Chapter 48: Chapter 48

First contact with Diamond City proved to be ample entertainment for the girls. Seeing it wasn’t anything confidential, I shared the recording from the room’s hidden cams with Gwen and her people, and we decided to include it for the school’s lessons, after censoring out the faces of course. ‘Never judge a book by its cover’ and whatnot.

The story spread to Caladan, where Cait and Piper took sadistic glee in retelling how Diamond City assumed I could barely keep everyone clothed and well fed. They played the modified recording, pausing at moments for everyone’s laughter to die down.

Eh, it wasn’t that funny to me, but it’s good that they indulged in harmless fun.

I still had to figure out what to import though, as an exchange for whatever I decided to export. Bottle caps are cute, but fuck all useless to me. Maybe something that’ll help encourage Diamond City to advance, like some sort of manufactured goods?

At least the matter of exporting goods gave me reason to use my macros. While the initial stuff were taken off the Tupile and personally cloned for New World 81’s use, after the discovery of macros, I found I could assign a slab of floor with the reset function and clone function, effectively creating an area where anything tossed on it gets restored to brand new and duplicated X amount of times. It had a cooldown of a minute or so, but I could crank out basically anything I want within the usual one cubic meter size restriction.

The affected floor space was limited, and it required the item to be fully within the space as it contacted the floor, plus with more fragile objects you had to quickly catch the duplicates flying out of thin air. But other than that, I basically assigned a part of the Tupile’s trash area to serve as a cloning depot and automated it with bots. Thanks to that little trick, I could reliably ‘produce’ a couple of shipping container’s worth of stuff each day.

Speaking of the Tupile, I had the worker bots there work on upgrading the Zippy Lid, and also start work on Zippy Lid’s siblings, just in case. The Zippy Lid series would be kept in the Tupile’s enlarged hangar for cases where orbital assault was necessary.

A section of the ship was also assigned to begin printing out my new currency. Still as unnamed as my state, the plastic-cloth banknotes would serve as the only acceptable form of money in my place. While we currently didn’t need it yet for Caladan, the plan was to slowly ease everyone into using it to pay for non-essential services first, like access to the pool and glass-roof grasslands, or using the buggy service.

Theoretically, citizens would get a minimum amount of cash each week, and could earn more by getting good grades in school, doing light work in the farms, helping with bot maintenance and other such work that wasn’t high risk or heavy labor. Non-citizens would earn the notes by selling goods or doing work designated for outsiders, like providing information or...hm, still have to work on that bit.

On that topic of information, the Railroad had officially moved into my territory a few days after the meeting with Diamond City. They came in ones and twos, giving an obscure coded greeting to Deacon who arrived first. I set them up in an underground extension under R&R 81, and they were free to use the surface apartments if they wanted. None of them took the offer obviously, but it was the polite thing to do.

While they were grateful for the place, they were still wary of me. Eh, at least we don’t really interact much. They had their own secret exit near some dense foliage, and the eyebots had effectively cleared the airspace enough to keep their comings and goings untrackable to the Institute.

I traded information with Desdemona about the Institute’s own possible spy network. I remembered pretty much every Bunker Hill trader being in on it, as well as someone at least from Diamond City. No proof, of course, so I added that disclaimer too. I brought up the discovery of synths in the Minutemen and she confirmed that there was at least one mind-wiped rescuee in there, so until I can confirm allegiances, there’ll be no purges within that militia group.

A deal was also hashed out to draw the line between synths I will or will not shoot, which basically meant if they came at us with hostile intent, I won’t be bothering with rehabilitation or reprogramming. My side also had no responsibility in handling abolition for synths. If one of them somehow came up appealing for sanctuary, the policy will be to redirect them to contact the Railroad and anything else will be up to how whoever it was from my side felt about that encounter. Robot patrols would just treat them as any standard visitors for now.

I left the Railroad to their thing after helping them move in, giving them a line to my office phone if they ever needed anything. From what I understand, some volunteers from Vault 81 joined their cause and were quietly supplying them with whatever surplus the vault could give away, under Gwen’s oversight. Seems that most of the vault were on the side of synth liberation, which made sense I guess, since I remembered the place being hinted to be a secret ally in the game.

As the Railroad’s agents trickled in, I also got calls from two families from the west requesting to settle within my lands. They just wanted protection as they started anew, and were willing to pay tribute for permission to work some land.

With some discussion with Vault 81, I assigned the families some land not too far from the vault and Station 81, handed them some better tools and materials to start up, and wished them all the best. In exchange, they’d learn to keep to my laws and were given the same access the vaulters did to Station 81’s facilities if they needed it.

I also got promised a nifty fifty percent of their first harvest and twenty for every subsequent one, which would be a good experiment to see if Dr Penske’s new strain of potatoes, carrots and hybrid grain were as rad resistant as everyone hoped they would be. Otherwise, I could just use it as export goods. I still need to figure out how to get one-headed cows for meat though, brahmin meat looks way fouler than the normal cuts back in my old life. Also, I’ve seen old dying cows with more life in their eyes. Ooh, and sheep. Wool should be a luxury item in the post-apocalypse, no?

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Farmers and Railroad aside, things were more or less uneventful, allowing me and the Caladanites to settle into a comfortable lifestyle. Which was why when I got an urgent ping from patrol bots, the urgency felt almost offensive. But seeing the situation, I really shouldn’t complain.

Eyebots keeping an eye on the south relayed the recording of a bloody defeat of a group of Minutemen by a much larger force of raiders. Once they were done torturing and executing the prisoners, the mob headed northwards, towards my borders. The eyebot’s magnifying allowed me to pick out several figures in bulky power armor, and my bet was they were leaders from various gangs united in a coalition.

That, or some raider boss had a lot of power armor to hand out to his lieutenants. Both options were equally disturbing, since at the end of the day I was looking at an army that could easily overwhelm any force in the Commonwealth at the moment, Minutemen and Diamond City included.

Not me though, thankfully enough.

Some eyebots were sent to keep track of the horde’s movement as I gave a call to Vault 81 and the Railroad to inform them of the situation. After that, it was my first strategy meeting with Curie, my girls, and every eligible soldier in Caladan, which meant basically everyone above fourteen. Even the new girls rescued by Deacon and the guy from Vinebrook were eager to shoot up some raiders.

“At the rate they are travelling, the raiders will be at Station 81’s borders in four day’s time tops.” Curie handled the briefing, since she had a faster connection and processing to real-time feeds in case anything changed. Rather interesting to hear the kindly yet clinical voice being used to point out enemy movements. “It is hard to make out, but it is safe to say that your assumption that this is a conglomeration of several raider groups seems to be correct, Sev. At least four distinct uniforms, for lack of a better term, can be confirmed, and I speculate there are at least twelve to thirty more distinct groups.”

There air was tense, despite being at the safety of Caladan, there was enough attachment to the mainland and Vault 81 (I think) for my residents to feel unease at the massive collection of scumbags moving north.

The room’s projector kept a live stream of the birds-eye view of the army, zooming in every now and then as Curie and the networked military robots did their thing. “With our current strength, routing these raiders would not be a problem, but your concerns about them splintering and causing collateral damage throughout the region is well founded and expected.”

And that was the biggest issue we faced, not fending off the threat but ensuring that the messy aftermath didn’t ruin everyone else’s day. “So, can we get a plan up for a clean extermination?” I asked, noting how the room’s atmosphere changed to a predatory tenseness.

Curie nodded curtly. “Using current resources, the terrain ahead of the army can be prepared for a highly efficient encirclement in two days. Levelling the ruins would take up most of our time, and some effort would be needed to intercept their scouts, though that should not be an issue.”

“Sounds good. Think we can bring out the big beams?” I checked, ignoring the querying looks from everyone else.

“Most certainly, Sev. If the implementation is successful, it would greatly aid in our efforts.” I smiled brightly at the prospect of field testing another project.

Clapping my hands once as I stood up, I swept my gaze across the room, seeing anticipation and excitement in everyone here. “Right then. You heard Curie, there’ll be lots of raiders coming up. I’m looking for volunteers to join me in a bit of a shootout.”

There was no need to continue the speech, the room drowned in the eager cheers of my Caladanites. Even Piper and Cait had their hands up as they yelled to join in.

“Cool. Get some last minute training in and I’ll show you our new toys.”

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