, which tastes terrible by the way. Like Royal Crown, only worse. I miss Pepsi.

There was a chest full of guns and ammunition, and most of the dried up skeletons were carrying ammo of several calibers. I picked that up and examined it, distributing it to the men and women in the team. The safe took a little fiddling with my trusty screwdriver and a bobby pin and there were documents, ammo, old stacks of dollar bills, jewelry, holotapes on encryption, which I took, and drugs.

Shared out we descended and finally found a toolbox with a silver locket in it. There was a locked door, which I picked and found a bunch of vicious bugs taking notice of food supply. I opened up with spray and pray, backing off, and let the CQC handle the rest. I shuddered to regain control of myself from the adrenaline spike, Ruby watching for targets beside me. A giant cockroach three feet long got speared on her bayonet. It was actually carrying some kind of magical weapon, which I examined before returning to her.

Finally I returned to the central chamber and examined the terminal there and the mainframe it was connected to, before copying the contents to a blank set of holotapes and removing the Fusion Core from the generator. The lights dimmed but did not go out entirely.

“Okay, wrap it up and lets head back,” called Ruby. Everybody was carrying salvage and dropped weapons and armor that could be sold in the Sanctuary Hills general store. The ancient Vault Tech ghoul ran it cheerfully, happy to be needed again.

People really don’t ask for much. A safe place to raise kids, a roof that doesn’t leak, a full belly, and nobody shooting at you while you go about your day. This shouldn’t be so hard to accomplish.

The snow started to fall as we tramped back to Sanctuary and Ruby went ahead to return the locket to Blake Abernathy. She returned shortly after, using her speed to her advantage.

“They said thank you,” Ruby said once she caught her breath. I pulled up a work stool for her and a hot cup of tarberry tea to sip while I worked on a lockpicking gun. It was invented by the FBI back in the 1970’s, well actually it was invented by a locksmith, but the FBI took credit for it. You stick the probes into a lock and pull the trigger a couple times and then you can turn the lock open. It jiggles the pins out of the way in the tumbler so it will rotate, opening. Pretty simple concept, and the tech was illegal to possess unless you were law enforcement, emergency services, or a locksmith.

“Next time you are sneaking around some ruins and find a safe you can’t jiggle open, try this tool,” I explained, demonstrating on several locks.

“That’s cool,” Ruby admitted after staring at it work.

“It's technology from my world. Doesn’t exist here. Well, it does now.”

“What did you think about Concord, the Quarry, and Ophelia?” Ruby asked, knowing it was my first trip off the island.

“It was a relief having guards around me, but the thought you could just be walking into the sights of a sniper anywhere out there gives me chills,” I admitted. Ruby patted my head. Part of me thought this felt nice. The rest felt it was condescending. I considered this thought before opening my mouth, knowing I’d done it many times to Ruby, both here and when she was a teenager on Remnant. I sighed.

“I’m going to need better armor before I go out there again. I have plans to restore this entire region, but that means actually meeting the civilized leaders, assessing remaining technology, restoring infrastructure, and visiting prewar ruins for salvage. I can’t do those things while staying here farming on Sanctuary Hills,” I said. Ruby nodded, then sipped her tea. I fed her a muffin, made from flour I’d milled on a machine I’d created using the Razorgrain we grew here.

Increasing the food supply in various ways, especially as the snow fell and melted off the roofs of our increasingly insulated homes, and people made use of the new denim I’d created using a cotton fiber that didn’t mind the cooler weather and a series of machines that spun it into thread, wove it into denim, dyed it blue, brown or green, and then handed it over to a charming lady who said she heard about us from a passing trader at the radio station where she worked previously. She was our tailor now. One of her coworkers had tried to teach Shakespeare to the supermutants, which is what the locals call the big green cannibals who would attack settlements to drag off people to eat them. Yes, that is just as horrible as it sounds. Yes, my turrets killed them when they tried it here.

Expanding the fields and turrets beyond the ring of houses was on my list for the Spring, once the snow melted. I was planning to add more homes, too. While I enjoyed the irony of maple syrup in the forest, and how pleased that made the pregnant women, and the progress on digging more bomb shelters so pregnant women could get out of the radiation, we couldn’t go very deep before hitting the water table. We’re on an island, after all. Ruby and her pregnancy weren’t showing yet, and it wasn’t slowing her down from what I can tell. She is still the definition of Genki.

My experiments in creating Aramid ballistic fiber are not going really well. Yes, I had learned that the pulp from mutfruit after squeezing out the juice is a good starting point for cellulose production into paper pulp, but aramid isn’t made from paper. It is carbon fiber, and you usually make that from any source of carbon, electricity for the nanotubes to form, and polymer so it becomes flexible enough to link the tubes together so it can be woven into fabric. Bones provided the critical part, and sand or broken glass for the silica needed. Chemistry adjusted via experiments using alcohol and wood ash found I’d created a silicon fiber similar to aramid, using silicon instead of carbon. So not carbon fiber but silica thread, kind of like what spiders use, and with similar tensile strength. I can use this. I extracted threads from the gelatin, which vented alcohol. I opted to create a recovery vessel so the alcohol would get re-used and not be a fire hazard or injure any pregnant women.

The spools of thread got woven into brown denim that was both flexible and fireproof up to 500’C. You have to use a blowtorch to cut it because it will damage scissors or shears. I made a suit out of it, covering a comfortable set of leather armor with three layers of this glued and painted in winter camouflage for the season. I then did the same for Ruby’s armor, though her pants would lose their appeal if they get covered and she’d be slower if its the least wrong. Since speed is Ruby’s best defense, I left that alone. I’d see about making her some armor pads that wouldn’t hinder her movement.

My converted and armored flight helmet, traded with one of the settlers, got a HUD using the sensors from a junked robot similar to Codsworth, and battery powered with a Fusion Cell. It was light, offered nightvision and flare protection, and was able to stop a .308, probably. Shrapnel certainly, and all those 38’s flying around. It took some practice moving silently in this armor, and I feel like I was less stealthy than before.

The practice time detracted from some of my projects, but I need to keep it up if I’m going to emerge from this island into scouting the commonwealth. Maybe do something about the water supply. I wonder if I could build robots to collect up the radioisotopes and deliver them to a reactor for use? The way to deal with radioactive contamination is either burial, which won’t work with all the water here, or collection, which will be hard but possible. I wonder if I could start by decontaminating the lake here? I gave that some thought.