Securing our new lands had resulted in an interesting and somewhat disturbing change within and around our lands. The sentient threats were packing up and trying to leave our borders, and there were far more raiders and super mutants than anyone had first expected.
The raiders were easy prey, our Eversors, Centurions and Sentinels easily caught up with the various clans, gangs and packs of humans to add to Tleilax’s resource pool.
Super mutants though presented a unique challenge. Unlike the raiders, the separate roving packs of designer soldiers would merge into a single cohesive group with little to no issue. Up until now, we had taken out camps individually, so we couldn’t appreciate the strategic issues this could cause until eyebots recorded the formation of a mega horde formed from countless smaller groups. Eversors picked off some of the bands that were still leaving or were close enough to our borders, but there were still plenty more green giants to go around.
The horde was fleeing southwards, growing larger with every smaller band of super mutants caught up and assimilated with it. The legion of super mutants didn’t present any threat to us, seeing how they were trying to get away from us, and I had to admit a sense of smugness to witness the highly aggressive brutes preferring to flee than trying to fight on to the end. But the fact that there was that many super mutants moving off to somewhere meant that they would present a major menace to anything in their way.
We can’t have that on our conscience, can we? Plus, Blacksite Tleilax could use more bodies for FEV related experiments.
So plans were drawn up to try cutting the size of the horde down to a less worrying size. Wiping them out with ordnance from a distance was easy enough to do, but it was boring. The companies had little fighting during the previous conquest of the Glowing Sea and even those in 2nd were itching for a fight, so they’d form the vanguard while most of our Sentinels remained within the Nexus’ borders to clean things up. Some Centurions would provide fire support along with the Glossu, and I gave my new Strigoi another chance at making an impression.
So as the army was mobilized, we continued monitoring the situation from a bird’s eye view. And I was suddenly painfully aware of the need for increasing our air power. I’m still keeping the Zetan ships out of public knowledge, and vertibirds are fine, but we could do better. Proper air superiority, air transport, and air support will need to be developed for our Nexus.
In the meantime, more eyebots were sent out to track the super mutant horde and the path they were projected to take. Thankfully, no settlements would be in the way, nor were there any caravans on the desolate wasteland that we might have to reroute.
Unfortunately, Calvin caught a group of bulky figures potentially heading on a collision course with the horde. A group almost entirely composed of power armor…either that’s the BoS, or a bunch of souped up raiders. I didn’t like either option, but the former could be afforded some level of civility at least.
Eh, former or latter, worst comes to worst Tleilax gets more bodies to convert into research points.
Deciding that it was better to at least try saving the group before they got swallowed up by the mass of FEV-green bodies, I took the Zippy Lid and stuffed it with as many Strigois as I could. I had to shake off the ominous deja vu as I piloted the stealthed ship through the skies of the Glowing Sea.
There’d be no rad god or almost-dying this time.
Right?
Surely…surely the super mutants had no god to summon right?
Swallowing down the unreasonable unease, I focused on the strategic updates from Eva and watched from my altitude at how the thousands of gathered super mutants coming into view looked like a carpet of insects. It was like watching a nature documentary with the helicopter shot following a herd or swarm of creatures. If I heard Attenborough suddenly began narrating, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised.
Based on the eyebots an the highly intelligent guesstimate from Eva, we were dealing with no less than four thousand super mutants, with around fifteen warlord packs at the center of a formation that fanned out just over a mile wide with a depth of maybe fifty yards.
How the hell the Commonwealth and its surroundings managed to hold that many monstrosities was something even Eva was forced to reassess. I mean, with their well known appetites in game, surely they’d have devoured all the radstags, bugs and mole rats by now? Or did they just have a high preference for human meat?
Eva brought me away from that illogical bit of nonsense with the chime of her voice. “Alert: Unidentified group has been detected by a forward element of the horde. Estimated probability of survival within sixty seconds-”
“I’m gonna guess… Fuck low?”
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“Based on your previous uses of the term, that is incorrect. Estimated probability is lower than ‘fuck low’. More super mutants are converging on the group..”
I sighed as I sent the Zippy Lid slicing through the air to hopefully be in time for a rescue mission. “How’s our deployment going?”
“Ox transports, the Glossu and supporting elements have begun their transit, ETA to combat lines remains within acceptable timeframe: no more than twenty three minutes. Transport Sentinels are en route with no major deviations in ETA to planned destinations. ETA remains at twelve minutes.”
So everything was going as planned, save for the power armored idiots about to be caught by the big muties. Well, if I don’t reach them in time, it’s their fault for getting caught so damned soon.
Still though, I wasn’t feeling too down with the potential loss of strangers that were guaranteed to be either hostile or would be hostile in the near future.
“Well, since there’s no time to be lost… Battle Brothars!” I called out to the unresponsive Strigoi in the back of the ship, putting as much derpy gravitas into the delivery. Damn was it good to live out stupid memes sometimes.
I was grinning like an idiot as I found the small firefight and brought the Zippy Lid to hover above it. The ship’s ramp was lowered and after setting the ship to autopilot I got up from my seat to face the highly cramped rear of the ship.“Strigoi! The Codecks Astartees nehmes this maneuvah Steel Rehn. We will descend upon the foe, we will ovawhelm them – we will leave none alive!”
The sixteen uncomfortably packed robots activated and I could hear the rearmost uncurl its limbs, crawl out of its awkward arrangement and walk to the ramp and jump off with a burst of its jetpack. Its fellows quickly followed after, unfolding and untangling themselves and disembarked the Zippy Lid with a roar of their jetpacks.
I joined after them, maintaining my console view as I plummeted down. I watched as blooms of dust erupted from the robots’ landings even as I tried picking out actual humans to assign IFF labels to. In the meantime, the Strigoi that landed quickly began cutting down the FEV giants around them to secure the landing zone. I hoped that none of the power armored guys shot at the robots, not while I’ve yet to set up their friendly status anyway.
Turns out, after I landed on two console-fortified feet, that pretty much all the humans - who clearly were BoS folks now that I saw the insignias - were dead or dying to bother accidentally setting themselves as enemies. Which meant that my killbots could go about their job of shredding through the super mutants without a care in the world. The amount of blood, limbs and gore that was already flying around was far more impressive than their first appearance against the Children of Atom, I’ve got to say.
“Strigoi. Dalek.”
The Strigoi who were just killing anything within reach as they created a perimeter, now went about expanding that perimeter, and then abandoning it completely as they created their own trails of carnage. The hazy afternoon became tinted with the red of a bloody mist that lingered in the air. A sweep via console showed that nothing around my immediate vicinity was alive, save for me and four heavily maimed members of the Brotherhood of Steel.
I pulled out a modified pistol for the occasion, a new interrogation tool that was quickly becoming the thing that made our prisoners in Tleilax shit themselves upon seeing its barrel: a healing gun, basically a smaller healing emitter set to a pistol grip for mobile use. With the limited charges, they’ve been assigned to the assigned medics of each company for emergencies to stabilize near-death cases until we can get them to the proper healing arches.
For me though? With my console reloads?
I might as well adopt a German accent and call myself Medic.
Conveniently, there was a still living person in power armor no less in the red HP than anyone else. Their armor was utterly fucked, like someone took a hammer at a tin can. I knelt down beside them and had to pry open the armor pieces or the healing process would end up growing around the heavily dented metal plates.
It took a while of manually tearing metal chunks out that I realised the occupant of the armor was a woman, and when I yanked off the helmet, I had a good guess as to who I had just saved. It’s a guess because I’m not sure if the Fallout 3 models translated well to real life, and because the blood smearing most of her features gave some wiggle room for doubt.
“Eva, once Steel Rain has been executed, send four Sentinels over. Oh, and prep Ix’s infirmary to receive four humans. I’ll be stabilizing them and we can go for mild interrogation once they’ve been fully healed up.”